Climategate: What Does It All Mean?

Ronald Bailey from the March 2010 issue

On November 19, thousands of email messages and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were leaked to a Russian website. The leaked material suggested that CRU researchers may have manipulated historical temperature data, hidden data from other researchers, and tried to interfere with the scientific peer review process. A day later, British journalist James Delingpole dubbed the affair “Climategate,” and a new front was opened in the global warming wars. reason asked its science correspondent and longtime climate science watcher, Ronald Bailey, some questions to help navigate readers through the controversy.

What is East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit?

The CRU, one of the world’s leading climate study centers, has constructed one of the three main records of global surface temperature trends since the mid-19th century. These records indicate that the earth’s average surface temperature has increased by about 0.8 degree Celsius since 1860. These data are used to validate the results of the computer climate models that have been predicting steep rises in global temperatures as a result of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is produced mainly by burning fossil fuels. The CRU researchers are deeply involved as participants and reviewers in the process of producing assessment reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

What is the IPCC?

Set up by the United Nations in 1988, the IPCC is responsible for evaluating the risks associated with man-made climate change. The IPCC assessment reports, released every six years, are supposed to be authoritative summaries of current climate science, guiding policy makers’ decisions on how to address man-made global warming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 

How much does the broad understanding of surface temperatures depend on East Anglia’s research? 

Phil Jones, the CRU’s embattled head, tried to allay concerns about the integrity of his center’s data by issuing this statement: “Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Center [sic] in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.”

In addition to the CRU surface temperature data, there are two other leading sources used by the IPCC, one created by National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the other by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). But in 2007 University of Colorado climatologist Roger Pielke and his colleagues noted in the Journal of Geophysical Research that “the raw surface temperature data from which all of the different global surface temperature trend analyses are derived are essentially the same.” They said “the best estimate that has been reported is that 90–95 percent of the raw data in each of the analyses is the same. That the analyses produce similar trends should therefore come as no surprise.”

A leaked email message from Jones himself appears to confirm the data overlap: “Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center,” he wrote. Given this interdependence, Jones’ defense that the CRU’s data correlate with other data sets is less reassuring than it sounds. Indeed, the fact that the three main sets of research correlate so well may provoke concerns about the validity of each.

Where do these data come from?

The data sets are derived from instrumental surface records (essentially thermometers) from weather stations around the globe, in some cases going back to the middle of the 19th century, combined with sea surface measurements from sources such as the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set. 

What did the leaked email messages and documents say?

In one message, researcher Tom Wigley described adjusting mid-20th-century global temperature data in order to lower an inconvenient warming “blip.” Editing the 1940 temperature spike downward by 0.15 degree Celsius makes a better-looking trend line in support of the notion of rapidly accelerating man-made warming. The adjustment may have been reasonable given changes in instrumentation, but all raw data and the methodologies used to adjust them should be publicly available so others can check to make sure.  

In another set of troubling email messages, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about man-made climate change. CRU leader Phil Jones, for example, said he and researcher Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting scientific articles out of the IPCC’s next report “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles they disliked. 

Then there is the “HARRY_READ_ME” file in which someone who seems to be a CRU computer programmer expresses his frustration with the muddled data sets he is trying to make sense of. At one point, he asks, “What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah—there is no ‘supposed,’ I can make it up. So I have :-)” The note does not inspire confidence in the accuracy of the temperature data, to say the least. 

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