The University of East Anglia in London announced yesterday that they would start an investigation into claims that scientists at the institution’s Climatic Research Unit allegedly withheld data concerning global warming.
The CRU, which has taken measurements and published several articles on climate change, was brought under investigation when over 1,000 e-mails from the station, in addition to information and readings on the rate of atmospheric change, were stolen and downloaded to a website late last month.
Phil Jones, the former director of the CRU, resigned in response to the impending investigation.
The university said in a press release that Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor of the University of Glasgow, would be leading the independent investigation. Yesterday’s release was the first time that the institution reported that the research would be examined.
“The reputation and integrity of UEA is of the utmost importance to us all. We want these allegations about CRU to be examined fully and independently,” UEA Vice Chancellor Edward Action said. “That is why I am delighted that Sir Muir has agreed to lead the independent review, and he will have my and the rest of the university’s full support.”
Jones’s e-mails in particular have sparked worry among those being investigated.
“I would like to see the climate change happen so the science could be proved right,” Jones wrote in one of his e-mails.
The leak, which came a week before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, has raised concern within the British government as to possible effects that critics of global warming could have on upcoming legislation on greenhouse gases.
“We have to beware of the climate saboteurs, the people who want to say this is somehow in doubt, and want to cast aspersions on the whole process,” Ed Miliband, Britain’s climate change secretary, told The Associated Press.
However, scientists still hold strong to the fact that climate change is a proven, scientific fact.
“The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus that tells us the earth is warming,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said. “That warming is largely a result of human activity.”
UEA expects the investigation to be completed by spring 2010.
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3 Comments
Actually, you need to check
Actually, you need to check your simple facts before you write about this matter.
The University of East Anglia is based in Norwich, UK – which is 200 miles away from London. Check it out here: http://www.uea.ac.uk/about/gettinghere
The Director of the CRU has “stood aside pending the outcome of the investigation”. (http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/dec/CRUphiljones). Your assertion that he has resigned without this qualification means that you are suggesting he thinks he has done some thing wrong.
“Jones’s e-mails in particular have sparked worry among those being investigated.” Where is the quote that backs this up? Who, exactly, is worried?
Your article will seriously
Your article will seriously mislead people. The issue is only about the scientists willingness to share data, not about the credibility of the data. I have read extracts of the emails concerned and saw nothing to suggest data was faked at all. I don’t know where you got this from, but it was obviously not a credible source. The issue is that the scientists were not releasing the data to certain people (climate change denial groups), were systematically avoiding Freedom of Information requests and were deleting emails about these data requests. If you read the emails, it is clear that the scientists trust their data and think climate change is genuine. This is in fact shown by the statement you quote, that Dr Phil Jones hopes climate change happens to prove the science right. With so many funded vest-interest skeptics trying to undermine hard-won progress get climate change accepted, I think we can all understand the human feeling he expresses here. Please amend the start of the article.
An easy explanation of what
An easy explanation of what ClimateGate means,
ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.
ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views, and then sat on the IPCC panels as authors judging which published studies go into the IPCC final reports. This is why they always keep shouting “peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies”. They owned the peer review process.
ClimateGate exposed that this small group has been adding positive corrections to the raw global temperature data, inflating the amount of published temperature rise over the last 50 years. Both CRU in the UK and NASA-GISS in the US add these biases. At CRU, the programmers did not even know what and why some corrections were added every month. Only since satellite monitoring for comparison have the amounts of biasing leveled off.
ClimateGate exposed the leaders of this cabal instructing each other to delete emails, data files, and data analysis programs ahead of already filed Freedom Of Information Act requests for raw data and computer codes, clearly a crime.
ClimateGate exposed the “trick” about the Hockey stick figure and other studies that performed proxy construction of past temperatures. After all, reconstruction of the last 1,000 years of climate is the first step in predicting the future with super computer programs as explained below:
Everything about all 21 super computer programs used by the IPCC to determine future global warming rely on best-determined past sensitivities to solar and volcanic effects (climate forcings) from the proxy temperature record.
1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved.
2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas effect coefficient in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.
3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.
4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.
5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.)
I hope that this makes the ClimateGate controversy easier to understand.