Climatic Research Unit email controversy
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
The story was first broken by climate change denialists, who argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy and that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. The CRU rejected this, saying that the emails had been taken out of context. FactCheck.org reported that climate change deniers misrepresented the contents of the emails. Columnist James Delingpole popularised the term "Climategate" to describe the controversy.
The mainstream media picked up the story, as negotiations over climate change mitigation began in Copenhagen on 7December 2009. Because of the timing, scientists, policy makers and public relations experts said that the release of emails was a smear campaign intended to undermine the climate conference. In response to the controversy, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists released statements supporting the scientific consensus that the Earth's mean surface temperature had been rising for decades, with the AAAS concluding: "based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway... it is a growing threat to society".
Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations.
Timeline of the initial incident
The incident began when a server used by the Climatic Research Unit was breached in "a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack", and 160 of data were obtained including more than 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents. The University of East Anglia stated that the server from which the data were taken was not one that could be accessed easily, and that the data could not have been released inadvertently. Norfolk Police later added that the offenders used methods that are common in unlawful internet activity, designed to obstruct later enquiries. The breach was first discovered on 17 November 2009 after the server of the RealClimate website was also hacked and a copy of the stolen data was uploaded there. RealClimate's Gavin Schmidt said that he had information that the files had been obtained through "a hack into backup mail server". At about the same time, a short comment appeared on climate sceptic Stephen McIntyre's Climate Audit website saying that "A miracle has happened."On 19 November, an archive file containing the data was copied to numerous locations across the Internet. An anonymous post from a Saudi Arabian IP address to the climate-sceptic blog The Air Vent described the material as "a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents", adding that climate science is "too important to be kept under wraps". That same day, McIntyre was forwarded an internal email sent to UEA staff warning that "climate change sceptics" had obtained a "large volume of files and emails". Charles Rotter, moderator of the climate-sceptic blog Watts Up With That, which had been the first to get a link and download the files, gave a copy to his flatmate Steve Mosher. Mosher received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening and replied: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow." Shortly afterwards, the emails began to be widely publicised on climate-sceptics blogs. On 20 November, the story emerged in mainstream media.
Norfolk police subsequently confirmed that they were "investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia" with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime unit, the Information Commissioner's Office, and the National Domestic Extremism Team. Commenting on the involvement of the NDET, a spokesman said: "At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations." However, the police cautioned that "major investigations of this nature are of necessity very detailed and as a consequence can take time to reach a conclusion". On 18 July 2012, the Norfolk police finally decided to close its investigation because they did not have a "realistic prospect of identifying the offender or offenders and launching criminal proceedings within the time constraints imposed by law". They also said that the attack had been carried out "remotely via the internet", and that there was "no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime".
Content of the documents
The material comprised more than 1,000 emails, 2,000 documents, as well as commented source code pertaining to climate-change research, covering the period from 1996 to 2009. According to an analysis in The Guardian, the vast majority of the emails were from or to four climatologists: Phil Jones, the head of the CRU; Keith Briffa, a CRU climatologist specialising in tree ring analysis; Tim Osborn, a climate modeller at CRU; and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The four were either recipients or originators of all but 66 of the 1,073 emails, with most of the remainder of the emails being sent from mailing lists. A few other emails were sent by, or to, other staff at the CRU. Jones, Briffa, Osborn and Hulme had written high-profile scientific papers on climate change that had been cited in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Most of the emails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate research, such as data analysis and details of scientific conferences. The Guardian's analysis of the emails suggests that the hacker had filtered them. Four scientists were targeted and a concordance plot shows that the words "data", "climate", "paper", "research", "temperature" and "model" were predominant. The controversy has focused on a small number of emails with climate change denier websites picking out particular phrases, such as one in which Kevin Trenberth said, "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 was actually part of a discussion on the need for better monitoring of the energy flows involved in short-term climate variability, but was grossly mischaracterised by critics.
The most quoted email was one in which Phil Jones said that he had used "Mike's Nature trick" when preparing a graph as a 1999 cover illustration for the World Meteorological Organization "to hide the decline" in reconstructions based on tree-ring proxy data post-1960, when measured temperatures were actually rising. The "trick" was a technique to combine instrumental temperature record data with long term reconstructions, and "the decline" referred to the tree-ring divergence problem, which had already been openly discussed in scientific papers, but these two phrases were taken out of context by commentators promoting climate change denial, including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, as though the phrases referred to some decline in measured global temperatures, even though they came from an email written at a time when temperatures were at a record high.
John Tierney, writing in The New York Times in November 2009, said that the claims by sceptics of "hoax" or "fraud" were incorrect, but that the graph on the cover of a report for policy makers and journalists did not show these non-experts where proxy measurements changed to measured temperatures. The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context "trick" was normal scientific or mathematical jargon for a neat way of handling data, in this case a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion. The EPA notes that in fact, the evidence shows that the research community was fully aware of these issues and that no one was hiding or concealing them.
An Associated Press review of the emails concluded that they showed scientists fending off critics, stating that "One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming", and mentioned ethical problems with this action due to the fact that "free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method". They cited a science policy expert as stating that it was "normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds".
Responses
In the United States, former Republican House Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert called the attacks a "manufactured distraction", and Newsweek and The New York Times described the dispute as a "highly orchestrated" and manufactured controversy. Concerns about the media's role in promoting early allegations while also minimising later coverage exonerating the scientists were raised by journalists and policy experts. Historian Spencer R. Weart of the American Institute of Physics said the incident was unprecedented in the history of science, having "never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance". The United States National Academy of Sciences expressed concern and condemned what they called "political assaults on scientists and climate scientists in particular".In the United Kingdom and United States, there were calls for official inquiries into issues raised by the documents. The British Conservative politician Nigel Lawson said: "The integrity of the scientific evidence... has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay." Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics said that there had to be a rigorous investigation into the substance of the email messages, once appropriate action has been taken over the hacking, to clear the impression of impropriety given by the selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages. United States Senator Jim Inhofe, who had previously stated that global warming was "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people", also planned to demand an inquiry. In a debate in the United States House of Representatives on 2 December 2009, Republicans read out extracts from eight of the emails, and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner said: "These e-mails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit". In response, the president's science adviser John Holdren said that the science was proper, and the emails only concerned a fraction of the research. Government scientist Jane Lubchenco said that the emails "do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus" that the Earth is warming due to human actions.
Climate change sceptics gained wide publicity in blogs and news media, making allegations that the hacked emails showed evidence that climate scientists manipulated data. A few other commentators such as Roger A. Pielke said that the evidence supported claims that dissenting scientific papers had been suppressed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the emails revealed apparent efforts to ensure that the IPCC included their own views and excluded others, and that the scientists withheld scientific data.
An editorial in Nature stated that "A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories." It said that emails showed harassment of researchers, with multiple Freedom of Information requests to the Climatic Research Unit, but release of information had been hampered by national government restrictions on releasing the meteorological data researchers had been using. Nature considered that emails had not shown anything that undermined the scientific case on human-caused global warming or raised any substantive reasons for concern about the researchers' own papers. The Telegraph reported that academics and climate change researchers dismissed the allegations, saying that nothing in the emails proved wrongdoing. Independent reviews by FactCheck and the Associated Press said that the emails did not affect evidence that man-made global warming is a real threat, and said that emails were being misrepresented to support unfounded claims of scientific misconduct. The AP said that the "-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data". In this context, John Tierney of The New York Times wrote: "these researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude – and ultimately undermine their own cause".
Climate scientists at the CRU and elsewhere received numerous threatening and abusive emails in the wake of the initial incidents. Norfolk Police interviewed Phil Jones about death threats made against him following the release of the emails; Jones later said that the police told him that these "didn't fulfil the criteria for death threats". Death threats against two scientists also are under investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. Climate scientists in Australia have reported receiving threatening emails including references to where they live and warnings to "be careful" about how some people might react to their scientific findings. In July 2012, Michael Mann said that the episode had caused him to "endure countless verbal attacks upon my professional reputation, my honesty, my integrity, even my life and liberty".