A heated debate
The Climate Files
By Fred Pearce
Published by Guardian Publishing 2010
£11.99
Climategate broke in late November 2009 after huge
amounts of emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit
(CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were published on the
internet. They were seized on by bloggers who spun them as a global
conspiracy by scientists to fool the world about man-made climate
change. MANNY THAIN reviews a recent book detailing the scandal and its
consequences.
THE LEAKED FILES added to the already growing public
cynicism towards scientists in general and the theories of human-made
climate change. Searching questions were directed at some of the world’s
most eminent climate scientists. The ownership of data and the
scientific peer review system were put in doubt. It went further still.
The way science as a whole is conducted was under the microscope.
The Climate Files, a well-written, fast-moving
account by Fred Pearce – writer on climate science for years for the
Guardian – delves into what happened. His intention is to rescue climate
science. He also throws a harsh spotlight on scientific malpractice, and
raises questions on how scientists should operate in the future. From
the outset, however, their cause was not helped by the mute response of
the CRU and UEA. "Silence sounded like guilt", says Pearce.
Before getting into the main part of the story,
Pearce gives some interesting background to the beginnings of climate
science from the predictions of a new ice age in the 1940s-70s. The CRU
was established in 1972. Phil Jones, the central player in the email
controversy, joined it in 1976 (aged 24). He became CRU joint director
in 1998, its sole director in 2004.
An important date in the recognition of global
warming as a serious threat was October 1985. In Villach, Austria, 89
scientists from 23 countries discussed the role of greenhouse gases.
They met as individuals. This was important, above all for those from
the US, usually held on a tight leash by the Reagan administration.
After six days they signed a declaration recognising "substantial
warming", "attributable to human activities".
In 1988, global warming grabbed the world’s
attention during a drought in the US. By the end of the year, scientists
had persuaded the UN to let them establish the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess "the scientific, technical and
socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of
human-induced climate change". It was intended as a body of scientists.
The Reagan administration, however, opposed this and lobbied for the
creation of an inter-governmental body.
Playing hockey at the IPCC
NONETHELESS, FOR OVER a decade, the IPCC set the
agenda, though not without controversy at times. Pearce details the
flawed way it operates. Drawing up IPCC reports, for example, is a messy
business. The chapters are drafted by scientists. Government
representatives meet to agree the summary. If there are any
discrepancies, the chapters have to be changed. Clearly, this is not the
fault of the scientists. But it does not merely reflect a compromised
balance between them and policy-makers. In fact, it reflects the
inability of capitalist powers – based as they are on a profit-driven
system of competition between corporations and nation states – to
achieve genuinely open, international cooperation.
The summary to the IPCC’s third climate assessment,
published in 2001, included the famous ‘hockey stick’ image – the
horizontal shaft turning upwards into the blade as temperatures rise
abruptly. It had previously featured on the cover of a World
Meteorological Organisation report in 1999. One of the key difficulties
in global warming research is that thermometer records are available for
only 160 years. To go back further in time, therefore, requires looking
at other data, known as proxies, from which temperatures are estimated.
The scientists who came up with the hockey stick were led by Mike Mann,
physicist turned paleoclimatologist at Penn State University since 2004.
There are dangers in mapping temperatures from proxy
data. For instance, tree-ring records, the main component in the hockey
stick, sometimes reflect changes in moisture rather than temperature. To
fill in some gaps and help create a global picture, Mann had included a
tree-ring series from central China and a data set from pre-1400
bristlecone pines in the US. Both are regarded as potentially
unreliable. The CRU emails show that there had been debate among
scientists in September 1999 on whether the hockey stick should be
included in the IPCC summary – the only part of the report most people
outside of the scientific community read.
Despite the liberties Mann may have taken in his
hockey-stick research, however, other studies, using different
statistical techniques or combinations of proxy records, have produced
broadly similar patterns. This includes studies of hundreds of wells and
deep boreholes worldwide. These looked at how fast changes in
temperatures at the surface conduct downwards. On each continent
temperatures warmed faster during the 20th century than in any of the
previous four. Almost all the studies support the main claim in the IPCC
summary: that the 1990s was probably the warmest decade globally for
1,000 years.
Another contentious issue was the effect of
urbanisation. Cities are warmer than surrounding areas. As a rapidly
growing economy, China became the focus of attention. Some argued that
this urbanisation could affect global warming to a much greater degree
than was being recognised by Jones and others.
In 2008, Jones returned to this subject in a paper
for the Journal of Geophysical Research, looking at more than 700
weather stations in eastern China. He found that the urban heat
phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming in the area between
1951 and 2004 – the period from the 1980s marking the fastest urban
growth. Jones’s revised work may also apply in other
fast-industrialising countries, like India and Brazil. It also shows
that it was correct to draw attention to the urban heat effect.
It would be wrong, however, to conclude that this
changes the global picture of temperature trends to any great extent.
Two-thirds of the planet is covered by ocean, far from urban influence,
and they are warming, too. But, as Pearce says, "to ignore it is sloppy
science". And it had been dismissed by many climate scientists for a
number of years, apparently because it did not fit their model.
Blocking tactics
QUESTIONS HAVE BEEN asked about the influence
exerted by leading scientists on the publication of material through the
peer review system – where papers are reviewed anonymously by other
experts in the field before publication. The scientists at the centre of
Climategate say that they are safeguarding standards in scientific
literature by rejecting bad science. But there are real dangers of
conflicts of interest with this process.
In March 2004, Jones emailed Mann saying that he had
"recently rejected two papers from people saying CRU has it wrong over
[20th-century data from weather stations in] Siberia. Went to town in
both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very
surprised…"
Another example concerns a paper by David Douglass,
an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, New York, and John
Christy, of the University of Alabama. They analysed temperature data
from US satellites which, they said, did not confirm what climate-change
models were predicting. In 2006, Ben Santer, climate modeller at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, and linked to CRU,
received a copy for peer review. He criticised it harshly, saying it
contained "serious scientific flaws". The paper was not printed.
Douglass produced a new version which was published,
without peer review, on the International Journal of Climatology website
in December 2007. Douglass said it presented "an inconvenient truth"
about climate change: "Human-produced greenhouse gases are not
responsible for global warming". Fox News reported it and the right-wing
Heartland Institute adopted its argumentation.
However, Douglass’s statistical analysis was shown
to have been incorrect. Pearce explains the somewhat detailed reasons
for this before moving onto the central allegation. Santer could do
nothing about the online publication. But he exerted his influence to
ensure that its publication in scientific journals was delayed until he
had been able to redo much of Douglass’s analysis using the correct
statistical techniques and write up his findings.
As Pearce points out – as he does on numerous
occasions – the available evidence shows that Santer was right about the
science. Douglass’s work did, indeed, contain serious flaws. To date,
his criticisms have not been challenged by Douglass. Nonetheless,
although Santer denies that he and his colleagues conspired to hold back
the publication of the Douglass paper, the emails strongly suggest
otherwise. At the time, however, Douglass received all the publicity.
The leaked emails reveal repeated attempts by Jones
and others at CRU to block freedom of information (FoI) requests. They
were clearly frustrated at the time it was taking to deal with the huge
numbers they were bombarded with. As far as they were concerned, these
requests were being made solely to disrupt their work and further the
climate-change sceptics’ agenda. They could well have been correct in
that assessment. But is that justification for their actions?
Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes
it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent
intentionally the disclosure of requested information. The Information
Commissioner’s office (ICO) felt that UEA had not handled FoI requests
correctly, and said that the only reason it did not take legal action
was because the statute of limitations, set at six months, had elapsed.
Jones and co also hid behind confidentiality agreements between
individuals and organisations.
There was a siege mentality taking hold. And, in the
run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks in December 2009, CRU scientists
were getting increasingly jittery.
Sceptical overdrive
A BIG QUESTION remains: who was the leaker or
hacker? Three main groups remain suspect: UEA dissidents; people acting
for a corporation or state, maybe to influence the Copenhagen talks;
bloggers hostile to CRU. It could even be that mismanagement of the CRU
server had made the information publicly available accidentally.
There were three stages to the publication of the
large zip file on the internet. Each could have been done by different
people. Firstly, the assembly of 4,660 files, some of them dating back
to 1991. Secondly, the copying, which took place mainly on 30 September,
10 October and 16 November 2009. Thirdly, the distribution. According to
Pearce, it "was done in a reasonably sophisticated manner" as files were
loaded onto the ‘open proxies’ favoured by hackers to cover their
tracks, involving servers in four countries.
Suffice it to say, they made it onto a number of
websites, went round the world and caused a sensation. Climate-change
sceptics have made the most of it. One of the most-quoted extracts is
from Jones in 1999. In it, he says he will use "Mike’s Nature trick" to
"hide the decline". The phrase has been spun as an attempt to stop the
truth getting out that global temperatures had levelled out in the first
decade of the 21st century.
Republican and Tea Party wild cannon, Sarah Palin,
denounced the emailers as a "highly politicised scientific circle" who
"manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures"
(Washington Post, 9 December 2009). That particular email from Jones,
however, had been sent in 1999. The previous year had been the warmest
year in the warmest decade on record – so there was no decline to hide.
Again, the sceptics’ attitude was clear: don’t let the truth get in the
way of a good headline.
The decline referred to the apparent drop in
temperatures according to an analysis of tree rings. Up to around 1960,
tree rings correlated well with changes in temperature. That has changed
in the past half century – no one is certain why, although there are a
few theories being worked on. The ‘trick’ was the technique used by Mann
in his hockey stick paper in Nature in 1998. That made it possible to
merge tree-ring data from earlier times with more recent thermometer
data. All Jones was doing was explaining what he had done in the paper.
In the US, the campaign was revived to overturn a
2007 declaration by the American Physical Society that evidence of
man-made climate change was "incontrovertible". In Britain, Lord Lawson
launched the Global Warming Policy Foundation to "bring reason,
integrity and balance" to the debate – in same way he attacked Britain’s
workers as Thatcher’s chancellor, perhaps. Most of its trustees and
advisers are recognised climate sceptics. Lawson refuses to say who
funds the organisation – and, as a private concern, it is not subject to
FoI legislation.
On the defensive
THE RESPONSE BY the UEA and CRU to the release of
the emails was a public relations disaster. There was an initial
denunciation of the supposed hackers, but complete silence over what had
been revealed. UEA staff were instructed not to talk to the media. The
response of most environmental groups was even more muted. They kept
their heads down. It left the field open for sceptics to dominate the
discussion and they made the most of it. It was not until February,
three months later, that Jones and others began to surface.
Changes in procedure at the IPCC had been noted well
before Climategate. The IPCC report in 2007 was notably cautious.
Previously accused of hyping up the science, the summary’s authors
downplayed it this time. There was no mention of the possible collapse
of the Greenland ice sheet, rapid melting in Antarctica, a shutdown of
the Gulf Stream or the release of greenhouse gases from the soil, ocean
bed or permafrost.
Then came the complete failure of the Copenhagen
talks at the end of 2009, followed swiftly by controversy over the claim
that the Himalayan glacier could melt away by 2035. That was simply
wrong. Some scientists had questioned the claim before it was published,
but it found its way into the IPCC report anyway. There were other
discrepancies between the summary and chapters. The result has been a
gradual erosion of the reputation of the IPCC to the point where it is
now severely damaged, maybe irreparably so.
The political plates had shifted. The answer of many
in the environmental movement to global warming is to make individuals
pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with increased taxes, etc.
This lets the big corporations off the hook and hits working- and
middle-class people hardest. The ground has been left open for
right-wing, corporate, climate-change sceptics because of the lack of a
coherent alternative being put forward. Such an alternative would
require the rational planning of production, distribution and resources.
That is impossible under capitalism. It would require genuinely
democratic, economic planning in a socialist system. The sceptics have
become increasingly confident. And, as the financial crisis began to
develop – and since the recession has begun to bite hard – their
position has been consolidated further.
Who’s asking the questions?
THREE ACADEMIC REVIEWS and a parliamentary inquiry
were launched into Climategate. None of them showed the CRU in a good
light. Scientific bodies, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry and the
Royal Statistical Society, criticised the CRU for its misconduct.
Jones admitted that it was not standard CRU practice
to publish all data and methods: "Maybe it should be, but it’s not".
When he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers asked for
details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes, he answered:
"They’ve never asked". Pearce laments: "The rigour of peer review came
crashing down before our eyes".
Science relies on producing findings that others
test out. Climate science, reliant as it is on complicated modelling and
projections, can be difficult to replicate. That is one reason that
sceptics have felt able to claim that bad science has proliferated. It
is also why there have been increasing demands for the release of raw
data. On the other hand, it is also why researchers, who have sometimes
spent decades assembling masses of data, can be reluctant to hand it
over to those they perceive to be, and who very often are, opposed to
the theories of human-induced global warming.
Some of the most vocal sceptics have clear agendas.
As Pearce writes: "The scientific sceptics are few in number but the
power often lies with the people from this political end of the spectrum
– the fossil fuel companies and right-wing think-tanks and newspaper
proprietors – who are keen to publish their views". Many of them fit
"the stereotype of right-wing attack dogs", he says. Pearce also speaks
of "a new breed of critic", "amateur scientific sleuths driven more by
curiosity and healthy scepticism for received wisdom". Mann is
unconvinced: "I think what is happening is the anti-science machine
industry has fully exploited the resources made available by the
worldwide web. I would imagine that much of what might appear to an
outsider to be organic, to be grassroots, is actually connected, funded,
manned by those connected with the climate change denial movement".
Inbuilt systemic secrecy
WHAT IS CERTAIN is that the global reach of the
internet has opened up new, vast areas of widely accessible information,
and that people are prepared to use it. Ultimately, it is up to the
‘scientific community’ to come to terms with that. But how far is it
possible to open up access to data, especially in a capitalist system?
In this system, for obvious reasons, private
companies jealously guard research projects, secreted away behind
business confidentiality. The public sector is also affected. As a
direct consequence of Climategate, Britain’s Meteorological Office
boasted that it was making a load of data ‘publicly available’. It
transpired that much of it was old data already accessible via the World
Meteorological Organisation. In fact, one of the CRU’s tightest
confidentiality agreements was with the Met Office. This was confirmed
by a Met Office spokesman, who said that it has "to offset our costs for
the benefit of the taxpayer, so we have to balance that against freedom
of access".
Meanwhile, the vested military and economic
interests of competing nation states are protected under official
secrets acts. To genuinely open up scientific research and ensure real
cooperation would require an end to such inbuilt secrecy. As mentioned
earlier, that would require fundamental, systemic (socialist) change.
The biggest danger arising from Climategate is that
the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. The logic of the sceptics’
position is that we do not need to curb greenhouse gas emissions. There
is a legitimate discussion to be had on the extent of their impact.
However, the vast majority of scientific study backs the view that a
combination of human and natural phenomena could bring about potentially
cataclysmic events in the next decade or so. That is a key issue we must
not lose sight of.
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