Last week, hackers broke into a University of East Anglia database and stole hundreds of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit.
The hackers anonymously posted several of these emails online, with this comment: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."
Much of the recent buzz has been about an email from Dr. Phil Jones to several of his colleagues. The 1999 email includes this passage: “I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] 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,” according to The Guardian.
Climate-change skeptics have been quick to use this episode to challenge the entire body of climate-change science. They are calling into question the basic conclusions of anthropogenic climate-change studies, asking whether we should trust scientists who are appearing to skew the data.
But, as Nate Silver of the political blog Five Thirty Eight rightly points out, the emails implicate the climate scientists at UEA in an offense committed by countless scientists and businessman alike. They have attempted to make their graphs look more clear-cut and reflect the conclusions that they hoped we would draw. But they did not doctor data or falsify findings.
Choosing to present their data this way was wrong. But does that undermine the conclusions of the scientists' work?
No it does not. As Greenpeace released in a statement, you can find questionable emails in just about any organization’s archives.
“Contrary to what the skeptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, NASA and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth,” according to the statement.
In other words, the warming trend expressed in their findings has been independently verified by these leading institutions of science, and the fact that the British scientists may have overrepresented their data doesn’t change that. This “scandal” may not end well for the scientists, but it says nothing about climate change itself.
As Silver said, “I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to ‘The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming.’ Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger.” One who wants to deny that climate change is real should find other evidence for skepticism; these emails by no means support that claim.
What we should learn from all of this is that there must be a change in the way climate data is handled and reported on. This incident has prompted several scientists to call for increased transparency, according to The New York Times, which will hopefully help the institutions that inform us about climate change earn the trust of the general population. The study of climate change is such a complicated science and a heated, politically charged topic that transmitting unbiased information to the public is of the utmost importance.
Reach Hannah at hannahwasserman@asu.edu
