Climategate Part 1 - A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism

Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games. To get the post-Copenhagen science review underway, the world has a fine document at hand: The Climategate Papers.

On Nov. 17, three weeks before the Copenhagen talks began, a massive cache of climate science emails landed on a Russian server, reportedly after having been laundered through Saudi Arabia. Where they came from, nobody yet knows. Described as having been hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the emails have been the focus of thousands of media and blog reports. Since their release, all the attention has been dedicated to a few choice bits of what seem like incriminating evidence of trickery and scientific repression. Some call it fraud. Email fragments instantly began flying through the blogosphere. Perhaps the most sensational came from a Nov. 16, 1999, email from Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), in which he referred to having “completed Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature.

Also clear is that the official science on climate change as we know it today, looking backward and forward, has been developed and controlled by the relatively small collection of scientists who wrote most of the emails. Working directly or indirectly for the IPCC, the scientists seem to have become captive of that organization’s objectives, which was to find “the hand of man” in climate records to justify plans to change the climate in future. The scientists, in other words, became engaged in the all-too-familiar business of decision-based evidence making.

Briffa? Maybe.

Andrew Bolt thought it might be Wigley.

Climategate: Which one blew the whistle?
Andrew Bolt Saturday, December 05, 2009 at 12:09am
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climategate_which_one_blew_the_whistle/

Meet Tom Wigley, the Climategate insider who may finally have choked on all the deceit he witnessed.
Picture: http://blogs.news.com.au/images/uploads/wigley-sm.jpg

It is almost certain that the leak of 4000 documents from the University of East Anglia was not the work of a hacker but of a whisteblower. The sheer effort of retrieving, itemising and sorting all those documents, and of weeding out any that were purely personal or irrelevant, required someone who had not just the computer skills and the access, but who knew what was important, and had the motivation to put in countless hours of work.

If the leaker was an insider, here are the candidates - named and pictured. The list also shows the extraordinary reach of the University’s Climatic Research Unit into climate science circles when judged even just by formal ties.

Of course, I’m sure none of these people did leak the emails, which they would know is probably an illegal act and one likely to make them a pariah in climate science. So let’s rule out immediately the suggestion that any of these people did their duty to the public and blew the whistle on a colossal scam. I wouldn’t accuse them of anything so serious. I especially wouldn’t accuse Wigley of being a leaker.

But imagine if one of them had indeed realised that enough was enough, and too many lines had been crossed by the Climategate scientists- including criminal ones. Which one of them might have cracked, and decided to blow the whistle? Or put it this way, which of them showed the greatest evidence of an uneasy conscience - or a growing sense of seeing a wrong that needed righting?

Again, I rule out that any of these people actually did leak the emails. This is purely hypothetical - an exercise in trying to determine the most ethical and principled of the CRU staff and associates, as evidenced by the emails.

And I’m proud to say that for me the answer is a fellow Australian, Adelaide-born Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and a CRU Visiting Fellow.

Here are three examples of his frustration with Climategate scientists hiding data, fudging results, covering up, making “dishonest presentations”, and presenting “deceptive” proofs of warming. All these protests are from this year - and two from just the past two months. All show his frustration, even anger or possibly fear, at the scandalous deceit and coverups he was witnessing.

Of course, you may wonder why he didn’t go public with the serious concerns he was raising in these emails to his colleagues…

EVIDENCE: Briffa must “be very, very careful”

Just two months ago Wigley wrote to Phil Jones, CRU head, to say that sceptic Steve McIntyre was actually right, CRU deputy director Keith Briffa had made an extraordinary “mess” of tree ring data which he’d claimed showed the world hadn’t been hotter. Wigley also wondered why Briffa had chosen just 12 trees in Yamal to show modern warming, and failed to include a much larger sample which would have shown cooling instead. He also warned against the CRU’s hiding of data:
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:57:57 -0600
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds…

139.222.131.184

Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith
does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in
emails, Yamal is insignificant....

But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith
explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And
how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated
chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don’t know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in
recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less
often that M&M [McIntyre and fellow sceptic Professor Ross McKitrick] saybut where did they get their information? I
presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if
you ask me. Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and conciselybut I am not
sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of.
And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that
affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasonsbut
many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The
trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something,
and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is
being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this.
I’d be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.

EVIDENCE: “The Figure you sent is very deceptive”

Two months ago Wigley rebuked Climategate’s Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann for sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and warmist scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.

> On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:
> > Mike,
> >
> > The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical
> > runs with PCM look as though they match observationsbut the
> > match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low
> > climate sensitivitycompensating errors. In my (perhaps too
> > harsh)
> > view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model
> > results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use
> > results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least
> > here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and
> > forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
> >
> > Tom.
> >
> > +++++++++++++++++++
> >
> > Michael Mann wrote:
> > > thanks Tom,
> > > I’ve taken the liberty of attaching a figure that Gavin put
> > > together the other day (its an update from a similar figure he
> > > prepared for an earlier RealClimate post. see:
> > > http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009…; It is indeed worth a thousand words, and drives home Tom’s point below. We’re planning on doing a post on this shortly, but would be nice to see the Sep. HadCRU numbers first,
> > > mike
> > > On Oct 14, 2009, at 3:01 AM, Tom Wigley wrote:
> > > > Dear all,
> > > > At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the
> > > > recent
> > > > lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to
> > > > look at
> > > > the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic
> > > > trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second
> > > > is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the
> > > > observed data.
> > > > Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The
> > > > second
> > > > method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.
> > > > These sums complement Kevin’s energy work.
> > > > Kevin says ... “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack
> > > > of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”. I
> > > > do not
> > > > agree with this.
> > > > Tom.

EVIDENCE: “asking for trouble” on the Wang case.

One of the biggest problems with calculating temperature trends over the past century is how much to allow for the fact that measurements in our fast-growing concrete jungles will suffer from the “urban heat island” effect of all those extra machines and concrete. How much of the warming until 2001 must be discounted as a result?

(The following draws from this post by Counting Cats in Zanzibar and from Watts Up With That’s summary.)

The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.

Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.

Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.

Neither Jones nor Wang replied to Keenan’s request for an explanation and retraction. When Benny Peiser’s sceptic-friendly journal Energy and Environment said it would detail the evidence, Climategate scientist Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, tried deliberately to mislead it with the warmists typical smears, later confiding in a leaked email:

(1177158252.txt):

So my feeble suggestion is to indeed cast aspersions on their motives and throw in some counter rhetoric. Labeling them as lazy with nothng better to do seems like a good thing to do.

In August last year Wang was cleared of fraud by his university’s inquiry into the allegations, but the inquiry was held in secret and did not allow Keenan to participate, in violation of the university’s own rules. Nor would it release its report. It was now clear that climate scientists were working as a clique, refusing to release data or confront error - if not outright fraud.

Now to Wigley’s emails. He had been the director of CRU at the time, and knew the charges against Wang were actually true, and that the failure to answer and address them was wrong. He hints to Jones that Jones could have known the data was wrong, too, and participated in a coverup. He accuses the university of “asking for trouble” with its seeming coverup, too..

Tom Wigley to Phil Jones:

(1188557698.txt)

Phil,

Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW [Wang] at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.

Whether or not this makes a difference is not the issue here.

Tom.

Again from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones, just seven months ago:

(1241415427.txt)

Date: Mon, 04 May 2009

Phil,

Do you know where this stands? The key things from the Peiser items are …

“Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist. Moreover, the report was published as part of the Department of Energy Carbon Dioxide Research Program, and Wang was the Chief Scientist of that program.”

and

“Wang had a co-worker in Britain. In Britain, the Freedom of Information Act requires that data from publicly-funded research be made available.

I was able to get the data by requiring Wang’s co-worker to release it, under British law. It was only then that I was able to confirm that Wang had committed fraud.”

You are the co-worker, so you must have done something like provide Keenan with the DOE report that shows that there are no station records for 49 of the 84 stations. I presume Keenan therefore thinks that it was not possible to select stations on the basis of …

“… station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times”

[THIS IS ITEM “X”]

Of course, if the only stations used were ones from the 35 stations that *did* have station histories, then all could be OK. However, if some of the stations used were from the remaining 49, then the above selection method could not have been applied (but see below) unless there are other “hard copy” station history data not in the DOE report (but in China) that were used. From what Wang has said, if what he says is true, the second possibility appears to be the case.

What is the answer here?

The next puzzle is why Wei-Chyung didn’t make the hard copy information available. Either it does not exist, or he thought it was too much trouble to access and copy. My guess is that it does not exist if it did then why was it not in the DOE report? In support of this, it seems that there are other papers from 1991 and 1997 that show that the datado not exist. What are these papers? Do they really show this?

Now my views. (1) I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here. But ITEM X is in both the W-C W and Jones et al. papers so where does it come from first? Were you taking W-C W on trust?

(2) It also seems to me that the University at Albany has screwed up. To accept a complaint from Keenan and not refer directly to the complaint and the complainant in its report really is asking for trouble.

(3) At the very start it seems this could have been easily dispatched.

ITEM X really should have been …

“Where possible, stations were chosen on the basis of station histories and/or local knowledge: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times”

Of course the real get out is the final “or”. A station could be selected if either it had relatively few “changes in instrumentation”

OR “changes in location” OR “changes in observation times”. Not all three, simply any one of the three. One could argue about the science here it would be better to have all three but this is not what the statement says.

Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start?

Perhaps it’s not too late?

–

I realise that Keenan is just a trouble maker and out to waste time, so I apologize for continuing to waste your time on this, Phil. However, I *am* concerned because all this happened under my watch as Director of CRU and, although this is unlikely, the buck eventually should stop with me.”

When did Tom Wigley finally choke on all that deceit? And if he didn’t, why the hell not?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.