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Cross-posted at DailyKos
So you sit down with the family for your holiday dinner, and suddenly Uncle Grover starts going on about how climate change is just a massive hoax perpetrated by Al Gore, Leonardo di Caprio and the evil, corrupt scientific establishment - and the recently hacked collection of emails from climate scientists proves it.
Don't want to get caught slack-jawed and fuming? Well, here are some key points and background about those emails (what the right laughably calls "Climategate", and which environmentalists have rebranded as Swifthack - as in "swiftboating")- to help you go mano-a-mano with the climate deniers and fight their fictions with fact. (And not a moment too soon, as the conservative bloviocracy appear to have had some success in reducing the number of people who believe in climate change, according to recent polls )
Fiction: The stolen emails prove that scientists were lying and concealing evidence that climate change is a hoax.
Fact: Out of 1000 stolen emails covering 13 years, the right-wing noise machine has focused on a tiny handful, which they conveniently quote out of context. These emails discuss issues that, rather than being dark, mysterious and hidden, have long been part of the public dialogue on climate change. |
| As is often the case with private communications unexpectedly revealed to the public, the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit don't always show these researchers in the best light - sometimes acting in petty or inappropriate ways. But in no way, shape or form do these emails demolish the fundamental integrity of climate science, as the climate deniers continue to insist.
A brief discussion of the five major allegations constantly cited by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, etc. follows - with more detailed analysis (to which I am indebted) at Yale Climate Forum , Get Energy Smart Now and the Union of Concerned Scientists :
1)The selectively edited quote that has gotten the most attention to date is from one of Prof. Phil Jones's November 1999 emails: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick...to hide the decline." The allegation is that Jones is admitting to some dastardly scheme to conceal evidence that temperatures are actually declining. But that's absolutely not what's happening. First of all, the term "trick" is ubiquitous in the scientific literature, where it is used to mean a "trick of the trade", i.e., a clever device, not some sort of ruse.
In fact, the "trick" referred to was clearly explained in the Nature article (by Michael Mann) referenced here. The issue is that climate scientists have to rely on a variety of different techniques to identify the climate record over thousands of years. One of those techniques is by examining the width of the rings in tree trunks. Such rings have been reliably correlated with temperatures for the last 200 years; however, since the 1960s, there has been an odd divergence between tree ring widths and actual, observed temperatures. (There is significant debate over the causes of the divergence, though no definitive answer yet.)
So Jones is simply suggesting in this email that the climate record be clarified by overlaying actual, observed temperatures over the recently quirky tree ring data, which show tree ring widths - not actual temperatures - to be in decline. Indeed, it's the conspirators on the right who are providing the smoke and mirrors here by refusing to show you the full email quote, which is "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps [my emphasis added] to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." As if openly using real temperature data in place of problematic data represents a vast conspiracy - rather than a perfectly appropriate scientific method.
2)The second out-of-context quote exciting the right is from Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, CO. In an October 2009 email, he states "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." Just like the previously discussed email, this one references a published paper in which Trenbeth publicly expresses the same views he provides here - the behavior of a good scientist showing all his cards, not that of a shadowy conspirator.
The issue discussed here is one dear to the heart of climate deniers, namely that, after rising dramatically for decades, global temperatures appear to have hit a plateau in recent years. (The same "decline" that deniers claim to have found in the previously discussed Phil Jones email - except for the inconvenient truths that: his email was actually referring to tree ring widths, not temperatures; his email dated to 1999, before temperatures hit a plateau: and temperatures in fact have not declined, except for one year, 2008.)
Trenbeth, in his article, compares temperatures in 2008 with those in 2000, seeking to explain why 2008 was the coolest of the decade (though, to put matters in context, the last decade was still the warmest in recorded history ). His point - a common one in science - is that we know much less than we should, and we need more and better research, data and models. For a scientist hungry for the best information possible, that may be a "travesty." But note that it has nothing to do with climate denial or skepticism, as he states quite clearly in his article:
Given that global warming is unequivocally happening ... then adapting to the climate change is an imperative. To plan for and cope with effects of climate change requires information on what is happening and why, whether observed changes are likely to continue or are a transient, how they affect regional climates and the possible impacts.
It is not a sufficient explanation to say that a cool year is due to natural variability ... There must be a physical explanation, whether natural or anthropogenic.
3)The other most frequently cited emails relate, not directly to issues of climate science, but to scientists' behavior toward one another. The emails on these topics are surely the ones under investigation by the University of East Anglia, since some show inappropriate attitudes and potential bad conduct, if indeed the scientists' bluster in those emails was more than just talk. Even if so, there is no evidence of the complaints in these emails actually leading to the suppression of anyone's work - in fact, the evidence shows the opposite.
A number of the emails show Phil Jones and other climate scientists disparaging, and even making efforts to suppress, the work of climate skeptics. Notably, this included putting pressure on the journal Climate Research after it published a paper in 2003 by Soon and Baliunas arguing that current warming trends are not historically unprecedented. Jones, Mann and others protested that the peer process didn't work properly in terms of this paper - and in fact half of the editorial board of this journal ended up resigning out of similar concerns. Since this article was published 6 years ago, other climate scientists have not been able to replicate Soon and Baliunas's results.
Jones, in another email, says that he would like to do whatever he can - "even redefine what the peer-review literature is!" - to keep two other papers out of the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. But if he took any such efforts, he was unsuccessful - both papers in question were cited in the IPCC report to which he was referring.
Finally, most seriously from a legal perspective, Jones suggests in a 2008 email to fellow climate scientists that they delete emails previously sent to him to avoid having to comply with the UK's Freedom of Information law (then being invoked by climate skeptics eager to do what hackers have now done in stealing and posting these emails).
Ultimately, then, all these emails show is scientists sometimes acting rudely, even intolerantly toward those who challenge their work (and in one case, perhaps inappropriately covering his tracks). What they don't show is anyone skewing their research in order to demonstrate fraudulent results. And they most certainly don't invalidate the large body of work that has demonstrated that climate change is occurring and it has worsened due to excessive human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases.
In fact, the idea of a climate change "conspiracy" or "hoax" is preposterous, requiring one to believe that, not a few scientists, but thousands, are routinely tampering with their results in order to fool the whole world. And to what end? Money? Power? World domination? (Cue video of Dr. Evil sucking on pinky.) One would indeed have to consider the whole enterprise of scientific inquiry to be illegitimate in order to end up at such a conclusion.
Yet this is the "scandal" that the right wing unintelligentsia has been riding to convince the public that climate change is just a hoax dreamed up by a bunch of environmentalists. It's up to each of us to get the truth out, quickly and effectively - dinner table by dinner table. |
