Takeaways:
- The scientific consensus has only become stronger as the evidence for global warming from various sources has mounted and confirmed the temperature data. June 2019: Study: NASA’s estimate of Earth's long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures.
- “Climategate”(sic) was a manufactured "controversy" by fossil fuel interests and global warming denialists - timed specifically to disrupt the 2009 and 2011 climate talks and the Cap and Trade bill. Out of context stolen hacked e-mails distributed from a russian server and onwards to the echo chamber of denier blogs and think tanks and right wing media outlets where everyone had a prepared script? COME ON!!
- Why would anyone “hide the decline” in a time when all the available temperature data were all showing rapidly warming?? There had been no decline of global temperatures to hide."
- First, climate scientist Michael Mann’s “Nature trick” simply refers to adding temperature measurements from modern instruments to a chart illustrating indirect “proxy” temperature estimates (i.e., analyzing tree ring sizes) in the more distant past. The use of the word “trick” in the email was in the context of “trick of the trade,” not “tricking the audience.” If the latter were the case, the use of two different sources of data would not have been labeled as explicitly as possible in Mann’s scientific paper and subsequent reports.
- Second, “hiding the decline” referred to the fact that indirect proxy temperature estimates from tree rings were known to be unreliable after about 1960. From about 1960 to 1990 they showed temperatures falling, whereas we know temperatures actually rose during that time.
- Nine, yes, thats 9, investigations ALL cleared the scientists. Innocent to proven guilty in a court of law, right?
- All the CRU data have been replicated. The Independent Climate Change Email Review went back to primary data sources and were able to replicate CRU's results. This means not only was CRU not hiding anything, but it had nothing to hide. Though CRU neglected to provide an exact list of temperature stations, it could not have hid or tampered with data.
- Canadian neo libertarian think tank, Frontier Centre for Public Policy, who attacked the scientists, have now admitted they were wrong and have apologized to Michael E. Mann.
- June 2019: Study: NASA’s estimate of Earth's long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures. The study also confirms what researchers have been saying for some time now: that Earth's global temperature increase since 1880 – about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, or a little more than 1 degree Celsius – cannot be explained by any uncertainty or error in the data. Going forward, this assessment will give scientists the tools to explain their results with greater confidence. New Studies Increase Confidence in NASA's Measure of Earth's Temperature – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
- Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction was false [McIntyre and McKitrick have additionally been discredited in a recent peer-reviewed article by Rutherford et al (2004)] RealClimate have more: False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction
- Perhaps even more more telling is the fact that during the same time of the CRU data, (and today), the UAH satellite data, run by well known contrarians John Christy and Roy Spencer, shows the same warming trend as all the other data. John Christy and Roy Spencer, whom deniers always have used to “debunk” climate science, are now saying the planet was, and is indeed warming - and is thus debunking “climategate”.
Introduction:
It was a manufactured "controversy" by fossil fuel interests and global warming denialists - timed specifically to disrupt the 2009 and 2011 climate talks and the Cap and Trade bill.
“A manufactroversy, also known as a nontroversy, is a manufactured controversy.
A manufactroversy can be a form of denialism: pretending that a controversy exists over something which is, in fact, not in debate by anyone who has the slightest grasp of the facts, but which a number of people wish to deny for religious, political, or other reasons. The usual motive for this is to attempt to give the appearance that the facts are still up for debate, à la anti-environmentalism. Another kind is the manufactured "scandal": blowing a non-issue out of proportion.”
Manufactroversy - RationalWiki
“What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy?
A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails. The credulousness of all too many journalists about the supposed misconduct revealed by “Climategate,” a pseudo-scandal that relied on selective, out-of-context quotes from emails at a British university, prefigured the disastrous media handling of hacked Democratic emails in 2016. (All we learned from those emails was that scientists are people — occasionally snappish, and given to talking in professional shorthand that hostile outsiders can willfully misinterpret.)”
Opinion | Climate Denial Was the Crucible for Trumpism
Stolen emails. Wikileaks. White supremacists. Donald Trump. It all happened in 2009.
Al Gore and IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 and "most people" had now come to the conclusion that man-made climate change was a reality.
2009: In Copenhagen, it would be an important climate meeting immediately and in the United States the so-called "cap and trade" bill would reduce CO 2 emissions. The fossil fuel industry goes into panic mode. "Something" had to be done.
Let's see, what is the cheapest trick in the book? Ahh, smear campaigns !! Epistles from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in England are stolen by an hacker. (So handy!). The contents of these emails were then twisted and turned out of context to "prove" that the serious climate science was corrupt.
All the right wing conservative media in the United States of course went completely bananas. All of these reported the case in exactly the same manner, with exactly the same words. These media outlets had been feed beforehand and funnily enough used the same sentences in their reporting. So carefully planned was this hacker attack. And who broke the case you wonder? The denier blog WattsUpWithThat, funded by fossil fuel funded think tank The Heartland Institute. Hilarious.
And, do not laugh now,
but just before the next global climate conference, the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa November 28, 2011,
a new series of 5,000 hacked emails was posted on a Russian server.
Once again, the e-mails are communicated via links in the comments fields in climate-denier blogs. The hacker writes, "Today's decisions should be based on all information we can get, not on" hide the decline (sic) ".
Lets debunk this smear campaign in 3 simple steps:
- All the CRU data have been replicated:
"The Independent Climate Change Email Review went back to primary data sources and were able to replicate CRU's results. This means not only was CRU not hiding anything, but it had nothing to hide. Though CRU neglected to provide an exact list of temperature stations, it could not have hid or tampered with data."
Did CRU tamper with temperature data?
Anyone can now view for themselves the raw data that was at the centre of the “climategate” “scandal”.
Temperature records going back 150 years from 5113 weather stations around the world were yesterday released to the public by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The only records missing are from 19 stations in Poland, which refused to allow them to be made public.
“We released [the dataset] to dispel the myths that the data have been inappropriately manipulated, and that we are being secretive,” says Trevor Davies, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for research. “Some sceptics argue we must have something to hide, and we’ve released the data to pull the rug out from those who say there isn’t evidence that the global temperature is increasing.”
OK, climate sceptics: here’s the raw data you wanted
Perhaps even more more telling is the fact that during the same time of the CRU data, the UAH satellite data, run by deniers John Christy and Roy Spencer, shows the same warming trend as all the other data.
What trend do the UAH data show now? Lets go to the UAH home page:
The University of Alabama in Huntsville
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climat...
Their trend is 0.13 C per decade. Very much in tune with all the other data.
2. 9 (nine!) separate investigations clear the scientists—including Mann and Jones—of wrongdoing and note that the scientific consensus on global warming remains strong. Investigators do criticize the University of East Anglia for dodging open records requests.
LONDON, UK, March 31, 2010 (ENS) - An investigation into leaked emails by British climate scientists that appeared to indicate a conspiracy to manipulate data to bolster a case for global warming has cleared the scientists of wrongdoing. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee today published its report on the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit, CRU, at the University of East Anglia. The investigation found no basis for accusations of dishonesty and no attempt to mislead on the part of the scientists.
RA-10 Inquiry Report: Concerning the Allegations of Research Misconduct Against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Department of Meteorology, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University February 3, 2010 RA-10 Inquiry Committee for the Case of Dr. Michael E. Mann:
... the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community … .
Michael Mann Exonerated as Penn State Inquiry Finds 'No Substance' To Allegations
The Climate-gate story – the real scandal
Canadian neo libertarian think tank, Frontier Centre for Public Policy, have now admitted they were wrong and apologized to Michael E. Mann:
Michael Mann Wins - Greg Laden's Blog
Michael Manns Hockey stick have later been confirmed and improved by the 4 most comprehensive studies on paleoclimate:
Its affirmed by US National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
- It’s confirmed and improved by the 4 most comprehensive studies done on the matter (+ ca 150 other studies).
- New paleo-science further improves the Stick.
https://www.nature.com/articles/...
3. The emails taken out of context:
Thats what denial blogs do. They pull one sentence, or one phrase, or one data point OUT OF CONTEXT. They hope their audience accepts it without looking any further. They want their blogs to be the blinders on the eyes of their readers. "Look here; don't look there."
A prime example is a 1999 e-mail from Jones, who wrote:
“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.”
Skeptics claim the words “trick” and “decline” show Jones is using sneaky manipulations to mask a decline in global temperatures. But that’s not the case. Actual temperatures, as measured by scientific instruments such as thermometers, were rising at the time of the writing of this decade-old e-mail, and (as we’ve noted) have continued to rise since then. Jones was referring to the decline in temperatures implied by measurements of the width and density of tree rings. In recent decades, these measures indicate a dip, while more accurate instrument-measured temperatures continue to rise.
"Scientists at CRU use tree-ring data and other “proxy” measurements to estimate temperatures from times before instrumental temperature data began to be collected. However, since about 1960, tree-ring data have diverged from actual measured temperatures. Far from covering it up, CRU scientists and others have published reports of this divergence many times. The “trick” that Jones was writing about in his 1999 e-mail was simply adding the actual, measured instrumental data into a graph of historic temperatures. Jones says it’s a “trick” in the colloquial sense of an adroit feat — “a clever thing to do,” as he put it — not a deception. What’s hidden is the fact that tree-ring data in recent decades doesn’t track with thermometer measurements.
The divergence problem is a physical phenomenon - tree growth has slowed or declined in the last few decades, mostly in high northern latitudes. The divergence problem is unprecedented, unique to the last few decades, indicating its cause may be anthropogenic. The cause is likely to be a combination of local and global factors such as warming-induced drought and global dimming. Tree-ring proxy reconstructions are reliable before 1960, tracking closely with the instrumental record and other independent proxies.
Here is another from Michael E. Mann:
"No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction"
In the right context, the meaning is nothing like what denier bloggs wants you to believe. That highlighted part clearly shows he didn't mean the first sentence the way science-denial blogs pretended.
Another common quote is from Kevin Trenberth:
“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.”
Again, out of context, that sounds pretty damning, but in context, he was not talking about the warming of the entire planet, but rather the flow of energy through the earth, and the fact that there are parts of that system that we do not yet understand. Here is the paper that Trenberth was discussing (Trenberth 2009)
So to summarise, Trenberth's email says this:
"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."
After reviewing the discussion in Trenberth 2009, it's apparent that what he meant was this:
"Global warming is still happening - our planet is still accumulating heat. But our observation systems aren't able to comprehensively keep track of where all the energy is going. Consequently, we can't definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That's a travesty!"
Skeptics use Trenberth's email to characterise climate scientists as secretive and deceptive. However, when one takes the trouble to acquaint oneself with the science, the opposite becomes apparent. Trenberth outlines his views in a clear, open manner, frankly articulating his frustrations at the limitations of observation systems. Trenberth's opinions didn't need to be illegally stolen and leaked onto the internet. They were already publicly available in the peer reviewed literature - and much less open to misinterpretation than a quote-mined email.and you can find more details at Skeptical Science.
“ In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded: “
Letter to Congress from U.S. scientists: "The body of evidence that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming is overwhelming. The content of the stolen emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming. … Even without including analyses from the UK research center from which the emails were stolen, the body of evidence underlying our understanding of human-caused global warming remains robust."
The truth is that over the 13 years covered by the CRU e-mails, scientific consensus has only become stronger as the evidence for global warming from various sources has mounted. Reports from the National Academies and the U.S. Global Change Research Program that analyze large amounts of data from various sources also agree, as does the IPCC, that climate change is not in doubt. In advance of the 2009 U.N. climate change summit, the national academies of 13 nations issued a joint statement of their recommendations for combating climate change, in which they discussed the “human forcing” of global warming and said that the need for action was “indisputable.”