Climategate: The Real Story - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 147

that the raw data were available in the public domain and the fact that other groups—in particular
NASA and NOAA—had produced their own independent global temperature curves from those data.
Not only did these other two records show the same basic trends as the CRU record (called
HadCRUT3), but among the three it was the CRU record that showed slightly less warmth over the
past decade. 24 Ironically, this was the record climate change deniers were relying on in their efforts
to argue for a lack of recent warming.
Some critics also claimed that the e-mails revealed a culture of “gatekeeping,” that climate
scientists, myself included, were unfairly preventing skeptics from publishing in the peer reviewed
literature. So claimed Patrick Michaels 25 of the libertarian 26 Cato Institute roughly a month after the
CRU hack in a December 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed. 27 Peer review, however, is by definition
gatekeeping; it is intended to keep seriously deficient work from polluting the scientific literature. 28
Figure 14.1: Competing Temperature Records
Three independent assessments of global temperature trends through 2009. The CRU ('HadCRUT3') record shows the least recent
warming. [From the World Meteorological Organization.]
Deniers made numerous other false allegations based on misrepresentations of the content of the
stolen e-mails. In one e-mail, I had quoted another colleague (Jonathan Overpeck, now at the
University of Arizona) referring to the importance of “containing” the putative medieval warm period
(MWP). It is obvious from reading the full e-mail that we were simply discussing the importance of
extending reconstructions far enough back (more than one thousand years) so as to entirely “contain”
the interval typically referred to as the MWP. It was hardly an effort, as some critics contended, to
hide said interval. In another e-mail, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric
Research (NCAR) had stated: “The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the
moment and it is a travesty that we can't.” Far from the secret admission of a global warming hoax
that climate change deniers were claiming, Trenberth was pointing out the deficiencies in the ability
of our current observing network to track how heat is being redistributed within the climate system