Citizen Scientists and Climategate

Forrest M. Mims III


A few citizen scientists have found important flaws in scientific papers related to climate research. Others have carefully documented the improper placement of hundreds of weather stations whose data are used to monitor temperature trends. For these reasons, amateur and citizen scientists from several countries have long attempted to obtain climate data and computer code used to process the data from various climate research organizations.

Some climate research organizations have long resisted providing data to citizen scientists, even when data are requested under freedom of information acts. Now we know why, for the candid reaction by some heretofore highly regarded members of the climate science community to citizen scientist requests for data and code can be found in some of the e-mails included in an unauthorized release of several thousand documents from the Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of England's East Anglia University, one of the world's leading climate science organizations.

CRU has long played a key role in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), co-winner, with former US Vice President Al Gore, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. For reasons set forth below, the document release has triggered various investigations and worldwide interest. Some believe that the unseemly content of some of the documents marks the episode as the greatest scandal in the history of climate science. Others believe the documents simply reflect behind-the-scenes science that might be messy in places but is a distraction not worthy of significant attention. Either way, several citizen scientists are receiving a good deal of online attention these days. Their stories will no doubt figure in books that will most certainly be written about what has become known by bloggers and the media as "Climategate."

The document leak at the center of the controversy involves more than 1,000 e-mails between and among some of the world's leading climate scientists. Some of their e-mails appear to advocate withholding or even destroying documents subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act and subversion of the peer-review process in order to block scientific publications by scientists with whom they disagreed. Some e-mails discussed truncating the data used to make a time series chart so that recent temperature data would not be shown. One leading scientist was cheerful over the death of a rival, and another wrote that he would like to beat up an opponent.

The key citizen scientists in this saga include Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts and Willis Eschenbach. Steve McIntyre is a Canadian mathematician who has worked in the mineral business for the past 30 years. His experience interpreting drill cores in rock led him to question conclusions drawn from tree ring data to the effect that the global temperature increase of the past century was unprecedented in the past 1,000 years. His peer-reviewed publications and many hundreds of posts on Climate Audit, a blog he founded and edits, have challenged this and other claims made by leading climate scientists and institutions. (Climate Audit traffic became so heavy after the Climategate documents spread across the web that McIntyre had to open a mirror site here.)

Anthony Watts, who was profiled as "The Ultimate Citizen Weather Scientist" in the June 2008 The Citizen Scientist, is a US meteorologist who runs one of the most popular science blogs on the web (wattsupwiththat.com). Watts also runs surfacestations.org, a web site that documents through photographs and eye-witness descriptions the improper location of many hundreds of weather monitoring stations around the US. Watts' surface station survey suggests a warming bias in the US climate record due to the placement of many temperature sensors near or even over pavement and concrete or adjacent to parking lots, air conditioners and other sources of heat. Because of these findings and other factors, Watts, who drives an electric car to work, is skeptical about the influence of human activity on climate.

Willis Eschenbach, who resides in Honiara, Solomon Islands, has studied changes in sea level and coral. He began a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that figured in the Climategate scandal. He described his unsuccessful attempts to receive information in "The People Versus the Climate Research Unit (CRU)," an 11,000-word article that has been published on various blogs, including Steve McIntyre's mirror site here, and is reprinted with permission in this installment of The Citizen Scientist.

This brings us back to Anthony Watts, who was among those who posted Eschenbach's article about the CRU. On 19 November Watts posted an announcement about the unauthorized release of thousands of e-mails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit. Watts' announcement stemmed from a notice on a web site called “the Air Vent” (noconsensus.wordpress.com), one of a growing number of blogs that question the notion that human activity is chiefly responsible for climate change. The notice, which was posted under the pseudonym “FOIA” (after Freedom of Information Act), read:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

The comment closed with a link to a Russian Internet site with a huge 157 megabyte file of 4,568 documents and e-mails in 504 folders. The Russian site was soon closed, but not before web savvy readers posted the documents on other sites, one of which included a search window that allowed visitors to look for potentially embarrassing content.

Figure 1. Climate science was much less controversial in 1972 when Apollo 17 astronauts on the way to the moon made this famous photograph. Courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center.

Some of the e-mails in the Climategate document dump were so disturbing that I wrote the Hadley group to request clarification. They responded that:

"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

"This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry."

Some of the scientists whose e-mails were included in the document dump have made public statements that affirm their authenticity. If the purloined e-mails are authentic, and that is the consensus of most commentators, then the police inquiry may need to go far beyond the possibly illegal release of the documents to explore their disturbing content. Indeed, that may already be occurring. Meanwhile, global warming skeptics are having a field day claiming that some of their suspicions about several well known climate scientists have been correct all along.

Of course not all climate scientists engage in the kind of troubling conduct revealed in the document dump, and several whose e-mails are among those leaked have come forward to express their concerns. Among the most notable statement to date is "Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process" by Eduardo Zorita of Germany's Institute for Coastal Research. Dr. Zonita wrote that his statement would likely cause some of his future research to "...again, not see the light of publication...." presumably because it will be subjected to the blacklisting candidly described in some of the leaked e-mails. He then wrote,

"I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. They depict a realistic, I would say even harmless, picture of what the real research in the area of the climate of the past millennium has been in the last years. The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.

"These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture.' Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research."

Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia from where the files were either leaked or hacked, is one of the most prolific climate change scientists and the author of “Why We Disagree About Climate Change.” Dr. Hulme recently shared his thoughts on the document leak in Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth column in The New York Times.

"From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.

"This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science . But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood' of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

"But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science."

Some journalists who have long advocated for measures to reduce atmospheric emissions believed to be associated with climate change have also expressed their concerns.

Environmental journalist George Monbiot, a leading advocate of human-induced climate change, has demanded the resignation of CRU's Dr. Phil Jones, who is at the center of the leaked e-mails and whose temperature reconstructions back to the 1800's are central to the IPCC claims that climate has warmed significantly over the past century. Writing in The Guardian, Monbiot called the Climategate e-mails a "major blow (1)" and that the leaked e-mails "could scarcely be more damaging."

While Monbiot's views about global warming remain unchanged, he wrote that the e-mails provide evidence "of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released ( 2 , 3 ), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request ( 4 )." He was more upset that some of the e-mails "suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics ( 5 , 6 ), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( 7 )." Monbiot even called for a reanalysis of some of the data discussed in the e-mails.

The idea that the leaked documents reveal a major climate science scandal is not shared by all commentators, most notably those who contribute to Real Climate, a site begun by several NASA and university climate scientists to rebut the views of skeptics. Two of the Real Climate scientists figure prominently in the leaked e-mails.

For more information about Climategate, a list of key posts and news stories is here. You can access the leaked e-mails at Alleged CRU Emails - Searchable, which includes a search box to quickly find key words. Programmers may want to see a document called HARRY_READ_ME.txt, a very long and sometimes disturbing list of comments from 2006 to 2009 by a programmer named Harry who was attempting to make sense out of old CRU code and missing data.

The Computational Legal Studies blog has posted a chart that depicts all of the links between and among all of the leaked e-mails. The chart is at Visualizing the East Anglia Climate Research Unit Leaked Email Network. Included is a list of the key people cited in the e-mails with links to their home pages.

The Citizen Scientist would like to receive views about all sides of this matter. Send your comments (without ad hominems or other inappropriate language) to "Backscatter" (details at www.sas.org/tcs) and they will be published in our January installment.

References

The following references in the quotations from George Monbiot are not found in his column published in The Guardian and are from the version of the column posted on his blog.

to Quotations from George Monbiot

1. http://www.anelegantchaos.org/

2. http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=914&filename=1219239172.txt

3. http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt

4. http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=891&filename=1212063122.txt

5. http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=307&filename=1051190249.txt

6. http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt

7. http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419&filename=1089318616.txt

8. eg http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

9. http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116882

10. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20081216.html

Comments about editorials and any other content in The Citizen Scientist are welcome and should be sent to "Backscatter." Please include your name and the title and date of the article or column about which you are writing. Comments may be lightly edited for style and grammar. Please indicate if you do not want your comment published. Editor.
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The Citizen Scientist (04 December 2009).