Climate-gate: Don't believe the hype.

(Note: This is the full version of an editorial that will appear in this Sunday's edition of the Eagle Tribune and includes links to resources)

This week, negotiators from around the world are meeting in Copenhagen in an attempt for forge an agreement to deal decisively with the existential threat of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW). While the world’s leaders are largely in agreement on the need for such an agreement, the world is, yet again, held hostage to American domestic politics. Without American political, scientific and economic leadership, the world will be unable to face this growing threat.

At home we have been bombarded with news of the so-called “climategate scandal” and powerful groups with radical ideologies have worked to undermine the public confidence in the scientific consensus that has emerged on AGW. It is ironic that many of the same scientists, lawyers, lobbyists and media figures leading the AGW denial campaign learned their craft of disinformation while defending the tobacco industry, all the while claiming that cigarettes were not addictive or harmful to human health. While the threat is larger and the stage global, the play-book is the same – stress the uncertainty that is present in any scientific endeavor and smear the credibility of scientists. Despite being told by their own scientists as early as 1995, that “the impact of human industrial activity on the climate is undeniable”, the petroleum industry launched an organized campaign to undermine the scientific research and spread confusion, shaking the confidence of the public. In light of the long established, well funded and ongoing war against science, the theft and posting of private emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University could not have been timed better.

But what do these emails say? Do they “nail the coffin shut” on AGW or are they a tempest in a teacup? According to the contrarians (including the Eagle Tribune editorial board) the scientists at CRU were falsifying data, manipulating research to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, destroying evidence to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, blocking publication of research that contradicted their claims and forcing editors of journals who disagreed with them from their jobs and worst of all, knew that the earth was cooling, not warming and couldn't explain it. If you doubt all this global warming stuff, or at least don’t want the inconvenience of fluorescent light bulbs forced on you and read some of these emails without knowing their context, you will see just what you want to; a conspiracy to cook the books and hide the truth. However, if you place all of these emails in their context, with other emails and the studies and events the researchers are talking privately about, a much different picture emerges.

The most abused phrase in this saga is “hide the decline”. People who haven’t done any research beyond reading conservative blogs claim that scientists were “hiding the decline” in global temperatures to convince people that the planet was still warming when it was really cooling. There are two problems with this. First, the planet is clearly warming; 2005 tied 1998 as the warmest year in the instrument record, 2009 was globally the 5th warmest on record and 11 of the 15 hottest years have occurred since 1995. More importantly, the researchers weren’t talking about temperature decline; they were talking about the decline in tree ring proxy data that shows a false decline after 1960. Since there are no reliable instrument data prior to the 1800’s researchers need to use “proxies” like tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediments, ice cores, boreholes, even corals and stalagmites in caves to estimate what the past climate was like. For reasons scientists can’t agree on, tree rings simply aren’t good proxies after the 1950’s. The “trick” is to plot the actual instrument readings onto the graph to illustrate the actual temperature trend instead of giving a false impression that the earth is rapidly cooling.

Now some have seized on the word “trick” and claim that scientists would never use such a colloquialism and that it must be referring to a deception. Scientists counter that “trick” is commonly used in science and if one searches Goggle Scholar for the keyword “trick” over 200 journal articles can be found with the word “trick” in the title and hundreds more use the word in their abstract. Clearly, “trick” is a common term in science that often refers to a clever solution to a problem.

In open, democratic societies the expectation of transparency is everywhere and when people or organizations we are supposed to trust are less than forthcoming with information we ask for it can raise suspicion. Attempts by some scientists to withhold data or not comply with Freedom Of Information Act requests appear ominous but again, the context is important. What isn’t being brought to the public’s attention is the fact that many researchers purchase instrument datasets from the government weather services of many countries. Often, the information is provided with a requirement that the data not be disseminated to third parties. The data, in short, belongs to the organization that gathered it, not the researchers and as such cannot legally be given even when requested under FOIA. Also missing from the public discussion is the fact that over 95% of the raw data is available for anyone who looks for it. NASA and NOAA for example have vast amounts of data available online and researchers have been posting links to their raw data on realclimate.org. Ironically, this false claim of secrecy has prompted greater openness in the climate research community. It also has to be noted that despite scientists talking about deleting data, none of the raw data at CRU has been destroyed, deleted or “lost”.

The moist egregious assault from this “scandal” is the attack on peer review. Peer review is a necessary, but not always sufficient mechanism that ensures that research is valid, comports to standard practices and passes rigorous scrutiny before being published in prestigious journals. Sometimes however, poorly written articles or flawed studies survive peer review. Such was the case when an article was published in the journal Climate Research that the climate research community, and many scientists from other fields, found to be so poorly written and flawed it became clear that the peer review process at that publication had broken down. In protest, three of the editors of that journal resigned in protest. The publisher of Climate Research later admitted that he should have requested a number of changes in the article prior to publication. Despite the clear desire to exclude this poorly written anti-AGW piece from the IPCC assessment report, it was, in fact, included in that reports review of published literature.

So there you have it. No faked data, no conspiracy, no cover up. No emails were deleted, not a single piece of data lost or destroyed, no suppression of science. There is something unscrupulous going on however and that’s the well organized, well funded effort to attack science and confuse the public to protect the profits of a small number of multinational corporations and promote a quasi-religious ideology of radical libertarianism. What’s at stake isn’t whether we get to use incandescent light bulbs or drive hummers, it’s whether the human race can sustain itself and prosper on this small, and increasingly fragile world. We all, today, literally hold the future of the human race in our hands. Do we have the courage to do what is right today, for the generations that will follow?