The Age of Global Warming: A History (35 page)

22

Climategate

O, That this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.

Hamlet
 

Over Memorial Day weekend at the end of May 2006, four cinemas screened a movie.

‘You look at that river gently flowing by … It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. And all of a sudden, it’s a gear shift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and saying, “Oh yeah, I forgot about this.”’ 

Cut to a lecture theatre. 

‘I used to be the next President of the United States.’ 

Pause. 

Deadpan: ‘I don’t find that particularly funny.’ 

Smile. 

Audience applause.
[1]

A week later,
An Inconvenient Truth
moved into the top-ten grossing movies playing that weekend. By mid July, it overtook
The Da Vinci Code
. At the end of the year, it had grossed nearly $50 million and won two Oscars.
[2]
(Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11
, released in 2004, grossed $222 million worldwide, receiving a twenty-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival – but no Academy Awards.)
[3]

An Inconvenient Truth
was the cinematic sequel to
Earth in the Balance
, fusing Gore’s search for the meaning of life and saving the environment. He recalls listening to Roger Revelle as a student (‘I just soaked it up’); his six-year-old son’s near fatal car accident (‘It just changed everything for me. How should I spend my time on this Earth?’); a tobacco farming family, losing sister Nancy to lung cancer (‘It’s just human nature to take time to connect the dots. I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning’); the 2000 election (‘a hard blow … It brought into clear focus the mission that I had been pursuing for all these years’); and the ultimate meaning of what Revelle had told him (‘It’s almost as if a window was opened through which the future was very clearly visible. “See that?” he said, “see that? That’s the future in which you are going to live your life”’).
[4]

After the biopic segments, ice took up a large part of the movie.

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet could shut down the Gulf Stream and plunge Europe into an ice age. Viewers were left in the dark about when this might happen. In his 2007 book, Bert Bolin acknowledged that the rim of the Greenland ice sheet was melting faster than a few decades earlier, but snow was still accumulating over the ice sheet plateau. ‘At some point, probably more than centuries into the future, a situation of no return may be reached and the ice sheet might disappear in a matter of a millennium or more.’
[5]
 
An Inconvenient Truth
was ‘not always adequately founded in the basic scientific knowledge that is available,’ Bolin wrote.
[6]
 
It created the impression that the ice ages were caused by variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide, ‘which of course is wrong’.
[7]

Gore visited Antarctica. The ice has stories to tell us. ‘Right here is where the US Congress passed the Clean Air Act.’
[8]
Wrong again. Eric Steig, an isotope geologist, wrote, ‘You can’t see dust and aerosols at all in Antarctic cores — not with the naked eye.’
[9]

Ice cores can measure the different isotopes of oxygen and figure out a ‘very precise thermometer’, Gore explains. ‘They can count back year by year the same way a forester reads tree rings. And they constructed a thermometer of the temperature,’ as a graph with a remarkable similarity to Mann’s Hockey Stick flashed up on a seventy-foot digital screen. ‘The so-called sceptics will sometimes say, “Oh, this whole thing is a cyclical phenomenon. There was a medieval warming period, after all,”’ Gore continued. ‘But compared to what’s going on now, there’s just no comparison.’
[10]
  

Gore’s ice core temperature graph looked like Mann’s Hockey Stick because it was Mann’s Hockey Stick.
[11]

In February 2007, the IPCC started to release its Fourth Assessment Report. The attribution of rising temperatures to human activity was upgraded a further notch: ‘Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid twentieth century is
very likely
due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations’ – ‘very likely’ meaning a higher than ninety per cent chance of being correct.
[12]

In October, Gore and the IPCC were jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their role in creating ‘an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming’.
[13]
  The timing was propitious. In December, negotiators were to meet in Bali and adopt the Bali Road Map with a deadline of agreeing a follow-on deal to the Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen in December 2009. 

A month before Copenhagen, over a thousand emails to and from scientists at the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, together with three thousand other documents, found their way onto the internet. It was soon dubbed Climategate.

The origins of Climategate lay in the IPCC’s attempt to quarantine the Hockey Stick without repudiating it. Doing so meant subverting IPCC principles. All parts of the IPCC assessment process, Sir John Houghton wrote in 2002

need to be completely open and transparent. IPCC documents including early drafts and review comments have been freely and widely available – adding much to the credibility of the process and its conclusions.
[14]

The aim of IPCC reports is to summarise the latest science. The IPCC was therefore duty bound to report McIntyre and McKitrick’s critique of the Hockey Stick – unless they could find a more recent study that sidelined their conclusions. So that’s what they set out to do.

They consulted two unpublished papers by Caspar Ammann and Eugene Wahl. After a couple of attempts, the first paper was turned down by
Geophysical Research Letters
. Stephen Schneider facilitated provisional acceptance of the second in
Climatic Change
to meet the IPCC deadline. The published (and reviewed) version had verification statistics that corroborate McIntyre and McKitrick’s critique, but fell outside the IPCC’s deadline. So the final IPCC text claimed McIntyre and McKitrick were unable to reproduce Mann’s results (they could, using Mann’s algorithm) but that Wahl and Ammann could when using Mann’s original methods (without mentioning that Wahl and Ammann’s published paper reported that the reconstruction failed a verification test).
[15]

As an IPCC reviewer, McIntyre prodded the lead authors to show the decline on the Briffa temperature reconstruction. Don’t stop in 1960 – ‘then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to.’
[16]

When published, the comment was there, but the decline wasn’t. 

After publication, McIntyre wanted to see how his comments had been handled. Rejected, still considered inappropriate to show the recent section of Briffa’s reconstruction, was the editorial response.
[17]
The trail led back to the UK and to the Chapter Six review editor, John Mitchell of the Met Office.

On 21
st
June 2007, David Holland, a semi-retired engineer, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the UK government department responsible for oversight of the IPCC review records. He followed in January 2008 with requests to the Met Office.

The story Holland was told kept changing. First; Mitchell’s records had been deleted; then, Mitchell’s involvement in the IPCC had been in a personal capacity; finally, release of Mitchell’s emails would prejudice relations between the UK and an international organisation and that the IPCC – contrary to its policy of openness and transparency – refused to waive confidentiality.
[18]

In May, Holland sent Freedom of Information requests to Reading and Oxford universities and to the University of East Anglia about the change in the deadline for the Wahl and Ammann paper. Within two days, Phil Jones emailed Mann:

Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4 [the Fourth Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise … Can you also email Gene [Wahl] and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address … We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
[19]

Mann forwarded the email to Wahl, who told a Department of Commerce investigation that he ‘believes he deleted the referenced emails at that time’.
[20]

On the morning of 17
th
November 2009 someone tried to upload 160MB of data from the CRU server onto the RealClimate website. They must have had a sense of humour – RealClimate was established with a mission to fight McIntyre in the blogosphere Hockey Stick wars. Later that day, an anonymous poster, FOIA, appeared on the climate sceptic Air Vent website.

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.
[21]

The blogosphere lit up. The mainstream media was slower, apparently queasy at publishing private emails and unsure whether they were genuine. Three days later, the University of East Anglia confirmed they were.

It is hard to conceive of a less favourable run-up to the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. The CRU’s initial reaction of going to ground only made it worse. The Met Office’s Vicky Pope was left branding the release of the emails ‘a shallow and transparent attempt to discredit the robust science undertaken by some of the world’s most respected scientists’.
[22]
  George Monbiot in the
Guardian
thought otherwise. ‘Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial,’ Monbiot wrote.
[23]
‘There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.’
[24]

Two prominent climate scientists agreed. ‘The whole concept of “we’re the experts, trust us” has clearly gone by the wayside with these emails,’ Judith Curry of Georgia’s Institute of Technology, told Andrew Revkin of the
New York Times
.
[25]
Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia told Revkin that ‘the IPCC itself, through its structural tendency to politicise climate change science, has perhaps helped foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production’.
[26]

The following weekend, the
Sunday Times
carried a story that the University of East Anglia had thrown away records from which the temperature reconstructions had been derived. The original numbers had been dumped to save space. Roger Pielke Jr of Colorado University discovered the loss when he asked for the original records. ‘The CRU is basically saying, “Trust us,”’ Pielke said.
[27]

The disclosure fed speculation that the CRU had been fiddling its surface temperature reconstruction, one of the three principal ones used in climate studies derived mainly from the Global Historical Climatology Network.
*
There was another explanation. Proper record keeping was hardly one of the CRU’s strengths. In 2002, historian James Fleming, writing a short biography of Guy Stewart Callendar, was shocked to find that Callendar’s papers at the CRU hadn’t been stored properly. As a result, the CRU agreed to loan the papers to Colby College, Maine, where they were organised into archive boxes.
[28]

In December, the Met Office wrote to seventy scientists at British universities asking them to collect signatures for a statement to ‘defend our profession against this unprecedented attack’. Over one thousand, seven hundred scientists signed.
[29]

The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.
[30]

It all looked somewhat desperate. ‘The response has been absolutely spontaneous,’ Julia Slingo, the Met’s chief scientist improbably claimed. An anonymous scientist spoke of being put under pressure to sign. ‘The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming.’
[31]

At the beginning of December, the University of East Anglia announced it was establishing an independent review into the CRU emails headed by Sir Muir Russell, a retired civil servant. Meanwhile the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee started an inquiry of its own. It became clear that the Met Office’s December statement on behalf of the UK science community was not universal. The Royal Society of Chemistry argued that the nature of science dictated that research be transparent and robust enough to survive scrutiny. ‘A lack of willingness to disseminate scientific information may infer that the scientific results or methods are not robust enough to face scrutiny, even if this conjecture is not well founded.’
[32]

The Royal Statistical Society argued for publication of data. ‘Science progresses as an ongoing debate and not by a series of authoritative and oracular pronouncements.’
[33]
Commercial exploitation was not a valid reason to withhold data. If a company is granted a patent, the details of the invention must be revealed – ‘it cannot justifiably seek reimbursement for that knowledge and not make it available’.
[34]
All parties needed to have access to the facts. ‘It is well understood, for example, that peer review cannot guarantee that what is published is “correct.”’
[35]

The Institute of Physics was concerned about the integrity of scientific research. The emails constituted ‘
prima facie
evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law’.
[36]
A wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in the CRU’s field of research was needed, the Institute argued.