By Ross McKitrick, Ph.D
Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph, Canada
Introduction
News broke on or around 19 November 2009 that a large archive of emails and files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the UK had been released on the internet. The contents of the files were sufficiently disconcerting to the public, governments and university administrations that a number of inquiries were established. Several of my research projects were discussed not only in the so-called “Climategate” emails themselves, but also in the investigations, and I made detailed submissions of evidence to three of the panels.
Consequently I take considerable interest in the outcome of these inquiries, especially with regards to whether they approached the issues impartially, investigated thoroughly and drew valid conclusions that fully reflected the evidence.
As of 30 August 2010 all five had issued their reports. The overall impression that has been created is that the scientists and their work were vindicated. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chair Rajendra Pachauri declared in a recent interview1
“the doubts raised have proved to be unfounded.”
Considerable reliance is being placed upon the outcome of these investigations. As I will
show, for the most part the inquiries were flawed, but where they actually functioned as proper inquiries, they upheld many criticisms. But a surprising number of issues were sidestepped or handled inadequately. The world still awaits a proper inquiry into climategate: one that is not stacked with global warming advocates, and one that is prepared to cross-examine evidence, interview critics as well as supporters of the CRU and other IPCC players, and follow the evidence where it clearly leads.
Altogether there were five inquiries or investigations, conducted by, respectively, The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, The Oxburgh panel, the Independent Climate Change Emails Review under Sir Muir Russell, Penn State University and the InterAcademy Council. The first three were established in the UK and focused on scientists at the CRU. The fourth was focused on Michael Mann of Penn State University, a major correspondent in the Climategate archive. The fifth was
commissioned by the IPCC itself as a review of its policies and procedures.
Many accusations and insinuations began flying around during the uproar after the climategate emails were released. I would distill the main concerns down to the following questions.
1. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulate, hide, invent or otherwise misrepresent evidence in IPCC or World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports so as to mislead readers, including policymakers?
2. Did the scientists involved delete emails or other documents related to the IPCC process in order to prevent disclosure of information subject to Freedom of Information laws?
3. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges express greater doubts or uncertainties about the science in their own professional writings and in their interactions with one another than they allowed to be stated in reports of the IPCC or WMO that were intended for policymakers?
4. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges take steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work?
5. Did the scientists involved in the email exchanges take steps individually or in collusion to block publication of papers, or to intimidate or discredit journals, in order to prevent rival scientific evidence from being published?
My examination of the Climategate inquiries centers on the extent to which they succeeded in providing credible answers to the above questions. As will be shown, the various inquiries reviewed evidence that leads to an affirmative answer in each case, and in many cases the inquiries themselves report affirmative answers, yet they couched such conclusions in terms that gave the opposite impression. In other cases they simply left the questions unanswered. In some cases they avoided the issues by looking instead at irrelevant questions.
Two further questions follow from these, pointing to issues larger than Climategate itself, which many people have asked in the wake of the inquiries.
6. Is the IPCC a reliable source of information on climate change?
7. Is the science concerning the current concerns about climate change sound?
I will return to these questions in the concluding section to show that the inquiries support a negative answer to the former and are uninformative on the latter.
Read the complete report here (PDF)
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So what has ever been discovered about how the emails and Harry_Readme files got released in the first place?
“Never hold an enquiry unless you know the outcome beforehand.”
Having worked in the civil service (silly service), it was well known that the first job of any consultant hired by the Government was to find out the conclusions the sponsors wanted to hear. The job then was to complete the rest of the “analysis” to support these conclusions.
How else does one expect to get another (lucrative) contract from the Government?
Gaahh!!! Another 50 page pdf to read!!! But being familiar with the subject matter, Ross, you’re correct. The answers to the first 5 questions are in the affirmative. Negative on the last 2.
The problem with McKitrick is that when the opposition goes against him in a battle of WITS, they are “unarmed”. I think a lot of WUWT readers have engaged in technical writing of one sort or another. Therefore they would know that these 50 pages were not written overnight.
Alas, we wish we could make the same statement about the “Inquiry groups”.
Max
If you didn’t have predetermined answers to your own questions as following:
1) yes
2) yes
3) yes
4) yes
5) yes
6) no
7) no
then I doubt you would even have bothered writing this report, let alone posting it on this blog. Why don’t you just drop the pretense of open-minded questioning and admit that this is just another attempt to discredit the science?
No one has investigated or answered the question:
“What was in the emails that Jones et al deleted regarding the IPCC AR4?”
Why did the co-conspirators delete these emails? What was in them? Was there a IT forensic investigation to fine the contents in back-up tapes?
Released is the new expression for stolen?
Will the other emails…..the ones that have never been released, ever be released to the public? I think a complete history of the players correspondence would be devastating and would show all the stories they have told since the release of the emails – some of these in statements to the climategate inquirers – were really a significant effort to cover up. The proof of an effort to cover up for themselves would probably be more impactful than the issues raised in the original climategate email release.
Ross McKitrick, Ph.D;
I am half way through your report. I find it significant. You have a lucid writing style.
Thank you.
John
Has anyone here ever heard of this email?
“Dear Eleven,
…
This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a
dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is
apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed,
balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not
be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In
issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their
personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others
when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their
scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.
…
When scientists color the science with their own PERSONAL views or make
categorical statements without presenting the evidence for such
statements, they have a clear responsibility to state that that is what
they are doing. You have failed to do so. Indeed, what you are doing is,
in my view, a form of dishonesty more subtle but no less egregious than
the statements made by the greenhouse skeptics, Michaels, Singer et al. I
find this extremely disturbing.
Tom Wigley”
Tom Wigley here is not talking to a skeptic; he’s talking to someone who was circulating a statement designed to “bolster or increase governmental and public support for controls of emissions of greenhouse gases”. This email clearly shows a commitment to proper scientific values, at least on his part. But this email never gets quoted by anyone, anywhere.
The answer to your questions is “worse than we thought”!
I want to thank you for your recentless search for the truth.The stakeholders in this is the entire political establishment on one side and the democratic intrest on the other.
UN especially is on the line…they took upon a risk they didnt evaluate enogh…its a win or loose it all situation for the UN byraucrats!
P.S Do you ever sleep??? 🙂
What a lovely Dissection & Summary of the 5 attempted Cover ups by supposedly responsible public figures who were presumably paid by the Tax payers to find & tell the truth about Climategate.
Hats off to Ross McKitrick for such a clear & concise round up of the poor state of these so called “Investigations”.
I think that we all knew that these investestigations were designed to be white washes, even before the results were returned. And we also knew that the IPCC would use these as an indication that the AGW credibility had been restored. Nice job of summing it all up by Ross, however.
Anthony, I believe that the CLOUD experiments at CERN have been under way. Have you heard anything about any results from them? I think that those are going to turn out to be extremely important to the overall debate.
Another question I’d like to see Acton asked (with due notice, and under oath) is “Did a UEA employee compile a folder of emails and code and name it “FOIA.txt”, and if so, for what purpose? I remain suspicious that the purpose of creating the folder was to compile emails to be OMITTED from an FOI response, should other means of frustrating the request fail.
If Acton says No, and he’s wrong, he faces the prospect that the liberator will some day emerge to contradict him, and that would be serious for him.
If he says Yes, it will be fascinating to hear his account of the compilation’s purpose.
I just tried to download the PDF.
“Internet Explorer can not download….”, twice. Funny how often this stuff is “blocked”………
Just because I am not paranoid it does not mean that they are not out to get me……..
Tom says:
September 15, 2010 at 7:41 am
Are Tom and Tom Wigley one and the same?
@Tom: ‘Tom Wigley here … This email clearly shows a commitment to proper scientific values, at least on his part. But this email never gets quoted by anyone, anywhere.’
One swallow doesn’t make a summer.
Liberate the Liberator.
==============
Another clear and concise report regarding the various soft-shoe dances around the criminal behavior of several climatologists. Can we get an alarmist scientist here to try and refute the specifics of these reports?
Tom says:
September 15, 2010 at 7:41 am
Has anyone here ever heard of this email?
“Dear Eleven,
…
This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a
dis-service.
[…]
============
I certainly have heard of this one, Tom. In fact I quoted it (and the E-mail to which Wigley was responding):
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/the-fog-of-uncertainty-and-the-precautionary-principle/
Wigley was responding (albeit too late to make any difference, because he’d missed a Nov 19/97 deadline) to an E-mail entitled: “ATTENTION, Invitation to influence Kyoto”
That’s how they built “consensus” back then, you see: good, old-fashioned chain e-mails – asking people to endorse stuff when it was “too late” to make any changes if anyone disagreed with the content.
Hope this helps.
So what has ever been discovered about how the emails and Harry_Readme files got released in the first place?
No discovery as yet, believe PC Plod of Norfolk is still working on it, this was a convenient excuse for the UEA not to release the emails to Muir for his inquiry and he conveniently did not push the point.
————–
Tom,
I would admit it (McKitrick’s report) is a highly effective & successful attempt to discredit bad climate science. It looks like normal scientific process to me.
You are witnessing, by the very act of Dr. Ross McKitrick’s writing and posting this report on WUWT, the self-correcting nature of science. By the tone of your comments here on this post, it is apparent that to you this self-correcting process of climate science represents some moral struggle of the climategate scientists against someone bad. I think that shows you are too personally involved to objectively and coldly assess the corrections in climate science that are happening and which are accelerating.
Climate science is in need of correction and clearly in need of total public knowledge of all its previous aspects.
John
Tom says:
September 15, 2010 at 7:41 am
“Has anyone here ever heard of this email?
“Dear Eleven,……”
=========================================================
Tom, I seem to have a vague recollection of reading that elsewhere. It does seem that Dr. Wigley was trying to urge some to a higher sense of responsibility and integrity. It is sad that many will be painted with the same brush as others whom are blatant criminals.
That said, the climate science community has had ample time to clean up their own act. Their silence was deafening. I know Dr. Wigley knows how to communicate to the media. Yet, outside of one e-mail, I’ve heard nothing from him regarding the misdeeds and criminal activity of his colleagues.
Sorry, the attempt at vindication doesn’t wash with the ‘I knew about it but did nothing to prevent it.’ defense.
Al Gore, when discussing geothermal power, claimed the Earth’s core was very hot, like millions of degrees. He also used a graph in his movie showing CO2 and Temp over a large time scale. He labled the lines backwards, but hey, that doesn’t affect his conclusion at all. Michael “2 minutes for playing with a broken hockey stick” Mann writes an algorithm that eliminates well documented historical warm and cold periods. Not only that, his al-gore-ithm is so incredible it produces a hockey stick shape when random numbers are used as input. That is solid science there. Phil Jones, of sCRU U, managed to lose original datasets, leaving only a massaged and manipulated warmed up dataset for all other scientists to play with. The IPCC started with the conclusion that CO2 was a killer and to prove it loaded their summary reports with references to the science provided by the likes of Greenpeace and the David Suzuki foundation.
These are the types who the Climate Saviours would have us kneel before.