FYI: Climate skeptics turn up the heat

WASHINGTON -- Climate skeptics are having a field day, celebrating the firestorm of controversy surrounding the UK's Hadley Center Climate Research Unit, until recently the world's leading climate research centre. One skeptic, Canadian Steve McIntyre, has particular cause for doing a happy dance over the misery of the CRU.

If you've been living without an Internet connection, here's a quick overview of l'affaire Climategate. On Nov. 17, someone posted to the Internet a vast archive of materials that had been hacked or leaked from the CRU, including numerous emails, documents, computer code and data. While all of the information has not been verified as 100 per cent correct, none of the people cited has denied the documents are legitimate and some outside entities engaged in the email exchanges have confirmed they are genuine.

Bloggers and skeptics immediately tore into the package, and found evidence suggesting CRU scientists exaggerated warming; worked furiously to hide their data from outside examination; may have conspired to actually delete information to avoid freedom of information requests and may have conspired to keep contrary findings from being published in respected climate journals, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.

The data manipulation that has been most seized upon by bloggers involves the choice of which sources of temperature data should be used to reflect climate trends after 1960.

Because thermometer-based measurements of the climate are only about 150 years old (and are quite spotty for much of that time), when scientists set out to construct long-term estimates of temperature trends, they use what are called proxies, such as tree-ring measurements that ostensibly reveal the temperatures the tree experienced as it grew.

As it happens, the tree-ring proxies match up with the thermometer measurements up until about 1960, when there is a divergence between the two sets of data. The tree rings indicate a global cooling after 1960, while the thermometer data indicates a sharp warming. The CRU scientists decided to simply stop using the inconveniently non-warming tree-ring data after 1960. In one email, this is discussed as a trick developed by Michael Mann, the creator of the infamous climate hockey stick chart, that would hide the decline shown by the tree-rings and emphasize the recent spike in thermometer data, preserving the sanctity of the hockey stick.

Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.

But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre's information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he'd destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post.

The main excuse was that some of the raw data had been provided to CRU with strings on it preventing release. Surprisingly, within days of Climategate, the Hadley centre has announced it got all of those nasty strings cut, and -- voila! -- are now free to release the data. That is, the data they haven't lost, which supposedly includes most of the raw temperature data they ever collected.

Finally, and most troubling, are the suggestions a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.

The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other's work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don't like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!

Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.

Kenneth P. Green, an adviser to the Frontier Center for Public Policy, www.fcpp.org is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 5, 2009 H11