Climate Gate

Climate Gate refers to the climate change scandal involving the hacking into a webmail server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, which uncovered a string of controversial emails by CRU resident climate scientists. Climate change skeptics have argued that these emails “show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.” ¹ Climate change scientists counter-argue that the context of the emails is being manipulated by climate change skeptics and that the emails and science are uncontroversial and invalid.

Background

In November of 2009 an unknown group hacked into the University of East Anglia webmail server and retrieved several thousand emails written by climate scientists that spanned the past 13 years. ² The content of the emails is currently controversial, with climate change skeptics pointing to wording in the emails that reflects the manipulation of climate change science.²

Climate change skeptics also point out that the emails criticize a number of climate change skeptics. Climate change scientists defending the articles have argued that the controversial wording is not uncommon in the climate change science community and is being taken out of context. Climate change scientists also argue that the validity of the science in question remains unchanged. As a result of the hacking, Phil Jones, the director at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit is temporarily stepping down while the police and University of East Anglia officials conduct an investigation regarding the hacking and the validity of content of the circulating emails. ³

Tree ring argument

The tree ring argument refers to an email that states “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” ⁴ This information refers to a graph, which was used in the World Meteorological Organization’s statement on the status of the global climate in 1999. Climate change skeptics have pointed to the words “trick” and “decline” as evidence of information manipulation by the scientists. According to realclimate.org, scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”.⁴

According to the Director of the Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, the word ‘decline’ refers to the fact that the “data used on the referenced graph uses proxy data up to 1960 but only real temperatures from 1961 onwards”. ⁵ RealClimate.org (founded by, amongst others, Mike Mann, co-author of the documents being contested here) further explains that the authors of the email and graph “recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.”⁵