Climate-Gate

On November 17, 2009, 1,073 e-mails, sent and received between 1996 and November 2009 by members of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the United Kingdom (UK), were intercepted by hackers. The hackers then attempted to upload it to the Website RealClimate, which notified the CRU of their possible security breach later that day. Two days later, the e-mails began circulating on public Websites, including Wikileaks, and were eventually reported by the mainstream media. This was just a couple of weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change was to begin.

The long correspondence published online primarily consists of a rather informal exchange of comments and information between CRU researchers. However, among these casual e-mails were some that at first glance appeared less neutral, in which researchers talked about data, scientific publications, and recurring rebuttals by oppositional researchers. These e-mails, taken out of context, suggested that CRU researchers were hiding, modifying, or at times even deleting data in order to make climate change seem more evident. Furthermore, they seemed to imply that CRU researchers were obstructing the publication of papers they disagreed with, thus preventing their subsequent consideration by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The main researchers involved were Professor Phil Jones, director of CRU; Keith Briffa, Mike Hulme, and Tim Osborn, all climatology researchers at the UEA. Michael Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and the recipient of many of the leaked e-mails, was involved in the scandal.

Allegations and E-Mails

The allegations leveled against the CRU were based on excerpts of a relatively small set of e-mails. The first and perhaps most serious allegation of data manipulation is based on e-mails such as the one dated November 16, 1999, where Jones writes: “Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm … I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years [from 1981 onward] and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

The second allegation involved the ostensible concealment of data, which is a violation of the Freedom of Information Act. Some of the leaked e-mails suggested that CRU researchers were under continuous pressure to release data, but were apparently unwilling or unable to honor all of the different requests they received. An example of this behavior can be found in the e-mail dated February 2, 2005, where Jones writes to Mann, apparently referring to Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadian researchers who disputed Mann’s and the CRU’s work in a journal essay: “Don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites—you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

The third allegation, that of silencing dissenting research and hindering its publication and consideration by the IPCC, was based on sentences such as the following drawn from an e-mail sent by Phil Jones on July 8, 2004: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”