COPENHAGEN — On the day that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up in Copenhagen to say that the U.S. would contribute to a global clean energy and climate action fund that could grow to $100 billion in spending by 2020, Senator James Inhofe also appeared in Copenhagen.

Earlier this month, the Oklahoma Republican and one of Capitol Hill’s fiercest critics of climate action, told reporters that he would travel to Copenhagen with a “truth squad.” Its express mission: dispute climate science and disrupt the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which ends tomorrow.

But the weight of urgency to meet tomorrow’s deadline and the intense diplomacy now occurring around the clock transformed the roar of perceived fact that Inhofe planned into a politically diminishing squeak. Briefly circled this morning by a group of reporters inside the Bella Center’s media center, Inhofe looked  uncomfortable as he accused the news media here of “being on the far left,” asserted that climate science was “debunked,” and promised that the chance of the Senate approving a proposed climate and energy bill was “zero.”

Weak Appearance
Inhofe’s conservative allies in government and the media are certain to describe his visit as a heroic act of political principle – confront the lions of climate action in their own den and all that. But a more significant outcome of Inhofe’s three-hour Copenhagen visit could be the political consequence it may produce in Washington.

The Oklahoma Republican, who steadily elevated his career to national significance – in the model of former Alabama Governor George Wallace — through calculated confrontation and rhetoric strategically calibrated to excite and inflame, miscalculated every aspect of his trip here.

The timing was wrong. The audience was not receptive. And Inhofe’s message was a blur for foreign reporters – Senate politics, hijacked emails — and old news for American journalists.

Indeed, there was real news to report. The United States started the day here with a surprising commitment to help finance a $100 billion climate and energy fund, the first time the U.S. has formally recognized the magnitude of the investment needed globally. Clinton did not specify how much the U.S. would commit or its schedule, but did say that it was predicated on the Chinese allowing the world to measure and verify carbon reductions there.

The Chinese followed later in the day – no surprise — with assurances that it would be much more open and transparent in reporting progress on commitments it made last month to reduce carbon emissions.

A Day of Progress Ignores Oklahoma Senator
The climate negotiations, fraught with disagreement and slow progress for almost two weeks, clearly seemed to open up after both announcements. NGO experts close to the delegations said the talks were starting to move with more pace. The chance that the 192 nations here would reach a deal on climate change that makes a difference came into clearer focus. In other words, there is little space today in the momentous global conversation on climate and the economy for a whiny American senator from the Great Plains.

Inhofe, in short, left Copenhagen looking weak. No doubt, the Congressional delegation that also arrived here today, led by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, took note.

Inhofe’s revealing performance capped a tough week for free market conservatives in Copenhagen. Early in the week several meetings on climate science and the stolen emails, including one organized by Americans For Prosperity, an activist organization financed in part by coal and oil interests, attracted tiny audiences of less than a dozen participants. The stolen emails, flogged by Sarah Palin and the right as evidence of a conspiracy to cook the science on warming, were ignored in Copenhagen. Instead negotiators vigorously defended the scientific consensus on the causes of climate disruption and its consequences.

Oklahoma’s Favorite Son in DC
It’s too early to tell, of course, what effect Inhofe’s visit to Copenhagen will have on his standing in Washington. It’s almost certainly not going to injure his stature in Oklahoma.

Named a senator in 1994, to replace Senator David Boren, who resigned to assume the presidency of the University of Oklahoma, Inhofe has won with strong margins three times, the latest in 2008 by gaining 57 percent of the vote.

His primary financial support comes from the fossil fuel industries whose climate science-denying interests he vigorously advances. Since 2000, according to Oil Change International, the coal and oil industries have contributed $1.13 million to his campaigns. Oklahoma is the number three producer of natural gas, the number six producer of crude oil, and is home to seven big coal-fired power plants, according to the Energy Information Administration and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

And Inhofe’s role as one of President Barack Obama’s most aggressive opponents appears as secure as any in the Senate. Just 34 percent of Oklahoma’s voters supported the president in the 2008 election. Only Wyoming disapproved of the president more.

Keith Schneider, an environmental journalist, is media and communications director at US Climate Action Network. Reach him at kschneider@climatenetwork.org

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Opponents of climate action immediately pounced on the emails as evidence of scientific doubts about the authenticity of the planet’s warming. Real Climate’s cogent and convincing response is below.

Here at USCAN, we trust the scientific consensus that climate change is real and getting more dire.

We also condemn the climate warming deniers’ continued assaults on ethics, honesty, and integrity in their campaign to cast scientific doubt and halt action to curb climate warming. Last July, for instance, reporters in the United States revealed how Bonner and Associates, a contractor for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, forged the stationary of prominent progressive organizations, wrote fake letters of opposition to the House climate and energy bill, and sent them to a select group of House lawmakers. Before the email hack job it was the latest high visibility smear in a disinformation campaign that Al Gore has called an assault on reason – “falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of evidence to the contrary” – and that James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore describe in their important new book “Climate Cover-Up.“

– Keith Schneider

Assessing a Globally Significant Scientific Breach

By Real Climate
Special to the U.S. Climate Action Network

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently. Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution.

As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov. 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment.

Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Candor of Expression
Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been
published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Scientists Interact
Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions;

Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. But it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times.

Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him.

Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

Example
No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear.

Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence
problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682).

Those authors have always recommend not using the post-1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.

There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly noone would have gone to this trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but they probably should.

It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email made public?

Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.

Update: The Official UEA Statement in Response to the Breach:

“We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,” the spokesman stated. “Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.”

“This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.”

“We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this inquiry.”

This article first appeared on RealClimate.org on November 21, 2009.

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