The data used by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research unit is perfectly valid. Do not listen to a word the deniers have to say.
The anti-scientific side of the blogosphere, and increasingly the mainstream media, is alight with what David Cameron’s old University friend James Delingpole hysterically asserts via his Daily Telegraph column could be the ‘final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic climate change’.
What Delingpole, together with the blowhards and headbangers on the US right are calling ‘climategate’, revolves around emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) which were hacked and posted on the internet on Friday.
These climate deniers seem to think the CRU, like the Royal Society, NASA and the US National Academy of Sciences, are agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. By Saturday morning this story had already resulted in over 600 blog posts and around 200 mainstream press mentions.
For the best reaction to this hyped up story making its way around the right wing echo chamber – see Realclimate’s reaction. (This is a website run by some of the world’s pre-eminent climate scientists.) Their team of peer-reviewed climate experts conclude:
“The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.”
Professor Bob Watson – a chief science adviser to the government and former IPCC author – told the Today Programme this morning:
“These scientists at the University of East Anglia are both honourable and world class, their data is not being manipulated in any bad way whatsoever and it is totally consistent with two independent data sets in the United States, one at NASA, and one at NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and so I think while some of the wording in those emails is inappropriate and should have been more careful, these scientists are not manipulating or hiding anything. There’s absolutely no doubt the world’s climate is changing, and this data set, along with other data sets, proves that beyond doubt.”
This is also an amusing must read reaction that provides some perspective.
Today Professor Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, whose emails are at the centre of the story, said he wanted to put the record straight, saying he saw the hack “caused a great deal of ill-informed comment”, and Kevin Trenberth, another leading climate change scientist whose private emails were also among those stolen, said the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month’s global climate summit in Denmark.
He said:
“It is right before the Copenhagen debate, I’m sure that is not a coincidence.”
UPDATE 12:00 25/11/09
Left Foot Forward’s Rupert Read has a follow-up on the story here.
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31 Responses to “Climatic Research Unit data is valid – don’t let the sceptics tell you otherwise”
Joss Garman
Forlornehope – fair point on the ‘peer reviewed’ thing. I hope it was obvious what I meant, i.e. that these are REAL climate scientists with papers on climate science that have been peer reviewed as opposed to blogs on pseudo science written by non-climate scientists.
willstraw
Fantastically constructive comment from Gracie the Collie. Well done on engaging with this debate in such a mature manner.
Anon E Mouse
Joss Garman – so you think it’s OK not to give raw data to people who request it and then smear and lie about people who don’t share their “opinion” on the reasons for global warming (which as you know isn’t happening – oh sorry I should have said climate change).
By forcing poor countries to accept this nonsense on global warming is just cruel but then I suppose you people don’t need to grow a lot of crops in Kensington.
Shamik Das
And another supremely constructive contribution from Anon there, once again accusing others of smearing people while doing the same thing himself. And the idea, the very idea that the Right-wingers and the deniers are claiming to speak on behalf of poor countries is too contemptible for words.
Richard Blogger
There are several things to note about this “leak”.
The first thing is that they are all text files. That is not surprising because internet mail is exchanged as text. However, depending on the mail server, email may be stored in an RDMS database, or as individual files, or some proprietary flat file system (or maybe a combination of all three). Email clients’ message stores will be one of these mechanisms too. However, the general standard for emails stored as individual text files is that they have the extension eml, yet these have the extension txt. The extension indicates to me that they were created on a Windows machine (where the erroneous idea that extensions have to be three characters still persists). It is also the extension used by the standard text editor on Windows (Notepad).
As mail is passed between mail servers (at least two, the SMTP server of the sender and the SMTP server of the receiver) headers are added. Further headers are added to give the message a unique ID and also to give the ID of the message replied to (which allows threading by mail clients). Also MIME headers are added so that attachments (as additional bodies) can be added to the email. Usually an email message will have no less than 20 lines of headers.
Yet we find that the CRU emails only have To, From, Date and Subject headers (no Message-ID, no Received, no Return-Path, no References, no In-Reply-TO and no MIME information). Since all email messages will have far more than these four headers it is incontrovertible that these emails have been edited – if only to remove the extra headers, but who knows what else was changed. As I mentioned above, the editing probably was carried out using Notepad.
Without the headers that were removed it is difficult to see any threading in the emails, but a cursory inspection shows that they appear to be a jumble of emails, 1073 of them. How many emails do you think that the CRU mail server has archived – and remember the “leaked” emails are from 7 Mar 1996 to 12 Nov 2009? My guess is hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Yet somehow only 1073 of them were leaked. Even if the emails came from a user’s mailbox, do you think that a user would have saved just 1073 emails in a period of 13 1/2 years? I have tens of thousands of emails on my hard disk.
I know from the time I worked in a university that much of my inbox was in the form “going for a drink on friday?”, yet I couldn’t find any messages like that.
Now imagine you are a hacker and you have broken the security of some outfacing server and you see the storage folders of the email server, or perhaps a user’s mailbox. What would you do? Most likely you would copy everything. Then what would you do? Well since you have “dynamite” you would want to post this stuff as quickly as possible (partly to save your ass, so that you can remove the evidence from your machine, partly because you are so excited about the “dynamite”). So you would post everything as you found it to the internet.
That is not what has happened. Someone has carefully edited the emails to remove the extra headers (that admittedly get in the way of reading the emails when using Notepad, but most hackers would have an email client anyway), they have also removed attachments (why?) and they have sifted through them and given just a few emails, ones that tell a particular story. All of this takes time. Someone has been very methodical about this.
This is not the result opf some random hacker breaking into a web server, it is a concerted attack from someone who knows what to look for in the emails. The rather cack-handed editing of emails makes me think that it was not done by the hacker, but instead by whoever it is sifting the emails.
Anyway, one email caught my attention (1256353124.txt). First, bear in mind that the bane of the climate scientists is someone called Steve McIntyre who tried to “prove” that the hockey stick graph “was not true” (the US National Research Council convened to investigate McIntyre’s claims basically said that McIntyre was wrong, being publicly denounced like that is a bitter blow to any climate change denier). The following CRU email is about a preliminary paper posted on the public website, it reads:
I’m not thinking straight. It makes far more sense to have password-protection rather than IP-address protection. So, to access those pages
Username: steve
Password: tosser
Have a good weekend!
Mike
I am assuming that the steve mentioned here is one Steve McIntyre!