Climatic Research Unit Email Controversy
In the Climatic Research Unit email controversy (also known as "Climategate") which began in November 2009, extracts from a few of the stolen emails and other documents hacked from a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were taken out of context to support allegations against scientists working on the instrumental temperature record and on climate reconstructions.
The most quoted phrase took words from an e-mail of 16 November 1999 written by Phil Jones which referred to a graph he was preparing as a diagram for the cover of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) statement on the status of global climate in 1999. Jones wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." In science, the term "trick" is slang for a clever (and legitimate) technique, in this case Michael E. Mann's technique for comparing two different data sets, and "the decline" referred to the already published divergence problem with tree ring density proxies affecting the post 1960 part of Keith Briffa's reconstruction graph. Despite this and the fact that 1999 had just seen record breaking global temperatures, the email was widely misquoted as a "trick" to "hide the decline" as though it referred to a decline in measured global temperatures, an accusation made publicly by the politicians Sarah Palin and Jim Inhofe.
Questions were raised about the Soon and Baliunas controversy and a 2003 email from Mann suggesting "we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal." The allegation by Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute that pressure from Jones and Mann was responsible for the resignations at Climate Research was rejected by Hans von Storch, who said that he had resigned "with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper – a skeptic's paper, at that." Michaels also alleged a bias against letting sceptics like himself publish in peer reviewed journals; Mann said that the only bias was a requirement for good quality papers, and other climate skeptics had succeeded in getting their work in mainstream journals.
Eight independent investigations of the allegations and the emails all found that there was no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct by the scientists. One report, by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), considered detailed petitions raised by conservative activists and business groups with reference to the emails: the EPA examined every email and concluded that there was no merit to the claims in the petitions, which "routinely misunderstood the scientific issues", reached "faulty scientific conclusions", "resorted to hyperbole", and "often cherry-pick language that creates the suggestion or appearance of impropriety, without looking deeper into the issues."
Read more about this topic: Hockey Stick Controversy
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