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Climate scientists praise report on hacked email scandal
A silhouette shot of Al Gore, a U.S. former vice-president and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, is seen in front of a monitor during his lecture on climate change inside a mall in Manila June 8, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Romeo Ranoco
SINGAPORE |
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Leading climate scientists on Thursday welcomed a British report that cleared researchers of exaggerating the effects of global warming and said they hoped it would restore faith in the fight against climate change.
The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, launched an inquiry after more than 1,000 emails hacked from its climate research unit were put on the Internet.
Climate change skeptics leaped on the "climategate" emails as evidence scientists had exaggerated or lied about man's role in global warming, leading to a surge in cyber and media attacks on climate scientists.
The emails were leaked just before last December's major U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen and helped sour the public's belief in the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions blamed for heating up the planet.
Scientists said the emails, covering 13 years and more than 160 authors, were taken out of context by skeptics to boost their arguments that climate change was a hoax.
Many governments quickly stepped in to support the science of climate change because public sentiment about global warming is crucial to crafting policies that will lead to trillions of dollars being spent to green the global economy.
The third and most comprehensive investigation into the emails, led by former civil servant Muir Russell, defended the integrity of the university's Climatic Research Unit, or CRU.
It also said the emails contained nothing to overturn the case for manmade global warming put forward by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"In essence, the review found no evidence to support any of the vociferous claims by climate change deniers that challenge the honesty, rigor and professionalism of the CRU scientists," said Will Steffen, executive director of the ANU Climate Change Institute in Canberra, Australia.
DEFENSIVE
The Muir inquiry did criticize the scientists for their lack of openness and said some of their data was misleading.
Two of the most contentious parts of the emails were the phrases "hide the decline" and "trick," seen as evidence by skeptics of an attempt to massage data.
This related to temperature data used in a graph for a 1999 World Meteorological Organization report. The inquiry found the figure supplied for the report was misleading because the scientists had not fully explained how some of the data had been used.
Overall, though, the honesty of the scientists was not in doubt, the report concluded.
"What is quite clear from this, and earlier inquiries, is that the integrity of the fundamental science of climate change is unquestioned -- our climate is changing and we have shown beyond reasonable doubt that humans are in part responsible," Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist at the UK Met Office, said in a statement.
But she also pointed to the need for climate science to be subject to the closest scrutiny given climate change's huge implications for society and economies.
Michael Mann, one of the main scientists attacked over the climategate emails, also welcomed the findings.
"It is my hope that we can now put this bogus, manufactured scandal behind us and move on to a more constructive conversation about climate change," said Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, in an email statement.
(Additional reporting by Peter Griffiths in London; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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One of the things that all governments love to do is spend money on projects. This buys them power and influence. If public sentiment turns away from the hoax of climate change it will make it must more difficult for governments to confiscate more and more money from its citizens.
on global warming. It seems apt as a reaction to the report that the IPCC report (warts and all) has been “endorsed” by still another entity.
Copy….
Subject: To believe or not to believe
Date: Saturday, February 10, 2007 10:33:41 AM
Reference: Column on global warming by a syndicated columnist
It has been a while since the Times, of Trenton guested your column. Re: yours, today, Earth is in a fix ( Saturday, February 10, 2007, p.A9), I was impressed with the scientific nature of your critique of positions on global warming. Your conclusion? It should be obvious to them, that if we don’t fix Earth, Earth will fix us.
Believe it or not, when I read that line, I was (almost) instantaneously reminded of something that I learned from the city council of Cambridge, MA (where I spent three years during the early 1950s). The council was being upbraided for laxity in removing a very large amount of snow from the city streets, and was moved to umbrage. After all, said the president of the council, God put it there, so it’s up to Him to take it away.
Of course, like Katrina, global warming has been almost totally politicized, thus making it very difficult to separate substance from “spin”–in emanations from “scientists” as well as in those from newspaper columnists and editors (whose inevitably biased opinions tend to dictate the assembly and presentation on the front page, of what is perceived (by the naive) as “unadorned reality”.
In the case of “Katrina”, the immediate, unrelenting, politically oriented, non-substance related, Bush-blaming (that continues to this very day) tended to blunt the natural surge of sympathy that tends to follow all such tragic occurrences– and replaced it with tidal waves of political animus.
In the case of global warming, absent confirmation a la Einstein, there is no way on earth to know who is “right” or “wrong”, hence it is an arena that is ripe for, and rife with, political/social/scientific/media hucksterism. (That Al Gore has become active in the arena is sufficient to make the latter point.) Accordingly we should be ready to see every silver lining, while keeping in mind the “Cambridge city council dictum”, noted above.
End 2007 item
July 8, 2010: If instead of defending a report whose credibility has been brought into question, those who collect and store temperature data from stations around the globe were inclined to compute and report world temperature data in an understandable metric (for example, see data in the table, below) not only for the globe, but also for clearly defined climate regions, the general public would have some sense of what has been/is going on temperature-wise.
And it should be noted that similar data for major world climate regions do not appear to be available. We are in the dark as to how regional trends compare with those for the globe in order even to begin to appreciate claims that some regions are affected more than others.
It should be a relatively straightforward matter, for those closest to the collection and analysis of data on temperature, to generate needed summary statistics on observed global and regional temperatures, respectively, and make them available to weather services throughout the world.
Perhaps if those concerned with the IPCC report spent more time and energy in generating and reporting averages such as those shown in the table, the general public might come to give some credence to their interpretive evaluations.
We need “understandable” temperature data, for example, such as those shown in the table,below, which includes results of a secondary analysis of data from the designated Nasa site that indicate
an increase of some 1.4 degrees F between the 1880’s and the past decade.
As to what precisely that might “mean” for today, and for posterity, quien sabe.
But an explanation of which we should be concerned about that level of change–inconsequential when NJ temperatures are closing in on 100 degrees (F).
Table A. Means (F) of January to December global annual means by decade:
Secondary analysis of raw data reported at
“>http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txty
Variable Value Label Mean F Std Dev Cases
For Entire Population 57.1594 .4385 129
Midpoint
DECADE 1885 56.7482 .1020 10
DECADE 1895 56.7356 .1467 10
DECADE 1905 56.7158 .1711 10
DECADE 1915 56.6996 .1759 10
DECADE 1925 56.9066 .1290 10
DECADE 1935 57.1496 .1525 10
DECADE 1945 57.2756 .1481 10
DECADE 1955 57.1622 .1864 10
DECADE 1965 57.1784 .1677 10
DECADE 1975 57.2018 .1801 10
DECADE 1985 57.5186 .1714 10
DECADE 1995 57.7688 .2338 10
DECADE 2005 58.1060 .1509 9 (data for 2009 not available)
Note. MEANF = ((jtod/100)* (1.8)) + 57.1.
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