James Inhofe
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla) is Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The emails in this article are those that have caused the scandal about unethical practices of scientists at and associated with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia, UK. This sampling of emails was compiled by the staff of Senator Inhofe's office. Contact staff are: Matt Dempsey, Matt This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (202) 224-9797; and David Lungren, David This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (202) 224-5642. The Senator's web site is: www.epq.senate.gov/inhofe.
These emails are reproduced in the original, including grammar and punctuation mistakes. In the interest of brevity, these are excerpts of the CRU emails. Go to Appendix A in the report at the senator's web site for more complete reproduction of the emails.
Concealing Data
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re[garding] AR4 [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment -- minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
Phil Jones, Climatic Research Unit (CRU)
Hi Phil,
laughable that CA would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true. I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: *********@*****.com
talk to you later, Mike
Michael Mann, Penn State University
This is the sort of "dirty laundry" one doesn't want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in CRU. I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through GCOS.
Phil Jones, CRU
I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don't pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
From their wording, computer code would be covered by the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act]. My concern was if Sarah is/was still employed by UEA. I guess she could claim that she had only written one tenth of the code and release every tenth line.
Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR [intellectual property rights] to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.
Phil Jones, CRU
Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp [file transfer protocol] 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.
Phil Jones, CRU
PS I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!
Phil Jones, CRU
You likely know that McIntyre will check this one to make sure it hasn't changed since the IPCC close-off date July 2006! Hard copies of the WG1 report from CUP have arrived here today. Ammann/Wahl -- try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.
Phil Jones, CRU
The FOI line we're all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI -- the skeptics have been told this. Even though we (MOHC, CRU/UEA) possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on.
Phil Jones, CRU
I'm hoping that no-one there realizes I have a US DoE grant and have had this (with Tom W.) for the last 25 years.
Phil Jones, CRU
Undermining Peer Review
I think the skeptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo[climatology] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged. I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.
Phil Jones, CRU
This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature." Obviously, they found a solution to that -- take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that "anti-greenhouse" science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Balianas, Soon, and so on). The peer review process is being abused, but proving this would be difficult.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word "perceived" here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts. . . . Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
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!
Phil Jones, CRU
Dear All,
Just a heads up. Apparently, the contrarians now have an "in" with GRL [Geophysical Research Letters]. This guy Saiers has a prior connection w/ the University of Virginia Dept. of Environmental Sciences that causes me some unease. I think we now know how the various Douglass et al papers w/ Michaels and Singer, the Soon et al paper, and now this one have gotten published in GRL, . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
Mike,
This is truly awful. GRL has gone downhill rapidly in recent years. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
I'm not sure that GRL can be seen as an honest broker in these debates anymore, and it is probably best to do an end run around GRL now where possible. They have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so. There is no possible excuse for them publishing all 3 Douglass papers and the Soon et al paper. These were all pure crap. There appears to be a more fundamental problem w/GRL now, unfortunately . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
If the RMS [Royal Meteorological Society] is going to require authors to make ALL data available -- raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations -- I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.
Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
I'm having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I've complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don't get him to back down, I won't be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I'll be resigning from the RMS.
Phil Jones, CRU
Obviously the editor and reviewers need to also be taken to task here.
Kevin Trenberth, UCAR
Manipulating Data
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.
Phil Jones, CRU
I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also unreviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions). . . . but the fact is that in doing so the rules of IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results.
Giorgi Filippo, International Centre for Theoretical Physics
M&M claim that when they used that procedure with a red noise spectrum, it always resulted in a "hockey stick." Is this true? If so, it constitutes a devastating criticism of the approach; if not, it should be refuted.
David Rind, NASA GISS
If we go to a more recent one the anomalies will seem less warm -- I know this makes no sense scientifically, but it gives the skeptics something to go on about!
Phil Jones, CRU
Questioning the "Consensus"
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data" but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.
Keith Briffa, CRU
Bradley still regards the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] as "mysterious" and "very incoherent" (his latest pronouncement to me) based on the available data. Of course he and other members of the MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective, i.e. the cup is not only "half-empty"; it is demonstrably "broken.". . . I just don't want to get into an open critique of the Esper data because it would just add fuel to the MBH attack squad. They tend to work in their own somewhat agenda-filled ways.
Edward Cook, Columbia University
As Tom W. states, there are uncertainties and "difficulties" with our current knowledge of Hemispheric temperature histories and valid criticisms or shortcomings in much of our work. This is the nature of the beast -- and I have been loathe to become embroiled in polarized debates that force too simplistic a presentation of the state of the art or "consensus view."
Keith Briffa, CRU
I have just read the M&M stuff criticizing MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes]. A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work -- an opinion I have held for some time. Presumably what you have done with Keith is better? -- or is it? I get asked about this a lot. Can you give me a brief heads up? Mike [Mann] is too deep into this to be helpful.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
Bottom line -- there is no way the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA [Little Ice Age] period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and variability.
Phil Jones, CRU
. . . given what we know about the ability to reconstruct global or NH [Northern Hemisphere] temperatures in the past -- could we really in good conscience say we have the precision from tree rings and the very sparse other data to make any definitive statement of this nature (let alone accuracy)? While I appreciate the cleverness of the second sentence, the problem is everybody will recognize that we are "being clever" -- at what point does one come out looking aggressively defensive?
David Rind, NASA GISS
I think that trying to adopt a time frame of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP' [Medieval Warm Period], even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back. . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
A Cooling World
I'm still not convinced about the AO recon [Arctic Oscillation reconstruction], and am worried about the late 20th century "coolness" in the proxy recon that's not in the instrumental, but it's a nice piece of work in any case.
Jonathan Overpeck, University of Arizona
There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted.
David Parker, UK Met Office
What an idiot. The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant. . . . IPCC, me and whoever will get accused of being political, whatever we do. As you know, I'm not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish.
Phil Jones, CRU
. . . In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability -- that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the [warming] prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us -- the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.
Mike McCracken, Climate Institute
I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug's paper that said something like -- half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998! . . . I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away. . . . Maybe because I'm in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems a bit over the top re[garding] the cold. Where I've been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk) it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.
Phil Jones, CRU
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.
Kevin Trenberth, UCAR
Subject: LAND vs OCEAN
We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming -- and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
Political Science
"I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same."
Keith Briffa, CRU
In my view, it is the responsibility of our entire community to fight this intentional disinformation campaign, which represents an affront to everything we do and believe in. I'm doing everything I can to do so, but I can't do it alone -- and if I'm left to, we'll lose this battle . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
Apart from my meetings I have skeptics on my back -- still, can't seem to get rid of them. Also the new UK climate scenarios are giving govt ministers the jitters as they don't want to appear stupid when they introduce them (late June ?).
Phil Jones, CRU
As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations . . .
Michael Mann, Penn State University
Frustrations of a CRU Scientist
I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO [meteorological codes] and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.
One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMO codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up -- but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!
Here, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING -- so the correlations aren't so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah -- there is no "supposed," I can make it up. So I have :-)
OH F**K THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a "Master" database of dubious provenance (which, er, they all are and always will be).
So the "duplicated" figure is slightly lower . . . but what's this error with the ".ann" file?! Never seen before. Oh GOD if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite!!
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before my head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections -- to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. *
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." --Thomas Jefferson
