Sorting Through the Stolen UEA Emails

On a second reading of the stolen UAE UEA emails leaked today, and just reading the README file emails, these sound worse than I thought at first – their impact will be devastating.

Much of this is "inside baseball" stuff, but all of us eat that kind of stuff up and form powerful impressions from it. Cardinal Richelieu said

"Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him."

The caveat, of course, is if these emails are accurate. I’ll assume for now that they are.

To be sure, it’s very easy to take nearly any email out of context and use it for ulterior purposes. Of course, the majority of the public doesn’t care about that and wouldn’t understand the context anyway. And to be honest, I really don't either, and neither do you. But that's the problem: we all are tempted to interpret them anyway.

Even trying to guess at the context and keeping it in mind, some of these excerpts are inexplicable. Some seem innocuous. Others seem just scientists being people, gabbing and gossiping and blowing off steam the way we all do.

In what I’ve culled below, the ones in red seem, to me, to be the most damaging (damning?); those in green as scientists being scientists and being naturally skeptical, and those in blue as scientists being simply human.

The red ones strike me as probably devastating. The original release of emails 2 years ago had a significant impact. My guess is that these are going to throw the science off-kilter for perhaps the rest of this decade, and may well lead some people to rethink how they are doing business (including certain journalists). That diversion would be a tragedy, for everyone, because there are still very, very good, scientifically proven reasons to think that humans are altering the climate and this will only get more pronounced in the coming decades.

Troublesome:

<5131> Shukla/IGES:
["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be
willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the
projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and
simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]


<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.


<1611> Carter:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]
Update (11/23/11): I fell into FOIA's trap of taking this excerpt out of context. See my post here.

<4755> Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s
included and what is left out.


<4241> Wilson:

I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I
could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures.
[...] The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is
precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.


<3373> Bradley:

I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should
never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year
“reconstruction”.


<1104> Wanner/NCCR:
In my [IPCC-TAR] review [...] I crit[i]cized [...] the Mann hockey[s]tick [...]
My review was classified “unsignificant” even I inquired several times. Now the
internationally well known newspaper SPIEGEL got the information about these
early statements because I expressed my opinion in several talks, mainly in
Germany, in 2002 and 2003. I just refused to give an exclusive interview to
SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.


<2009> Briffa:
I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of
all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!



<4716> Adams:

Somehow we have to leave the[m] thinking OK, climate change is extremely
complicated, BUT I accept the dominant view that people are affecting it, and
that impacts produces risk that needs careful and urgent attention.


<3062> Jones:
We don’t really want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written
[...] We’ll have to cut out some of his stuff.


<1485> Mann:

the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what
the site [Real Climate] is about.


<2267> Wilson:
Although I agree that GHGs are important in the 19th/20th century (especially
since the 1970s), if the weighting of solar forcing was stronger in the models,
surely this would diminish the significance of GHGs.
[...] it seems to me that by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the
models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from
the sun alone.


<2440> Jones:

I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself
and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the
process.


<2094> Briffa:

UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails]
anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC
task.


Scientists-being-scientists:


<1788> Jones:

There shouldn’t be someone else at UEA with different views [from "recent
extreme weather is due to global warming"] – at least not a climatologist.


<5111> Pollack:

But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.


<0310> Warren:

The results for 400 ppm stabilization look odd in many cases [...] As it stands
we’ll have to delete the results from the paper if it is to be published.


<2775>Jones:
I too don’t see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones certainly will not as we’re choosing the periods to show warming.


<1682> Wils:

[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]


<4693> Crowley:

I am not convinced that the “truth” is always worth reaching if it is at the
cost of damaged personal relationships


<2733> Crowley:

Phil, thanks for your thoughts – guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in
the open.


<2095> Steig:

He’s skeptical that the warming is as great as we show in East Antarctica — he
thinks the “right” answer is more like our detrended results in the
supplementary text. I cannot argue he is wrong.


<0953> Jones:

This will reduce the 1940-1970 cooling in NH temps. Explaining the cooling with
sulphates won’t be quite as necessary.


<4944> Haimberger:

It is interesting to see the lower tropospheric warming minimum in the tropics
in all three plots, which I cannot explain. I believe it is spurious but it is
remarkably robust against my adjustment efforts.


<4938> Jenkins/MetO:

By coincidence I also got recently a paper from Rob which says “London’s UHI
has indeed become more intense since the 1960s esp during spring and summer”.


<0896> Jones:

I think the urban-related warming should be smaller than this, but I can’t
think of a good way to argue this. I am hopeful of finding something in the
data that makes by their Figure 3.


<1583> Wilson:

any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will
undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently
have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model
comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.


<4165> Jones:

what he [Zwiers] has done comes to a different conclusion than Caspar and Gene!
I reckon this can be saved by careful wording.


<3994> Mitchell/MetO

Is the PCA approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems
to me that in the case of MBH the answer in each is no


<4369> Cook:

I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly can not be
defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the
science move ahead.


<0999> Hulme:

My work is as Director of the national centre for climate change research, a
job which requires me to translate my Christian belief about stewardship of
God’s planet into research and action.


<3653> Hulme:

He [another Met scientist] is a Christian and would talk authoritatively about
the state of climate science from the sort of standpoint you are wanting.


<2423> Lanzante/NOAA:

While perhaps one could designate some subset of models as being poorer in a
lot of areas, there probably never will be a single universally superior model
or set of models. We should keep in mind that the climate system is complex, so
that it is difficult, if not impossible to define a metric that captures the
breath of physical processes relevant to even a narrow area of focus.


<1982> Santer:

there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor
tests we’ve applied.


<0850> Barnett:

[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the
modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer


<5066> Hegerl:

[IPCC AR5 models]
So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long
suspected us of doing [...] and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing
correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.


<4443> Jones:

Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low
level clouds.


<4085> Jones:

GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be
correct.


FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we
get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US
Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original
station data.




Scientists are people too:

Jones:
The jerk you mention was called Good(e)rich who found urban warming at
all Californian sites.


<0810> Mann:

I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s
doing, but its not helping the cause


<4184> Jones:

[to Hansen] Keep up the good work! [...] Even though it’s been a mild winter in
the UK, much of the rest of the world seems coolish – expected though given the
La Nina. Roll on the next El Nino!