Connecting the Dots in Climategate

[Columnist’s note:  Originally I wrote a column about Russian charges of cherry picking data at the Hadley Climate Center.  Subsequently I located additional information, which seemed to warrant rewriting the piece.  Here is the revised version.]

Sometimes connecting the dots does not make for a pretty picture.  Around November 20 the public learned of hundreds of leaked e-mails from the prestigious Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.  Among the e-mails was the following communication from Phil Jones, Director of Climatic Research at CRU, to the American climatologist Michael Mann:

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.

The “two MMs” are almost certainly Canadians Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two leading critics of anthropogenic (human-made) climate-change theory.  McIntyre, through his web site www.climateaudit.org , discredited Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, which showed the last five decades  before 1999 to be by far the hottest in the last thousand years — hence the hockey-stick shape of the upward-sloping line.  Mann had refused to share the data behind his hockey stick, but McIntyre obtained the information indirectly from other sources.  For the full story, read here.

In the above e-mail, “station data” refers to weather stations around the world that measure global temperatures.  Jones reveals here that he was prepared to delete the data, and thus commit a felony, rather than share them with McIntyre and McKitrick.  Needless to say, this is not proper behavior for a scientist, whose work is supposed to be available for retesting.  And it begs the question:  What is in these data that is so sensitive?

On November 25 some interesting but little reported climate news appeared from down under. The New Zealand Climate Conversation Group and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition downloaded all of the available climate data for New Zealand. First, here is the official graph of New Zealand’s temperature history that reflects data used by Jones and the CRU:

But when New Zealand’s skeptical scientists graphed all of the available data, they allege that the true picture looks like this:

The official version used in climate models at the CRU is based, they say, on selective data. The complete data set, found in their study, shows remarkably stable temperatures since 1850.

According to the skeptical scientists who discovered this alleged New Zealand temperature cherry picking, all of the data are public information available for download.  If anyone would like to try this at home, we’d be happy to publish your findings here at CenterMovement.org.

The CRU e-mails, and perhaps the New Zealand story as well, seem to have prompted a similar reexamination in Russia.  One week and a half ago the Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a statement charging that the Hadley Center for Climate Change in the UK, which is closely affiliated with CRU, had been selectively choosing ground-temperature data taken from weather stations around Russia. The IEA says that the Hadley Center cherry-picked temperature readings from only 25% of Russia’s weather stations, and left 40% of Russian territory completely unaccounted for in their findings. Sites selected tended to be from urban areas, which climate skeptics argue are thermal islands and as such not necessary indicative of warming that is global in scope. Data from sites in remote Siberia were ignored, says the IEA. When all of the data are included, the IEA finds that there was no appreciable global warming in Russia during the last half of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st Century. Here, on Google, is the only translation of the Russian document currently available. [It is rough but mostly comprehensible. See the December 15 post on the IEA site.]

Russia comprises 12.5% of the world’s landmass. This is no small sample. If global warming has not occurred in Russia during the last half century, such a finding would be significant all by itself.  One climate skeptic, writing under the name of “Lucy Skywalker” at McIntyre’s site, has long been saying that Siberian temperature readings show no increase in ground temperatures over the course of the past fifty years. Now here comes the Russian IEA accusation backing Skywalker’s claim.

For years climate skeptics have argued that atmospheric-temperature measurements are more accurate than ground-based measurements. If the IEA and the skeptical New Zealand scientists are correct, then it turns out that even the heretofore accepted land-based measures are themselves unrepresentative of overall ground temperatures because they have been selectively chosen, with inconvenient data left out.

Significantly, the institution being accused of cherry picking data in support of preconceived conclusions includes the prestigious Hadley Center for Climate Change, arguably the leading brain trust of its kind in the world. The Hadley Center is responsible for many of the computer models that undergird human-made global-warming theory. If the Hadley Center is found to be corrupt, those models may all be compromised.

If global warming is real, the charges of the skeptics cannot continue to go unanswered.  Only 36% of Americans believe in anthropogenic global warming, and that was before the CRU revelations.   The argument that the science is settled increasingly looks like intellectual cowardice and dishonesty.  There must be an open debate with all questions on the table.  Assuming that global warming is real, there will be insufficient political will do what is necessary until the skeptics’ arguments are met by their opponents, refuted and thoroughly defeated.

If anthropogenic global-warming theory turns out to be based on junk science and eco-religion, then public confidence in science will suffer.  Environmentalism, in all of its other healthy and helpful forms, will be severely compromised.   Proving the integrity of global temperature data, or correcting any mistakes, ought now to be the critical mission of those who care most about the earth.