Making Sense of Climategate

INTRO

I spent the greater part of last night reading up on this so called "climategate," realizing that I didn't have a great handle on the alleged damning evidence or what it was that made people so upset. I was going to just put this up on Facebook, but I figured it was more of a blog thing, so here we are. I had to weed through quite a bit of scientific gobbledeegoop, and everyone should be aware that I'm not exactly fluent in that sort of thing (though I try real hard). Where possible, I will link to sources so that you can check up if you like and correct me if I have perhaps misinterpreted something along the way.

First off, is a link is very much worth reading. It was posted on a blog called RealClimate, which is run by leading climate scientists. Full disclosure on them, the domain is hosted by a PR firm, but they have never exercised editorial control over its contents, nor are the contributors paid for their time (more info on that here)

That disclosurey stuff out of the way, the link is here.

This is a pretty good overview of the situation, I think, though there's scientific language that is tough to sift through for a novice. I particularly like this paragraph:

"More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."

Go ahead and read the full thing if you like. I don't think it's a perfect rebuttal by any means, particularly when a layman has so much trouble figuring out what they're saying. I'll try to simplify matters based on a little digging I've done.

Now, this climategate business. So much data was stolen, but really only a couple major quotes are getting airplay and are getting talked about, so those are the ones I'm going to address. We'll go one at a time, here.

FIRST QUOTE

"I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

According to the realclimate link above, these scientists are talking about a subject called dendroclimatology. In a nutshell, this is the science of interpreting tree rings in order to reconstruct climate data from the past -- as in, before we started having reliable global data. We've got a pretty decent instrumental temperature record going back to around 1850, but to look back any further you have to use secondary means, and tree rings are a major component in that. It is an imperfect science sure, still in the process of taking off. But it is useful nonetheless.

Anyhow, the Keith mentioned in this quote is a man named Keith Briffa. Look him up if you like, his specialty seems to be dendroclimatology just as the RealClimate article suggests.

So what is the quote getting at? Well it's relatively simple. There is something called the "divergence problem" where the temperature predicted by the tree rings stops coinciding with the actual measured temperature after a certain point (that point is different depending on the method you use -- Keith is being singled out because he uses MXD -- a measure of density, rather than width).

Here is where I speculate, but only slightly. It seems the scientists were worried that somebody might misinterpret a graph of projected temperatures based on tree ring data (and that's the end of the speculation part). So they put actual, recorded temperatures on top of that to avoid confusion. Here is a rought picture of what I'm getting at here if you need a visual.

It seems rather silly when you actually read the quote, because the scientists are talking about adding "REAL TEMPS" in order to "hide the decline." Pundits are reading so much into the hiding the decline part, that they're not noticing that what's being added is actual temperature data. And they're not asking what the decline refers to.

Now, worst case scenario here -- if we are to assume these scientists did anything wrong here at all -- then perhaps they merged the orange and blue parts of my graph together. I don't have the actual graph in question, I couldn't say for sure either way. But I don't think that's what they did for two reasons. First, the realclimate post mentions "‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight)" -- at the very least a notation was made of where the tree ring predictions ended and the real temperature data began. And second, perhaps more importantly -- WE'RE NOT EVEN TALKING ABOUT DIRECTLY MEASURED TEMPERATURES HERE. Why would a scientist go to all the trouble to make a deceptive graph about tree rings? How would that further any hypothetical global warming conspiracy?

The whole quote breaks down once you place it in any sort of context, which of course the pundits don't. Go ahead and check my math on this, I'd love to see some more input on this.

SECOND QUOTE

"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."

This one is even easier to explain away. Super easy. For reference, here is that quote in context of the rest of the email:

" Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low….

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."

(source)

The email is from a guy named Kevin Trenberth. And the article he refers to is here.

You can read it if you like. I skimmed it. There's nothing there about global warming being false. The language used in the article isn't altogether different from that used in the email. It's just a scientist wondering aloud why 2008 was a little cooler than previous years, why some parts of the globe show cooler temperatures despite the global trend moving upward. He's asking why our models are so imprecise. That's it. Big deal. His article goes into more detail than I care to right here, but he makes a good case for why certain data anomalies shouldn't be trusted.

CONCLUSION

It's bunk. Almost entirely bunk. The worst any scientist here is guilty of is prettying up a graph, and it wasn't even a graph about actual recorded temperatures. It's a hit job and a smear, and I dare say it wasn't even worth the effort of their hackers. Or at least, it wouldn't be if people weren't so gullible as to latch onto this story the way they did.

And unfortunately, it's difficult to come up with clear straightforward rebuttals. I've tried here, but as evidenced by my word count, it's tricky. And like it or not, the pundits have a better narrative here.

But in any case, I hope this has been somewhat enlightening. Feedback is appreciated -- particularly if I can clear something up for you or you can clear something up for me. Thanks for reading.