Do the University of East Anglia "Hacked" Emails Show Global Warming Isn't Real?
The short answer is (a) global warming is real, regardless of what the email may say, and (b) it's not clear that the authors of that email did anything illegitimate.
Global warming is a fact. Arctic ice is melting, and the average temperature of the atmosphere has been increasing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (about 1750) -- to the best of our knowledge, at a rate 100 times the rate before 1750. These changes can be measured directly, and no one who can read a thermometer disputes any of them.
The global warming hypothesis is a well substantiated explanation of the cause of global warming. The hypothesis says that the human production of "greenhouse gases" such as carbon dioxide (produced by the burning of carbon-based fuels such as gasoline, natural gas, coal, and wood) is the cause of most of the global warming we have seen since about 1750. To mitigate these changes, proponents of the global warming hypothesis typically recommend that humans drastically reduce their use of carbon-based fuels.
Some scientists disagree with parts of the global warming hypothesis or with recommendations about what we should do. The views of these skeptics tend to take on one of two forms:
a. Global warming, though real, is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Earth has been much warmer, and much colder, than it is now, and will be both in sometime in the future, these critics argue. No technology we know, or even practically imagine, could control these conditions. Under any of those conditions, human life as we know it would be impossible. We're doomed to natural large-scale climate change eventually, the argument goes, and the changes we are seeing now are tiny in comparison. Why get upset, when humankind will disappear anyway?
No proponent of the global warming hypothesis disputes whether Earth has been, and likely will be, inhospitable to human life. The remainder of the argument above, however, is a kind of fatalism -- the view that because we can't affect what happens to us in the long run, we should just resign ourselves now to the outcome.
Fatalism doesn't stand the test of common sense. Either fatalism is correct, or it isn't. If it isn't, but we act as if it were, we can become victims of our own self-filling prophesies. If fatalism is correct, it doesn't matter what we do, so we might as well act as if it were false, if for no other reason than that it makes us feel better.
b. It's not clear that temperature estimates prior to about 1750, which are based on proxies such as tree-ring growth and temperatures of ice cores, are reliable enough to compare to the temperature observations since 1750. But if that is so, they argue, we don't know enough to blame human activities for causing global warming.
Taken at face, this argument seems reasonable. However, at least two things can be said about it.
First, although the uncertainties in temperature proxies such as tree-rings and ice-core temperatures are greater than the uncertainties in direct thermometer readings of the kind we have from the mid-20th century to the present, the trend of the average temperature indicated by these proxies is consistent. The skeptics do not dispute this long-term trend.
Second, large computer models of the climate continue to successfully predict the specific rise in average temperature as a function of specific greenhouse gas concentrations. The best of these models are used throughout the world, are based strictly on well established scientific theories and direct measurements of the climate. They are constantly subjected to intense international scrutiny. Most importantly, they do not depend on the accuracy of temperature estimates for times prior to about 1750.
What about the email? Here's what we know. A few thousand emails from a climate research center at the University of East Anglia (UEA, in Great Britain) were recently "hacked" and put on the internet by people who claim the emails show that the researchers were "hiding" or "doctoring" data that does not support the global warming hypothesis.
On even casual inspection of these emails, which are available to anyone who wants to see them, there is no evidence that anyone hid or doctored anything. The University of East Anglia itself has chartered an independent investigation of the emails; that investigation is still ongoing.
For further information, see http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf.
Global warming is a fact. Arctic ice is melting, and the average temperature of the atmosphere has been increasing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (about 1750) -- to the best of our knowledge, at a rate 100 times the rate before 1750. These changes can be measured directly, and no one who can read a thermometer disputes any of them.
The global warming hypothesis is a well substantiated explanation of the cause of global warming. The hypothesis says that the human production of "greenhouse gases" such as carbon dioxide (produced by the burning of carbon-based fuels such as gasoline, natural gas, coal, and wood) is the cause of most of the global warming we have seen since about 1750. To mitigate these changes, proponents of the global warming hypothesis typically recommend that humans drastically reduce their use of carbon-based fuels.
Some scientists disagree with parts of the global warming hypothesis or with recommendations about what we should do. The views of these skeptics tend to take on one of two forms:
a. Global warming, though real, is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Earth has been much warmer, and much colder, than it is now, and will be both in sometime in the future, these critics argue. No technology we know, or even practically imagine, could control these conditions. Under any of those conditions, human life as we know it would be impossible. We're doomed to natural large-scale climate change eventually, the argument goes, and the changes we are seeing now are tiny in comparison. Why get upset, when humankind will disappear anyway?
No proponent of the global warming hypothesis disputes whether Earth has been, and likely will be, inhospitable to human life. The remainder of the argument above, however, is a kind of fatalism -- the view that because we can't affect what happens to us in the long run, we should just resign ourselves now to the outcome.
Fatalism doesn't stand the test of common sense. Either fatalism is correct, or it isn't. If it isn't, but we act as if it were, we can become victims of our own self-filling prophesies. If fatalism is correct, it doesn't matter what we do, so we might as well act as if it were false, if for no other reason than that it makes us feel better.
b. It's not clear that temperature estimates prior to about 1750, which are based on proxies such as tree-ring growth and temperatures of ice cores, are reliable enough to compare to the temperature observations since 1750. But if that is so, they argue, we don't know enough to blame human activities for causing global warming.
Taken at face, this argument seems reasonable. However, at least two things can be said about it.
First, although the uncertainties in temperature proxies such as tree-rings and ice-core temperatures are greater than the uncertainties in direct thermometer readings of the kind we have from the mid-20th century to the present, the trend of the average temperature indicated by these proxies is consistent. The skeptics do not dispute this long-term trend.
Second, large computer models of the climate continue to successfully predict the specific rise in average temperature as a function of specific greenhouse gas concentrations. The best of these models are used throughout the world, are based strictly on well established scientific theories and direct measurements of the climate. They are constantly subjected to intense international scrutiny. Most importantly, they do not depend on the accuracy of temperature estimates for times prior to about 1750.
What about the email? Here's what we know. A few thousand emails from a climate research center at the University of East Anglia (UEA, in Great Britain) were recently "hacked" and put on the internet by people who claim the emails show that the researchers were "hiding" or "doctoring" data that does not support the global warming hypothesis.
On even casual inspection of these emails, which are available to anyone who wants to see them, there is no evidence that anyone hid or doctored anything. The University of East Anglia itself has chartered an independent investigation of the emails; that investigation is still ongoing.
For further information, see http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf.
Comment
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Comment by Jack K. Horner on January 13, 2010 at 9:21am -
In the case of the emails, the appropriate standard of evidence is whether we could convict the authors of the email (selectively extracted below, without attribution to the several sites on the Web on which it can be found) of fraud on the basis of those emails alone. Despite the claims of that commentary from the Web, the emails simply won't convict anyone of fraud.
The emails are certainly reason to launch a deeper, independent investigation, and UEA has done just that, as noted in the blog.
To be sure, those emails show pettiness, paranoia, and petulance. None of these is pretty, but they are not fraud.
Prior to writing the original blog, I read the mail reproduced below and electronically scanned the entire archive using as many keywords as I could extract from selections shown below. That scan reveals no more than the passages shown below.
As for the Arctic sea ice issue, the issue can be decided only by looking at the *trend over a decade or more* of data, and be more precise, it takes about a century of ice data to see the general trend. Two years of data tells us nothing by itself -- there are variations in the sea ice cover from year to year. The IPCC link, shown in the blog, puts the trend in perspective.
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