Weiye Loh's Library tagged ClimateGate →  View Popular, Search in Google

Speaking of the governmental influence on climate change policy, one scientist said:

 “I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”

And while the latest e-mails appear to be authentic, the University of East Anglia has been unable to confirm this, on account of the bulk of information. Nevertheless, one of the emailers, climate scientist professor Michael Mann, believes they are genuine. 

The fact that none of the emails postdate those released in 2009 suggests that the latest collection was most likely obtained during the initial Climatic Research Unit (CRU) controversy.    

Mann for his part has called the latest leak “truly pathetic,” alleging skeptics have been forced to rely on black PR as they’ve been unable to challenge the actual science.

"They have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat," Mann told the New Scientist.  

The Met Office, as the UK's national weather service, had approached the owners of data from more than 1,500 weather stations around the world - both inside and outside the zone covered by the FoI requests.

Many had given data to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) on the understanding that it would not be made public - the main reason being that they charge for the information.

About 60% either failed to respond, or responded equivocally. Some were willing to have it go public, while Trinidad and Tobago asked categorically for it to be kept private.

UEA argued that breaking pledges of privacy could damage international relations, and relations between UK research institutions and partners overseas.

But the Information Commissioner ruled that public interest in disclosure outweighed those considerations.

The study will look at questions such as:

 
• What are the benefits and risks of openly sharing scientific data?
• How does the rise of the blogosphere change scientific research?
• What responsibility should scientists, their institutions and the funders of research have for open data?
• How do we make information more accessible and who will pay to do it?
• Should privately funded scientists be held to the same standards as those who are publicly funded?
• How do we balance openness against intellectual property rights and in the case of medical information how do protect patient confidentiality? 
• Will the same rules apply to scientists across the world?

There are already three heavyweight groups that could be considered the official keepers of the world's climate data. Each publishes its own figures that feed into the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City produces a rolling estimate of the world's warming. A separate assessment comes from another US agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). The third group is based in the UK and led by the Met Office. They all take readings from instruments around the world to come up with a rolling record of the Earth's mean surface temperature. The numbers differ because each group uses its own dataset and does its own analysis, but they show a similar trend. Since pre-industrial times, all point to a warming of around 0.75C.

In a report dated Feb. 18 and circulated by the Obama administration on Thursday, the inspector general said, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.”

The inquiry into NOAA’s conduct was requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change. Mr. Inhofe was acting in response to the controversy over the e-mail messages, which were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, a major hub of climate research.

 Mr. Inhofe asked the inspector general of the Commerce Department to investigate how NOAA scientists responded internally to the leaked e-mails. Of 1,073 messages, 289 were exchanges with NOAA scientists.

The media dropped the ball

There is a famous quotation attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This is more true in the internet age than it was when Mark Twain was alive. Unfortunately, it took months for the Climategate inquiries to put on their shoes, and by the time they reported, the damage had already been done. The media acted as an uncritical loudspeaker for the initial allegations, which will now continue to circulate around the world forever, then failed to give anywhere near the same amount of coverage to the inquiries clearing the scientists involved. For instance, Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian published no less than 85 stories about Climategate, but not one about the Muir Russell inquiry.

there were charges that the CRU did not have backups of data they relied upon for their conclusions. But the CRU was never the primary source of this data – they simply aggregated and analyzed it. The primary data has always been available from the sources. As the BBC reports:

“We find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it,” it says.

 

“We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis”.

Web Coverage:

I used Google to search the Web for the following phrases:

“phil jones” climatic research unit

“michael mann” climatic research unit

For each search I used two filters.  1)  Web hits in the first two weeks after the Climategate story broke (11/19/09 – 12/03/09) and 2) Web hits in the first two weeks after Dr. Jones’ exoneration (03/31/2010 to 04/14/2010) and the first two weeks after Dr. Mann’s exoneration (02/03/2010 to 02/17/2010).  It should be noted that using the term climate research unit instead of climatic research unit (a common mistake) did not alter the results significantly.  The results appear below:

Dr. Phil Jones accused of wrongdoing resulted in 64,700 hits in the first two weeks after the story broke.
 Dr. Michael Mann accused of wrongdoing resulted in 39,000 hits in the first two weeks after the story broke.

When Dr. Jones was exonerated there were only 22,700 hits in the first two weeks after exoneration.
 When Dr. Mann was exonerated there were only 17,700 hits in the first two weeks after exoneration.

Dr. Phil Jones accused of wrongdoing resulted in 263 headlines in the first 42 days after the story broke.
 Dr. Michael Mann accused of wrongdoing resulted in 143 headlines in the first 42 days after the story broke.

When Dr. Jones was exonerated there were only 24 headlines in the first 19 days after exoneration.
 When Dr. Mann was exonerated there were only 27 headlines in the first 25 days after exoneration.