CLIMATEGATE AND THE CREDIBILITY OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

On Thursday 19 November 2009, during the “year of climate change”, when the world was preparing for the Copenhagen Conference, a team of individuals at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK, disseminated thousands of personal emails and computer files on the Internet. Mainly two topics sparked discussion: in their correspondence, the parties pondered how to deal with (1) the Medieval Warm Period, and (2) the fact that warming has not occurred during the first decade of this millennium, both of which pose significant problems for the greenhouse theory. It is still not known whether this was a case of external

106 See my blog text Translating discretions, (Annex 15.20)

107 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA-2008-0223+0+DOC+XML+V0//FI&language=FI

hacking or an intentional internal leak within the institution, but the incident launched a serious discussion about the independence and impartiality of climate science. Doubts also immediately arose about whether the timing was intentional and whether it was intended to disturb the political atmosphere of the climate conference. Among others, the first short news report concerning the matter in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (21 November 2009) carried a quotation from an interviewee claiming that “aiming the attack at the university is due to the approaching Copenhagen Climate Conference, which arouses strong reactions for and against”. The next news item (24 November 2009) repeated likewise the judgment of an interviewee, who said that “the perpetrators want to vitiate the climate conference in Copenhagen in December.”

It did not take long until the approximately 1000 e-mails disseminated by a Russian server were condemned in the mainstream media as bogus and as an outrageous attempt to question the credibility of climate science. Soon after the leak it was announced that the head of the Climatic Research Unit, Professor Phil Jones¹⁰⁸, would temporarily step down from his position. As a consequence, the British government set up external research committees to examine the reliability of the CRU research.

Nonetheless, none of those concerned attempted to contest the authenticity of the e-mails. They mainly cast doubt upon whether the admittedly large message chains were interpreted correctly.

At the time, the public was beginning to wonder about the weather, which was getting colder. The trend did not seem to follow the IPCC’s forecasts of warming. One of the leaked e-mails therefore aroused attention. Kevin Trenberth, a US researcher contributing to the IPCC Assessment Report, complained in one of his e-mails: “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...” This comment, taken out of its context, was interpreted as having produced unjustified pleasure for climate sceptics.

It could be inferred from the e-mails that some features that were worrisome in terms of the credibility and independence of science had gained a foothold in the IPCC’s core group of researchers. They gave the impression of a scientific community with a strong mission and goal. In terms of Pielke’s concepts (described in Chapter 4.3.6), it could be described as a group of issue advocates who had identified with their research subject to such an extent that they could no longer relate to it with the distance or detachment required by scientific research. The values of science – objectivity, criticality, autonomy and progress –could thus be jeopardised. This does not mean that it was necessarily a question of political aspirations, but rather

108 Phil Jones is a highly appreciated scientist of this field; EPP party also used him as our expert when we organised a climate conference in Ioannina, Greece in July 2007. https://www.flickr.com/photos/eppofficial/

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the all-too-human motives of a person committed to the production of knowledge.

Phil Jones notes in one of his e-mails of July 2005: “As you know, I’m not political.

If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”

The e-mails that relate to the peer reviewing of scientific results can be regarded as problematic. Some of the published e-mails considered the possibility of preventing the opinions of certain persons or of a certain kind from finding their way to scientific publications or IPCC reports. Some e-mails advised boycotting the scientific publication Climate Research. The recommendation was made to no longer classify it among peer-reviewed series because it had published articles approaching anthropogenic climate change critically and provided space for views which discussed the role of solar radiation and the Medieval Warm Period (Pearce 2010:130–137, Montford 2010:402–410).

Of course, it can always be asked what the significance of peer review is, if it does not imply the researcher’s free right to reject an article and regard it as being of poor quality or erroneous in its outlook. In principle, Jones and his colleagues practised their right granted by science. It remains a question whether one’s attitude makes possible the progress and self-correction indispensable to science or whether it has become so doctrinaire that there is no room for scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts.

Another example of non-desired publicity concerned the publication of an article claiming that urbanisation would have twice as big an impact on warming as previously assumed. Phil Jones e-mailed a message marked confidential, claiming that an opinion like that should not find its way into the IPCC’s report. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what peer – review literature is.” This became one of most widely-known leaked e-mails (Pearce 2010:138),¹⁰⁹ and its incriminatory nature was due to Jones’ role as the leading author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report – he, if anybody, was an insider.

The e-mails also made it apparent that the leading authors of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR) were not satisfied with the statistics on temperature development presented by the CRU researchers. They wanted a “clearer story”

which would confirm that the current warming is the strongest in over a thousand years. This is also related to one of the best-known representations of climate change, the “Ice Hockey Stick” coined by researcher Mike Mann which illustrates a strong temperature rise. Mann’s reconstruction has received also a lot of scientific

109 Pearce regarded Jones’ comment on the re-definition of peer review as a joke but conceded, nevertheless, that the text confirms Jones’ view that the study in question had to be kept out of the hands of the IPCC.

criticism.¹¹⁰ One problem that became apparent was, according to critics, that the Medieval Warm Period had to be blotted out from the graph.

In connection with the CRU scandal, one of the most frequently raised issues was the institute’s attitude towards the question of scientific transparency and, in practice, towards the British Freedom of Information Act. Judging from all the evidence, the institute was culpable of egregious violations. It took pains to destroy observational evidence, such as tree ring samples, for example, rather than allowing it to fall into the hands of the opposing side of the climate sceptics. The Freedom of Information Act had entered into force in 2000, and Jones found it inconvenient for his work and wanted to protect his data, which in his opinion could be misused in the hands of the sceptics. He had given the order that if anyone requesting the data had anything to do with the AGW-sceptic webpage, Climate Audit, the request should be turned down.

One interpretation, which defends and explains Jones’ behaviour, is that a British law cannot be applied to IPCC material (Pearce 2010: 144–148).

The defensive attitude clearly included some understandable frustration from a human point of view. According to his correspondence, Jones said that he had worked on the material for a quarter of a century: “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

The comment was honest but contrary to the spirit of science. The whole idea of scientific intersubjectivity and repeatability involves the possibility of finding errors by means of which the theory in question could be improved (Pearce 2010:150).

The CRU scandal led to the establishment of three different external investigation panels consisting of experts in relevant scientific fields, in order to ensure the integrity of the investigation. The investigative panels, which completed their reports during the spring of 2010, expectedly came to the conclusion that no intentional scientific fraud or distortion of results was found in the CRU’s operations. Instead, the CRU was criticised for actions that can be considered to demonstrate an anti-scientific attitude.

The problems mentioned includedlack of openness of the CRU researchers.

Evidence of withholding information was perceived as a risk for the reputation of the entire British climate-scientific field. Another cause for complaint was found in soon highly-publicized phrase, “Hide the decline,”¹¹¹ which concerned a graph presented in the WMO’s report of 1999. The problem was that expressions like “hide

110 Among others, Legates (2004) and Chapman et al. (2004) have criticised the selective use of so-called proxy data, and Esper et al. (2004) criticised the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period.

111 A ridiculing song was made about the “Hide the decline” phrase, in which the leading role is played by someone impersonator caricaturing Mike Mann. There are several versions of the song on the Internet, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAlMomLvu_4 . Fox News reported that Mike Mann considered pressing charges concerning the matter, and the video was played on Fox News: http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=FwTuEqqh0-g&feature=related

the decline,” as well as the word “trick” (in the sense of “deceive”) which aroused a great deal of attention in the e-mail leak, were directly related to this graph. Phil Jones reveals, in one of his messages, how he started employing a “trick” that was used earlier by Michael Mann in his article published in Nature magazine: he hid the part of the graph which revealed the temperature decline, and replaced it with a series of measurements demonstrating that the temperatures had risen.

Even though the panel did not accuse the researchers themselves of any intent to mislead, it judged the presented graph out-of-order because its drafting methods were not described in the text.

The CRU scandal is linked to the issues that appeared that same winter in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), especially in the contribution of Working Group II (WG-2). A claim concerning the melting of the Himalayan glaciers became the best-known error. According to the claim “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”. (IPCC 2007)

The error was obviously partly intentional, for according to newspapers, the glaciologist Georg Kaser had warned the panel already when the report was being prepared of the misleading nature of the claim, but his criticism was not accepted by WG-2. Kaser himself was responsible for the contribution of WG-1, which concentrated on the scientific aspects of the matter.

It is considered likely that the incorrect figure is from an interview of Professor Syed Hasnain of the University of Delhi, published by the New Scientist magazine ten years earlier, and his claim was not based on peer-reviewed research but on the campaign material of the environmental organisation WWF. Later on, Dr Hasnain joined The Energy & Research Institute (TERI), which is headed by Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC. TERI was conducting research on the Himalayas and received funding for it from the EU, among other sources. The Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7) finances the “Highnoon” with three million euros.

If the claim concerning the Himalayas was based on an interview circulated through the WWF, the fingerprints of non-governmental organisations could also be traced in the estimates on African crops and the deforestation of the Amazonian rain forests. Only a preliminary lecture on the relevant research could be found behind the claimed link between floods and climate change. The IPCC’s report quoted precisely this lecture, even though the actual research finally came to the conclusion that the assumed connection could not be proven (Pielke 2010:181–183).

Later on, a smaller error was also found in the IPCC report concerning the Netherlands, which is below sea level.

In January 2010, the chairpersons of the panel confessed that the research

material used, as well as its processing, was not in compliance with the IPCC’s standards. They stated their regret that approved procedures had not been appropriately followed.

Meanwhile, however, intense disputes were taking place in the background.

When the Indian government brought up the erroneous information referring to other pieces of research, Pachauri called the counter-arguments “voodoo science,”

remnants of climate change “deniers” and “schoolboy science.”¹¹² When it became apparent that the criticism had a strong scientific basis, Pachauri said that he was not responsible for what Hasnain had decided to say in his interview. Nevertheless, the Panel had to admit that it had not complied with the scientific requirement of peer review, even though the research labelled as “voodoo science” had been peer-reviewed.

From a policy-making point of view, I regarded the crises that winter as problematic, albeit educational. Science is a self-correcting system, but it can only correct itself by preserving its independence and impartiality, i.e. not by censoring anomalies appearing in a theory.

What attracted my attention was the fact that those showing the greatest confidence in the conclusions of contemporary climate science belittled legitimate criticism most passionately. If we are indeed worried about a greenhouse effect, should our anger not be directed at the internal erosion of our scientific credibility?

We will need reliable climate research in the coming decades and, therefore, its quality should be of utmost concern to us.

Niiniluoto (2010) took a stand in favour of scientific openness in connection with the Climategate scandal: “The faster any errors are corrected, the better it is for scientific progress. Thus, according to fallibilism, the reliability of science is not guaranteed by the certainty of results or the possession of final truths, but by the ability of self-correcting science to progress and regenerate. Thus, for instance, climate sceptics are welcome to shake the consensus of climatologists.

It is not an easy task, because they will have to present new scientific materials and arguments, which are even more convincing than the results that have been accepted thus far. Anyway, it is clear that current scientific views will be corrected and specified further in many ways in the course of time.”

Evelyn Fox Keller (2011), professor of philosophy of science at MIT, commented on the Climategate scandal by saying that if researchers hold some responsibility, it has to do with their way of supporting an image of science that presents it as infallible and as something that can convey an absolute and value-free truth. Most people realise that this image is unrealistic, but the emphasis is easily surfaces when

112 http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-19/global-warming/28130248_1_himalayan-glaciers-ipcc-panel-on-climate-change

dealing with non-researchers, and particularly when politics threatens to intrude the scientific realm.

The philosopher of science, Peter Godrey-Smith (2003: 164–165), has reminded us why forgery in science is a crime so much worse than theft. It is a matter of trust.

In the case of theft or plagiarism the only one who suffers is the one who has been robbed. In the case of forgery, anyone using the forged information in the research will be stigmatised as untrustworthy.

What, then, can be expected from science with regard to a phenomenon like climate change, which inherently contains a large number of uncertain factors?

When demanding absolute reliability of IPCC reports, no reference should be made to the certainty of information, for such is not available. Reliability concerns the procedures and methods of acquiring information. The classical criteria of science – objectivity, autonomy, criticality and progress – must be honoured in the procedures used to generate scientific knowledge and in the results conveyed by it. In my opinion, preserving the cognitivist ideal of science is the most important way to protect climate science from further scandals.