Hacked climate emails update

Updated 12/11/2009 with "Anatomy of a public relations disaster."

Fallout from the release by hackers of a series of emails by climate scientists has continued this week while negotiations to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions continue in Copenhagen. For earlier coverage see Jones steps down as head of climate unit and climate data allegations to be investigated.

Anatomy of a public relations disaster

Fred Pearce, a UK science writer says that the way that climate scientists have handled the fallout from the leaking of hacked e-mails is a case study in how not to respond to a crisis.

Pearce adds that it also points to the need for climate researchers to operate with greater transparency and to provide more open access to data. In the short term he ends his column with the following:

...I have been speaking to a PR operator for one of the world's leading environmental organizations. Most unusually, he didn't want to be quoted. But his message is clear. The facts of the [hacked] e-mails barely matter any more. It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

But he says all that ended on Nov. 20. "The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the [Climatic Research Unit (CRU)] leak is nothing less than catastrophic."

UK Parliament asks for answers

Phil Willis, the chairman of the UK's House of Commons science and technology committee, has written to Edward Acton, the vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, requesting a "comprehensive note" setting out what had happened with the hacked climate email servers and what steps have been taken to investigate the allegations.

Willis also asks how the CRU can "justify its commitment to academic transparency" and how the university proposes to restore confidence in the research.

A Skeptical Media?

Ian Plimer's uncritical coverage in the hacked emails row is frustrating says Bob Ward in the Guardian:

One of the many frustrations for climate change researchers arising from the current hacked climate emails saga has been the way that so-called skeptics have been given so much uncritical coverage by journalists who are not properly scrutinizing their misleading and inaccurate claims...

Take Ian Plimer, who helped the UK Independence party last week to launch its declaration of climate change denial and is a member of the academic advisory board of Lord Nigel Lawson's new lobby group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Plimer is gaining lots of new publicity as an "expert sceptic" says Ward, but the... "trouble is that Plimer is not a climate researcher and has not published any scientific papers on the change in climate that we have been witnessing over the past century. He is an Australian mining geologist who gained fame in his native country for publicly tackling creationists over their denial of the evidence for evolution...."

Al Gore's interview

Former Vice President Al Gore was interviewed in Slate.com. A number of the questions turned to the hacked emails. Here's one of Gore's responses.

Q: What's your view on the medieval warm period and the charge that the East Anglia e-mails suggest data was manipulated to "contain" that anomaly?

A: I haven't read those e-mails in detail, but the larger point is that there are cyclical changes in the climate and they are fairly well-understood, and all of them are included in the scientific consensus. When you look at what has happened over the last few decades the natural fluctuations point in the opposite direction of what has actually occurred. When they run the models and plug in the man-made pollution, the correspondence is exact. Beyond that, the scale of natural fluctuations has now been far exceeded by the impact of man-made global warming.

And again, we're putting 90 million tons of it into the air today and we'll put a little more of that up there tomorrow. The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God's sakes. It's not some mystery. One hundred and fifty years ago this year, John Tyndall discovered CO2 traps heat, and that was the same year the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. The oil industry has outpaced the building of a public consensus of the implications of climate science.

But the basic facts are incontrovertible. What do they think happens when we put 90 million tons up there every day? Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto!--physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn't trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is "unequivocal," which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.

If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn't take place, I'm sure we'd have a robust debate about it right now.

Statement from the UK science community

The criticism over the emails has led to the following statement issued and signed by more than 1700 scientists (the full list of signees is available on the extended page).

We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities. The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method. The science of climate change draws on fundamental research from an increasing number of disciplines, many of which are represented here. As professional scientists, from students to senior professors, we uphold the findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which concludes that "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and that "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations".