A centerpiece of the week's climate events in Copenhagen is an impressive globe, digitally enhanced to rotate and display messages from all over the world in support of climate action. Photo by Carl Ganter, Circle of Blue, for USCAN.

Yet what Mwamukonda said was especially dismaying was not the big differences between the US and the EU over cutting emissions, or how much the word’s rain forests to conserve, or the level of investment by developed nations to help developing nations make the transition to a low-carbon economy. All of that and much more will need to be resolved for the 12-day  conference to close on its goal of being a historically significant gathering.

“You’ve heard of Kilimanjaro?” Mwamukundo asked, folding his hands in his lap. “The ice is melting.  It won’t be there in a few years. The animals are dying from drought. Our land is changing. How can anybody doubt that climate change is real?”

Undercurrent at Opening
The sound of a lone trumpet and a chorus of young Danes opened the 15^th Conference of the Parties this morning at the enormous, O’Hare-size Bella Center. But the insistent soundtrack that also greeted negotiators from 192 nations, and thousands of reporters and climate activists from around the world, was the purposefully disruptive noise of opponents claiming the conference’s goal is premised on a scientific hoax.

There’s nothing new about the argument, of course. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary there are still people who insist the holocaust never occurred, the world was created 6,000 years ago, and George Bush was a great president.

But the digital break-in at the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia, in England, and the worldwide release last month of unguarded email exchanges among climate scientists has stirred an undercurrent among those gathered here that covers all of the emotional ground marked by indignation at one end and fury at the other. In other words the thousands of people who came to Copenhagen to address the important disagreements over the final text of the climate accord, many of whom devoted sizable chunks of their lives to actually delivering a breakthrough moment in how the world conducts its affairs, are pissed off.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists, the White House science advisor, and dozens of leading climate scientists have pointed out the thieved messages offer insight into scientific candor but they do not call into question the sound scientific consensus that has been reached about the causes of climate change and its consequences. The U.S. Center at Copenhagen, established by the Obama administration to showcase American research and federal actions to limit greenhouse gases, is holding a series of briefings throughout the next two weeks that explore the many scientifically peer-reviewed dimensions of the climate crisis.

Scientific Response
James McCarthy, a former lead author on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer today that articulated the scientific view that the stolen e-mails have no bearing on the overall understanding of climate science. “The scientific process depends on open access to methodology, data, and a rigorous peer-review process,” wrote Dr. McCarthy, who is board chair of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The robust exchange of ideas in the peer-reviewed literature regarding climate science is evidence of the high degree of integrity in this process. The body of evidence that human activity is prominent agent in global warming is overwhelming. The content of these a few personal emails has no impact what-so-ever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.”
The National Wildlife Federation issued a news release that included these facts about climate change:

• Temperatures this decade have been higher than any other decade on record, and one degree Fahrenheit higher than average temperatures in the 20th century. Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis. Available at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/.
• Ocean temperatures worldwide this summer were hotter than ever previously recorded. Source: NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), State of the Climate reports for June, July, and August 2009. Available at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/.
• Stable sea ice in the Arctic melted to its lowest recorded levels this summer, declining more than 60% since the 1980s and 1990s. Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at http://nsidc.org/news/press/20091005_minimumpr.html.
• Carbon Dioxide levels in the atmosphere for 2009 (387 parts per million) are the highest they have been in about 15 million years. Source: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Mauna Loa Observatory. Available at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/.
• Globally, 8.7 billion tons of carbon were emitted in 2008 from burning coal, oil and natural gas, a 41 percent increase from 1990. Source: Le Quéré, L., et al., 2009. Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. Nature Geoscience. Nov. 17. 2009.

Misbehavior and Deceit
What the email messages do call into question is the misbehavior and deceit of the opponents to climate action. It is still not known, though British authorities have launched an investigation, who broke into the university’s cache and who financed the theft and dissemination of the messages. Gaining those two facts will shed important light on what this episode was all about.

And while reporters parse, and climate critics cherry pick the significance of a handful of phrases contained in thousands of messages, the leaders of the view that climate change is a fraud are advancing a scientifically silly new narrative that posits the planet is cooling, polar bears are experiencing a population explosion, and the researchers who won a Nobel two years ago for their work to understand the chemistry and physics of climate science don’t know what they are talking about.

The objective of this campaign of deceit is now clear. Those who executed the break-in, timed the email release to coincide with the start of the Copenhagen conference, and recruited attention to the cherry-picked phrases want to tighten the comfort zone for global leaders and negotiators here. Big decisions about energy, the environment, and the economy are on the table. Amid all of the uncertainty about taking momentous steps to accelerate the energy, climate, and economic transition that has already begun worldwide, national leaders at least felt secure about the quality of the scientific foundations of their decisions.

Isakwisa Mwamukonda said this morning that African nations are confident that the science of climate change confirms what their eyes already tell them. The same is true for negotiators from other nations. Jonathan Pershing, the United States deputy special envoy for Climate Change, told a news conference this afternoon that the email theft “will have virtually no effect at all” on the negotiations and will be seen as a “small blip” in the history of the world’s work to solve global warming.

It’s worth noting that of the 192 countries represented here, only Saudi Arabia raised the hacking incident. Several NGO experts noted that the intervention was intriguing because Saudi Arabia approved every word of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, had Saudi scientists review the report, and participated in the report’s development.

Still, there may be some small measure of value to negotiators that come from the stolen emails. The episode seems to be temporarily expanding the space negotiators need—especially those from the U.S—to test proposals, exchange draft text, and refine ideas without worrying about leading today’s news broadcasts. Moreover, the story here – again, at least temporarily – is not whether the U.S. position could lead to a collapse of the talks.

Keith Schneider, a journalist specializing in environmental policy, is media and communications director at the US Climate Action Network. Reach him at keith@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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