Let’s Talk About East Anglia’s "Climate Gate"

[Buzz Clik]

You remember the East Anglia "email scandal" involving the very small Climate Research Unit (CRU) that had their emails hacked and made public in 2009. They used words like “hide data” and “trick” in a few emails that sent the skeptical community into a total uproar. The noise was so loud and so persistent that some investigative panels were put together to examine it. According to the skeptics, the resulting reports were damning of the CRU and proved that climate research is fraudulent. Those involved in the science, remarkably, and the opposite view.

Rather than engage in an exercise of empty contradictions with the skeptics, let’s take a detailed look at those investigations: their approach, conclusions, and recommendations.

Let’s get the formalities out of the way right now. Here are the links:
1) “The Report International Panel Set Up by the University of East Anglia to Examine the Research of the Climatic Research Unit.”
http://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/3154295/7847337/SAP.pdf/a6f591fc-fc6e-4a70-9648-8b943d84782b

2) “The Indepenent Climate Change E-mails review.”
http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

3) The House of Commons Select Committee: “The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - Science and Technology Committee Contents”
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/38703.htm


The first two panels had totally different charges with only a small overlap in their investigations. The third panel evaluated the other two with additional investigations.

My summary will quote from only from the first two documents and will summarize their findings.


The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review

This is a 160-page report generated in 2010 by a four-person panel. Their charge:

The Review examines the honesty, rigour and openness with which the CRU scientists have acted. It is important to note that we offer no opinion on the validity of their scientific work. Such an outcome could only come through the normal processes of scientific debate and not from the examination of e-mails or from a series of interviews about conduct.

Their methodology was intense and thorough, and in the end, came up with sixteen findings. Here’s the first:

Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.

That’s pretty strong and does not equivocate. Thirteen of the sixteen findings were similarly phrased (unhesitating exoneration), including subjects of undermining the IPCC process, withholding experimental data, misleading representation of data, hiding divergence, and subverting the peer-review process.

However, three findings dealing with deportment, communication, and freedom of information came out on the negative side, and I will quote all three here:

But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA, who failed to recognise not only the significance of statutory

On the allegation of withholding station identifiers we find that CRU should have made available an unambiguous list of the stations used in each of the versions of the Climatic Research Unit Land Temperature Record (CRUTEM) at the time of publication. We find that CRU‟s responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive.

On the allegation that CRU does not appear to have acted in a way consistent with the spirit and intent of the FoIA or EIR, we find that there was unhelpfulness in responding to requests and evidence that e-mails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them. University senior management should have accepted more responsibility for implementing the required processes for FoIA and EIR compliance.

Lack of openness; being unhelpful and defensive; lack of responsiveness. But, that’s it and nothing more.


Report of the International Panel

This panel was established by the Royal Academy at the request of East Anglia University. Their charge was to evaluate the integrity of the CRU:

The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on the integrity of the Unit’s research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data. The Panel worked by examining representative publications by members of the Unit and subsequently by making two visits to the University and interviewing and questioning members of the Unit.

They examined eleven publications in depth, and rigorously determined the veracity of the findings as well as close scrutiny of the methods used. The panel was quite succinct in their report, requiring only nine pages to clearly present their findings, summarized here:

1. We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention.


2. We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians. Indeed there would be mutual benefit if there were closer collaboration and interaction between CRU and a much wider scientific group outside the relatively small international circle of temperature specialists.

In addition, some specific comments made regarding the quality of the science, and providing more depth than the concluding comments:

1. Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups, presumably by accident rather than design, in the CRU papers that we examined we did not come across any inappropriate usage although the methods they used may not have been the best for the purpose.


2. CRU is to be commended for continuously updating and reinterpreting their earlier chronologies.


3. CRU accepts with hindsight that they should have devoted more attention in the past to archiving data and algorithms and recording exactly what they did. At the time the work was done, they had no idea that these data would assume the importance they have today and that the Unit would have to answer detailed inquiries on earlier work.


4. After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid.


5. Like the work on tree rings this work is strongly dependent on statistical analysis and our comments are essentially the same. Although there are certainly different ways of handling the data, some of which might be superior, as far as we can judge the methods which CRU has employed are fair and satisfactory.

This particular comment need special highlighting:

We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the endroclimatological work, but it seems that some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU. They seem also to reflect a lack of awareness of the ongoing and dynamic nature of chronologies...Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors.

==========

There you have it: results and findings directly from independent, outside reviews of East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit. They were guilty of not sharing all their emails when asked, being defensive, and not hiring an expert in statistics even though their statistical analyses were appropriate.

Every other allegation was shown to be totally baseless.

[Buzz Clik]

1. This thread reports old news

... but it doesn't hurt to be armed with the facts when the uninformed claim to know nothing of the truth.

[DanTex]

2. Words like "trick" and "hide" mean completely different things to scientists.

That's why from the beginning this was all about nothing. A "trick" is just a clever mathematical manipulation. "Hiding" something is rearranging an equation so that some terms appear to go away. And so on. If you read a book or watch a lecture about say advanced quantum mechanics, you will hear people talk about tricks all the time, and "getting rid of this infinity" and so on.

[Buzz Clik]

3. Very true.

Situation normal for climate change discussions: ignorance fueled by hateful discourse somehow passes for scientific debate in the eyes of some.

These guys, along with Michael Mann, were the objects of coordinated harassment campaigns, receiving thousands of emails demanding responses. Their attempt to select the serious -- or at least scientifically-based -- inquiries from the spam resulted in them getting their wrists slapped for FOIA violations.

[Buzz Clik]

4. Climate science, hard science ... ???

I witnessed a very strange question/comment in the context of climate science:

If climatology is a hard science, please describe the Laws that have been developed to predict results.

Chemistry has Boyle's Law, the Ideal Gas Law, etc. Physics has Newton's Laws of motion.

What Laws have been developed for climatology? What is the climatologist's equivalent of PV=nRT?

To me, this is a reflection of a near total lack of scientific knowledge, certainly nothing beyond freshman classes in college or maybe nothing beyond high school! And, of course, it demonstrates a void of understanding what climate science is.

"Please describe the Laws (sic) that have been developed to predict results... What is the climatologists equivalent of PV=nRT.

I guess my response would be, PV=nRT. The ideal gas law is the ideal gas law, regardless of its application. And, the ideal gas law can be applied to climate-related science (despite non-ideal behavior of gases):

Northern peatlands are a major natural source of methane (CH4) to the atmosphere. Permafrost conditions and spatial heterogeneity are two of the major challenges for estimating CH4 fluxes from the northern high latitudes. This study reports the development of a new model to upscale CH4 fluxes from plant communities to ecosystem scale in permafrost peatlands by integrating an existing biogeochemical model DeNitrification-DeComposition (DNDC) with a permafrost model Northern Ecosystem Soil Temperature (NEST). A new ebullition module was developed to track the changes of bubble volumes in the soil profile based on the ideal gas law and Henry's law. The integrated model was tested against observations of CH4 fluxes measured by closed chambers and eddy covariance (EC) method in a polygonal permafrost area in the Lena River Delta, Russia.

(Zhang, Y, Sachs, T, Li, CS, Boike, J. 2012.Upscaling methane fluxes from closed chambers to eddy covariance based on a permafrost biogeochemistry integrated model. GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY. 18:1428-1440)

The person who asked this question thought he was launching the torpedo that would sink climate science for good. But, damn. Just damn. Is this what passes for understanding and education among the skeptics? Gratefully, skeptics exist in the field of climate science exist and are capable of conducting intelligent conversations; they just never show up on discussion boards.