The Money Trail Big bucks riding on data: Leaked e-mails cast doubt on global-warming strategy
| 25 November 2009
While Al Gore was preaching to the faithful at $500 a pop in Toronto last night, the explosive news on climate change leading up to the huge UN meeting starting Dec. 7 in Copenhagen was happening elsewhere.
In what has been dubbed "Climategate," but more accurately resembles the surreptitious release of the Pentagon papers on the Vietnam war, computer hackers last week broke into the files of one of the world's leading climate monitoring agencies at the U.K.'s University of East Anglia.
They then aired over the Internet the self-described "dirty laundry" of many of the world's leading mainstream climate scientists.
The thousands of e-mails and other documents going back over a decade have prompted calls in the U.K. and U.S. for public inquiries into the controversial material and the security breach that led to its release.
The revelations have led to a tsunami of analysis and commentary in the climate blogosphere, which is far ahead of the mainstream media on the story. That isn't surprising given the documents call into question much of the current orthodoxy on global warming many media have inaccurately reported as undisputed fact for years.
One e-mail reveals leading British climatologist Phil Jones of UEA writing in November 1999 about using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures.
Jones said in a statement he used the word "trick" in the sense of "a clever thing to do" and with no intent to deceive.
In another startling e-mail, U.S. climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, commenting last month on the fact global temperatures haven't risen as they should have in recent years if the theory of man-made global warming is correct, wrote: "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 ... Our observing system is inadequate."
Trenberth has said he feels violated by the release of his correspondence and that his comments are being reported out of context and selectively.
Similar complaints by other climate scientists are unlikely to quell the controversy and not only because many previously argued the dip in global temperatures since 1998, while man-made carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise, was insignificant.
The documents also show prominent British and American climate scientists discussing how to avoid disclosing their data to requests under their countries' freedom of information laws, including deleting information. This is concerning because sharing original data with fellow scientists is key to verifying research, since it allows others to independently replicate the results.
HIDE PAPERS
The documents reveal climate scientists plotting to keep scientific papers they disagree with from being published and how to discredit scientists and scientific journals of which they disapprove.
Others, critics charge, show climate scientists committing the cardinal scientific sin of manipulating the data to fit their theories, instead of the reverse.
Some e-mails simply show climate scientists can be jerks -- labelling opponents "idiots," pronouncing themselves happy over the death of an unpopular colleague and fantasizing about punching out a skeptic.
Supporters insist all this simply shows science is a messy business, doesn't prove any conspiracy to hide the truth and that too much other research has been done to discredit mainstream climate theory.
But that misses the point. Much of this research -- on which tens of billions of public dollars have been spent worldwide over decades -- is the foundation upon which governments are about to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide. The result will be a massive increase in the cost of living for virtually everyone in the developed world.
Copenhagen will be a negotiation about transferring billions of dollars of wealth from the developed world to the developing one, with no guarantees it will help the planet.
That's what this controversy is really all about.
