Climategate: Theft and Illegal Publication of Data Followed by Mass Media Defamation of Scientists

In late November 2009, this data, stolen from a server at the University of East Anglia, was posted to a Russian FTP server. It includes 1,073 e-mails and over 150 megabytes of data, all pertaining to the work of the Climatic Research Unit, a premiere institution for climate science worldwide. Official investigations have subsequently cleared Dr. Michael Mann, Dr. Phil Jones, and the entire Climatic Research Unit -- in summary, all involved scientists are innocent of all wrongdoing allegedly "revealed" in the stolen data, a fact covered with much less enthusiasm by most of the mainstream press than the original seeming controversy, despite the fact that the controversy has now been proved to have been based completely on falsehoods. Of course, that should never have been a surprise to anybody since the one thing known from the start was that the whole story was literally based on an act of theft. But assuming that the thieves had some good reason, if only the corporate media could find it, made for more sensational headlines and probably slightly higher sales.

The corporate media reported that "leaked" or "hacked" e-mails suggested scientists had fudged data and committed various offenses against other scientists, who are skeptical of global warming. What really happened is quite different. First and foremost, data were stolen from University of East Anglia, not leaked and no "whistle blower" has come forward to explain why he or she stole and illegally published the data. Besides remaining anonymous, posting the stolen data to an FTP server favored by criminals in the first place is also inconsistent with the "whistle blower" claim, because a real whistle blower would have given the data to wikileaks.org for publication and eventual reporting by the press, or to a mainstream, legitimate climate reporter directly, such as Fred Pearce of The Guardian or Richard Black of BBC. Instead, amateur 'bloggers got access to the data before professional reporters had time to examine what the e-mails actually said, so amateur 'bloggers and climate denier hacks like James Delingpole and Anthony Watts set the narrative before their lies could even be checked by any responsible reporters. Real whistle blowers are defined largely by their motive, which is to tell the truth, but the manner in which the stolen East Anglia data were reported prevented the truth from being told. The police are still investigating the theft as a crime, and, at last report, Russia's FSB, the new KGB, are the primary suspects.

Due to the rampant blogosphere chatter about the stolen data, the negligent media habit of "covering the controversy" and plain laziness, the media clamored to all reach the same conclusions from a few phrases, picked by climate denial 'bloggers from 1,073 separate e-mails and 150 megabytes of data, for the ability of those snippets to imply controversy, not for their relevance to the state of climate science. The interpretations presented seemed reasonable at the time to many who are not full-time climate scientists, because of the excerpts that were reported and the context which the reporting implied, but the reporters' choice to use those excerpts from all the data they had, was certainly not reasonable, nor accurate, and probably is libelous unless they're completely scientifically incompetent. Now, I'll examine each of the "smoking gun" phrases and compare how they were reported, what they really mean in scientific terms, and most importantly, how much effort was necessary to determine what the scientists were actually talking about in each case, which will prove that the press abjectly failed to do its job.

"Hide The Decline"

There is no decline that any scientist would want to hide. Cherry-picking a few years of temperature data to try to show cooling is a very old trick, which all competent climate scientists and all honest climate science journalists know is bunk. The Sun's output varies over cycles of 9-14 years, and from the peak of those cycles to their nadirs climate science predicts minor declines such as can be detected if one starts measuring from a record hot year, such as 1998. The tired claim of a short-term temperature decline is so often repeated that every conscientious climate reporter already knows that temperature trends require decades to establish, and would discard out of hand the silly nonsense that pervaded the media, that Dr. Phil Jones was talking about a way to "hide the decline" in temperatures since 1998. That is a minor, known decline, which does not contradict the predictions nor the observations, of a much greater warming trend since about 1970.

Now, let's see what work is required to get to the truth, without referring to subsequent reporting, that is, to get to the truth using only records that were available in November 2009, the day the stolen data were made available. First, the "controversial" excerpt: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick ... to hide the decline." First, the entire sentence reads "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" and the phrase "adding in the real temps" should strongly suggest to anybody familiar with the techniques of climate science that the "trick" was a mathematical method of temperature reconstruction.

Now consider a hypothetical climate reporter who really doesn't get the science, but does know the big names of climate science. Before very long, such a climate reporter should have supposed that the "Mike" who Dr. Jones meant is Michael Mann, who without a doubt is the biggest name in climate science. (Not climate policy, that's Al Gore. In climate science, it's Michael Mann, hands down.) Now, suppose that this diligent, scientifically mediocre science reporter (or climate reporter or environment reporter, etc.) knows only that the quote involves Michael Mann, and a quote about some "decline" which might be controversial, or might be just a harmless discussion of technicalities, beyond the reporter's understanding. The easiest way to start to check is to search Google Scholar for "Michael Mann decline." This very simplistic search reveals that another author named Michael Mann is an accomplished political scientist, but near the bottom of the first page of results is a paper on which the climatologist Michael Mann is the third listed author. Then text-searching that document for the word "decline" takes the reader to section 4, which clearly discusses a decline in the quality of temperature proxies. By itself this is not conclusive, but the point is that this minimal effort would have put any diligent reporter onto a line of inquiry toward what we now absolutely know is the truth which is that "the decline" is a decline in the responsiveness of certain tree rings, which makes them poor temperature proxies after 1960, and the "trick" is to apply a sort of weighted average which reduces the weight given to known-bad data, and of course one is supposed to "hide" bad data in science, not just mix it up like toxic mortgages into AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities.

A half day of hard work by any reporter, not necessarily even one with any particular background in science, should have been enough to get the story right within one day after the story "broke." Instead, the corporate media got the story wrong for months, pretending the stolen data showed a conspiracy among scientists to fake global warming, or suggested a conspiracy, or implied some climate scientists interfered with the proper peer review process, none of which is true nor even remotely supportable by any real evidence as proven by official investigations that have cleared Michael Mann, Dr. Phil Jones, and all climate researchers at the Climatic Research Unit of all accusations. But after the months that those deliberate investigations required, The Story was too "cold" for front page corrections of the events that the same papers got wrong, on their front pages, for weeks. It turns out that they never had any excuse to have gotten it so wrong in the first place, and it's a travesty that they did.

"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, there is no "lack of warming" of the globe, nor any "lack of warming" of any kind that climate scientists ever tried to hide. Because global warming is caused by radiative forcing by CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, when global warming was established as the scientific consensus decades ago, we started comparing incoming radiation from the Sun to outgoing "longwave" radiation to confirm that heat is being trapped. And indeed, it is, but the satellite data show a wider discrepancy than even our direct measurements of temperature record. It so happens that we do know most of the heat that we have measured is stored in the oceans and we know that we have not been taking measurements deeper than 2000 meters. So, the thermal energy which satellite measurements tell us must be on Earth somewhere, but which we have been unable to detect, must be somewhere that we have not measured, and logically, the first place to look is in the one place we know we're unable to measure. And Kevin Trenberth considers it "a travesty that we can't" get equipment that measures ocean temperatures deeper than 2000 meters.

Now, let's re-consider the same hypothetical climate reporter who really doesn't get the science, but does know the big names of climate science. Now, instead of making this poor fool figure out the context of the one cherry-picked phrase, let's be more realistic and recognize that he or she would have downloaded the stolen data, not rely on other media's reporting of just the one phrase.

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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

So, the corporate media who reported the story knew that this e-mail by Kevin Trenberth referred to the lack of direct measurements of warming based on CERES (satellite) measurements and not to the lack of warming occurring, just by reading the e-mail, which, having been stolen, is and was easily available. But even a journalist unwilling to download stolen files from a strange server, but interested in getting their facts straight knew from others' reporting that the author of this e-mail is Kevin Trenberth and that the seemingly "controversial" phrase was missing heat, so obviously, the correct search for any legitimate use of that phrase in his previous research would have been http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=trenberth+missing+heat and that would have taken any scrupulous reporter to "Using atmospheric budgets as a constraint on surface fluxes" by Trenberth in 1997, "Earth's annual global mean energy budget" by Kiehl and Trenberth in 1997, and many other papers, all or most of which deal both with satellite measurements of incoming and outgoing radiation energy, and direct temperature measurements, and comparing the two quantities.

So, just like the "hide the decline" phrase that we now all know was reported untruthfully, reporters have no excuse for having gotten "it's a travesty" wrong, not even the day the story broke. It's much too easy to get the story right to believe that any professional "journalist" got it wrong by accident. No, they intentionally fabricated a controversy to sell papers.

COMMENT POLICY is simple.

1. Make your grammar and spelling respectable.
2. If you're asking me a question, ask your questions the smart way.
3. If you're arguing, do so civilly, and support your argument with original, authoritative sources of fact -- meaning peer reviewed science and official records -- not with op-eds. When I want Anthony Watts' opinion, or Roger Pielke, Jr's or Steve McIntyre's, I'll give it to them!

Radiation: What Makes Some Gases Greenhouse Gases

Electrons orbit the nuclei of atoms at specific "orbitals" which each correspond to an "energy level" meaning that for any electron to gain energy, it must move to a higher energy level and to lose energy, it must move to a lower energy level. Each element and each molecule has only certain energy levels available, and so an electron orbiting any nucleus can only go from its current level to one of the other available levels. The differences between different pairs of energy levels restrict atoms and molecules to gaining and losing energy only in particular quantities, a fact known to be so fundamental to the structure of the universe that a major branch of physics, quantum mechanics, takes its name from these distinct quantities of energy gain and energy loss.

Now, if you think that the Law of Conservation of Energy means that an electron cannot just gain energy or lose energy, then good! You're absolutely right. To go to a higher energy level the the electron has to get energy from its environment, and when an electron loses energy, that energy does not just cease to be, it has to go somewhere. We can't say where the energy will end up, but we do know exactly how it has to leave, and that is as a photon, aka, electromagnetic radiation. That's right, "aka" meaning "also known as" meaning that a photon is exactly the same thing as electromagnetic radiation. This is the infamous "wave/particle duality" of quantum mechanics, which some people find fascinating in its own right, but which is not central to The Greenhouse Theory. What is important to know about this for climate science is that changes in energy must occur in distinct quantities which are unique for each substance, and those energy level changes cause (or are caused by) emission (or absorption) of photons having the exact same amount of energy, and the quantity of energy per photon corresponds to a wavelength of electromagnetic radiation (some frequencies of which are visible, and called light).

This, finally, brings us to what makes some gases greenhouse gases. A range of per-photon energies just slightly less than that of visible red light, called the infrared range or infrared spectrum, also cause atoms and molecules to vibrate at frequencies corresponding to heat when infrared photons are absorbed. Likewise, warm gases that cannot emit infrared, stay warm. No molecules are unable to emit photons at any infrared wavelengths, but methane (CH₄), carbon dioxide (CO₂), water (H₂O) and all other greenhouse gases have "bands" within the infrared spectrum in which they do not emit electromagnetic radiation, making these molecules less able (not totally unable) to lose heat. That is what makes some gases "greenhouse gases."

COMMENT POLICY is simple.

1. Make your grammar and spelling respectable.
2. If you're asking me a question, ask your questions the smart way.
3. If you're arguing, do so civilly, and support your argument with original, authoritative sources of fact -- meaning peer reviewed science and official records -- not with op-eds. When I want Anthony Watts' opinion, or Roger Pielke, Jr's or Steve McIntyre's, I'll give it to them!

Heat Transfer: The Cause of Weather And Climate

Heat is a form of energy -- "thermal energy" -- so according to the Law of Conservation of Energy, it cannot be created nor destroyed, only converted from other forms of energy and transferred from one mass to another. First, here are some examples of conversion of energy from various other forms into thermal energy, and vice versa. Combustion (burning) wood, coal or gasoline converts chemical energy (the bonds holding together atoms of the chemicals being burned) into thermal energy, and in the interior of the Sun nuclear energy (much stronger bonds holding sub-atomic particles together as atoms) is converted into thermal energy (as well as light and electromagnetic radiation at many invisible wavelengths). Friction causes mechanical energy to be converted to thermal energy, and by containing the combustion of gasoline in pressurized cylinders with a movable piston in cars' engines, thermal energy is converted to mechanical energy, on such a scale that this website had to be created. Besides conversion of other forms of energy into heat, an object (or mass) can acquire heat from another warm object or mass by heat transfer, which has three modes. The most familiar mode of heat transfer (with the least familiar name!) is conduction. When you put ice on an injury, you do it to cool the injury, but the way that happens is by heat conduction, the transfer of thermal energy from the warmer object to the colder one, which is always how heat conduction works. So you're "really" heating the ice, not cooling a sprained ankle. Conduction also occurs in gases and liquids, not just solid objects. When cold water and hot water mix in a tub or sink to make lukewarm water, the mixture reaches a uniform temperature by conduction. (Anybody who takes milk in their coffee or tea, or has separate "hot" and "cold" taps, knows that stirring accelerates the process of reaching a uniform temperature, but it only does so by causing more hot and cold portions of the mixture to come into thermal contact with one another sooner. Either way, all that happens thermally is heat transfer by conduction.) Warm air from a heating duct causes the temperature in a cold room to increase, also by conduction. An important point about conduction is that conduction always causes heat to be transferred from the warmer mass to the colder, so that given enough time, a perfectly insulated system with no way of gaining or losing heat would always reach a uniform temperature, between the initial temperatures of the masses within it. So, for example, putting an ice cube in a glass of warm water will always cool the water and melt the ice. An ice cube at 31°F or 32°F is hundreds of degrees above Absolute Zero, meaning that if it could lose all its heat, that would be enough thermal energy to boil several ounces of warm water (if that water was initially near but slightly below the boiling point). Nobody is ever surprised that an ice cube cannot cause water to boil, but it's worth mentioning this to extend our vague intuition to the specific statement that thermal conduction is the transfer of heat between two objects or masses in contact, always from the warmer to the colder. Another mode of heat transfer is radiation, which is explained in Radiation: What Makes Some Gases Greenhouse Gases. In short, radiation is the transfer of thermal energy by the release of a photon whose wavelength is in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. That leaves only one more mode of heat transfer, convection, which is simply and accurately defined by the phrase "hot air rises." The reason it does is that hot air has higher pressure, which means that it has more tendency to spread out ("expand" in physics terminology). Spreading the same amount of mass over more space makes it less dense, so whenever cold air is above hot, the denser cold air falls down, forcing the hot air up. True story! Of course, in nature, it's a little more interesting than a block of cold air right on top of a block of hot air. Instead, when masses of air with significant temperature difference come into contact, they begin to mix, and the warmer air from one front rises above the cold air from the other front along the boundary between the warm front and the cold front, forming a slanted, ramp-like inclined boundary between the masses, called a thermocline. The cold mass then slides along below the mass of warm air, causing the winds we experience, which are basically all horizontal, or close enough that they feel perfectly horizontal, especially at ground level. Now you know how its inability to emit certain wavelengths of infrared radiation makes CO₂ trap thermal energy, and you know enough about how heat is transferred around physical systems to start to seriously examine both the observed and predicted results of adding more CO₂ to the atmosphere. The Earth's tilt, rotation, and orbit around the Sun are responsible for weather variations known as days and nights and seasons, and other more subtle drivers are responsible for multi-year cycles like El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, but the key to understanding them all is the transfer of thermal energy. And of course, adding thermal energy, or to be more exact preventing thermal energy from leaving, will of course effect how heat is transferred around the rest of the Earth's climate system. With these principles of physics in mind, a key to common acronyms at your fingertips, and a significant* effort, you will no longer need to depend on others to summarize climate science for you. You can read and understand the original research, and I think I can answer any questions you have. More to the point, I can show you how to find the answers for yourself. * Honestly, it's going to take quite a lot of effort. I think I can make it possible for just about anybody to understand the original scientific reports on climate science but I have no delusions of making it easy. It's difficult for me and it's not easy for the pros on the front lines of original research. Okay?

COMMENT POLICY is simple.

1. Make your grammar and spelling respectable.
2. If you're asking me a question, ask your questions the smart way.
3. If you're arguing, do so civilly, and support your argument with original, authoritative sources of fact -- meaning peer reviewed science and official records -- not with op-eds. When I want Anthony Watts' opinion, or Roger Pielke, Jr's or Steve McIntyre's, I'll give it to them!

Just the Facts of Climate Science

This site was initially motivated by the theft of climate scientists' data which was reported throughout the corporate media, without any fact-checking, as "climategate" but this should quickly become an accessible reference for clarifying all popular misconceptions about climate science, and eventually, about environment and energy policy, too. The organizing principle of this website is that any conversation, from the most basic coordination of plans among friends to a national debate about climate policy, must be based on a shared set of facts, and a shared understanding of how those facts interact to be worthwhile. While the vested financial interests of corporations and their "think" tanks are fair game, the focus will not be on various parties' bias, but on objective facts, how they are proved, and the magnitude of uncertainty of what cannot be absolutely proved, but can be estimated within a well-defined range. One thing we know with absolute certainty is that carbon dioxide causes warming. The best online resource to explain how this came to be known is the historical account by Spencer Weart & American Institute of Physics of the origin of the Greenhouse Gas Theory in the nineteenth century, when scientists found evidence of a past ice age in the fossil record, and began trying to understand what had caused it. It's fascinating, and everybody should read as much of it as you can, but even that resource is likely to be challenging for anybody who is not at least a college physics student. So the first steps are to understand the electromagnetic spectrum and how heat transfer causes weather and climate in enough detail to understand The Greenhouse Theory, without unnecessary jargon.

COMMENT POLICY is simple.

1. Make your grammar and spelling respectable.
2. If you're asking me a question, ask your questions the smart way.
3. If you're arguing, do so civilly, and support your argument with original, authoritative sources of fact -- meaning peer reviewed science and official records -- not with op-eds. When I want Anthony Watts' opinion, or Roger Pielke, Jr's or Steve McIntyre's, I'll give it to them!