Climatic Research Unit email controversy

The Hubert Lamb Building, University of East Anglia, where the Climatic Research Unit is based

The Climatic Research Unit hacking incident came to light in November 2009 with the unauthorised release of thousands of e-mails and other documents obtained through the hacking of a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England. The University of East Anglia described the incident as an illegal taking of data. Law enforcement agencies are investigating the matter as a crime, and are also investigating death threats that were subsequently made against climate scientists named in the e-mails.

Extracts from a small number of the e-mails were publicised and allegations were made that they indicated misconduct by leading climate scientists such as withholding scientific information, interfering with the peer-review process of scientific papers, deleting information to prevent disclosure under the United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act, and selecting data to support the case for global warming. Individuals who oppose action on global warming called the incident "Climategate", which became a commonly used neologism for the incident. The University of East Anglia, other scientists, scientific organisations, elected representatives and governments from around the world have described the incident as a smear campaign, and many, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and IPCC's head, Rajendra Pachauri suggested that it was intended to sabotage the then imminent December 2009 Copenhagen global climate summit.

The University of East Anglia has announced that an independent review of the allegations will be carried out by Sir Muir Russell and that the CRU's director, Professor Phil Jones, would stand aside from his post during the review.

Timeline

The incident began when a person or persons unknown accessed a server used by the Climatic Research Unit and copied 160 MB of data containing more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 other documents. The University of East Anglia stated that the server from which the data were taken was not one that could easily have been accessed and the data could not have been released inadvertently. It is not known when the breach occurred.

The breach was first discovered on 17 November, 2009 after the server of the RealClimate website was hacked and a copy of the stolen data was uploaded. According to Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate, "At around 6.20am (EST) Nov 17th, somebody hacked into the RC server from an IP address associated with a computer somewhere in Turkey, disabled access from the legitimate users, and uploaded a file FOIA.zip to our server." A link to the file on the RealClimate server was posted from a Russian IP address to the Climate Audit blog at 7.24 am (EST i.e. at 2009-11-17 12:24Z) with the comment "A miracle just happened". Schmidt discovered the hack minutes after it occurred. He temporarily shut down the website and deleted the uploaded file. RealClimate reported that they had notified the University of East Anglia of the incident.

On 19 November an archive file containing the data was uploaded to a server in Tomsk, Russia before being copied to numerous locations across the Internet. An anonymous post from a Saudi Arabian IP address to the climate-sceptic blog The Air Vent, described the material as "a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents" and defended the hacking on the grounds that climate science is "too important to be kept under wraps".

The Norfolk police subsequently confirmed that they were "investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia" with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime unit, the Office of the Information Commissioner and the National Domestic Extremism Team (NDET). Commenting on the involvement of the NDET, a spokesman said: "At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations." However, the police cautioned that "major investigations of this nature are of necessity very detailed and as a consequence can take time to reach a conclusion."

Content of the documents

The stolen material comprised more than 1,000 e-mails, 2,000 documents, as well as commented source code, pertaining to climate change research covering a period from 1996 until 2009. Some of the e-mails included discussions of how to combat the arguments of climate change sceptics, unflattering comments about sceptics, queries from journalists, drafts of scientific papers, and discussions of efforts to shut out dissenters and their points of view, and destroying various files in order to prevent data being revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. In an interview with The Guardian, Phil Jones confirmed that the e-mails that had sparked the most controversy appeared to be genuine.

E-mails

Most of the e-mails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate research, such as data analysis and details of scientific conferences. The controversy has focused on a small number of e-mails, particularly those sent to or from climatologists Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, and Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University (PSU), one of the originators of the graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph".

The Associated Press conducted a review of the e-mails and concluded that they showed scientists fending off sceptics, but did not support claims that global warming science had been faked. They stated that "One of the most disturbing elements suggests an effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics skeptical of global warming", and mentioned ethical problems with this action due to the fact that "free access to data is important so others can repeat experiments as part of the scientific method". They cited a science policy expert as stating that it was "normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds". The AP sent the emails to three climate scientists they selected as moderates, who did not change their view that man-made global warming is a real threat. The three scientists are on the record elsewhere supporting an outside, independent review of the allegations of misconduct at both the CRU and Pennsylvania State University.

Summarising its own analysis, FactCheck stated that claims by climate sceptics that the emails demonstrated scientific misconduct amounting to fabrication of global warming were unfounded, and emails were being misrepresented to support these claims. While the emails showed a few scientists being rude or dismissive, this did not negate evidence that human activities were largely responsible for global warming, or the conclusions of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which used the CRU as just one of many sources of data.

Professor Roger Pielke Sr., an atmospheric scientist at CIRES at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in an interview said, "Both those who denounce global warming as a hoax and [those who] claim that this is a 'tempest in a teapot' are incorrect. With respect to the role of humans in the climate system, there is incontrovertible evidence that we exert both warming and cooling effects." With respect to the emails in question, he said, "there are serious issues exposed by the emails — including the goal of these scientists to prevent proper scientific disclosure of their data, as well as to control what papers appear in the peer reviewed literature and climate assessments. The IPCC assessment, with which major policy decisions are being made, involves the individuals in the emails who have senior leadership positions."

The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, described the CRU's scientists "as highly reputed professionals, whose contributions over the years to scientific knowledge are unquestionable" and described their datasets as "totally consistent with those from other institutions, on the basis of which far-reaching and meaningful conclusions were reached in the [2007 IPCC report]." On November 24 the University of East Anglia issued a statement on the contents of the e-mails: "There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest quality of scientific investigation and interpretation."

Jones e-mail of 16 Nov 1999

An excerpt from one November 1999 e-mail authored by Phil Jones, which the UEA has stated refers to a graph he was preparing as a diagram for the cover of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) statement on the status of global climate in 1999:

"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."

The graph showed three series of paleoclimate reconstructions, based on records of tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc., along with historical and instrumental records. "Mike's Nature trick" referred to a paper published by Michael Mann in Nature in 1998, which combined various proxy records with actual temperature records. Mann described the "trick" as simply a concise way of showing the two kinds of data together while still clearly indicating which was which. He said that there was nothing "hidden or inappropriate" about it, and that his method of combining proxy data had been corroborated by numerous statistical tests and matched thermometer readings taken over the past 150 years. A press release by the University of East Anglia said that the "trick" was using instrumental data to meet a requirement of showing temperatures more recent than those covered by the proxy based temperature reconstructions, and that the use of the word "trick" was not intended to imply any deception.

The phrase "hide the decline" referred specifically to the divergence problem in which post 1960 tree ring proxy data indicate a decline while measured temperatures rise. The reconstruction by Keith Briffa et al. was based solely on tree ring data, which shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century to the mid 20th century. They had published a statement on the divergence problem in 1998, and had recommended that the post 1960 part of their reconstruction should not be used. Jones stated that the email was "written in haste" and that, far from seeking to hide the decline, CRU had published a number of articles on the problem. The implications of the decline are discussed in Chapter 6 of the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which describes discussion of various possible reasons for the divergence which does not affect all the trees, and says that there is no consensus about the cause. It notes that Briffa et al. specifically excluded the post 1960 data, which is therefore not shown in the graph of their reconstruction in the report. In his review comments on the report, Stephen McIntyre objected to this graph being truncated, and said that the whole reconstruction should be shown with comments to deal with the "divergence problem". The IPCC response was that this would be inappropriate.

Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has in the past said that graphs were prepared dishonestly and expressed doubts about whether there should be serious concern about global warming, has gone on the record accusing Mann of data rigging and outright falsification. Other climatologists disputed Lindzen's comments. Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center said he had seen nothing in the emails that called the fundamental science into question, and Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution agreed that there was no trickery, saying he would use the word trick to describe some methodological step, but expressed the view that the basis of reconstructions had been unclear. Several scientific sources state that the decline being referred to is a decline in tree ring climate proxy metrics, not temperature. Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the UEA, said that the scientists had drawn the line to follow the tree-ring reconstruction up to 1960 and the measured temperature after that."

McIntyre said that the "trick to hide the decline" consisted of removing tree-ring data from the later half of the 20th century. He said that since the cause of the divergence problem is unknown, and it may have existed in earlier periods, tree ring records cannot be used to estimate temperatures in the past.

Before the incident, continuing research had already presented reconstructions based on more proxies, and found similar results with or without the tree ring records.

Mann e-mail of 11 Mar 2003

Main article: Soon and Baliunas controversy

In one e-mail, as a response to an e-mail indicating that a paper in the scientific journal Climate Research had questioned assertions that the 20th century was abnormally warm, Mann wrote:

"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."

Mann told the Wall Street Journal that he didn't feel there was anything wrong in saying "we shouldn't be publishing in a journal that's activist."

Mann was not alone in expressing concern about the peer review process of the journal. Half of the journal's editorial board, including editor-in-chief Hans von Storch, resigned in the wake of controversy surrounding the article's publication. The publisher later admitted that the paper's major findings could not "be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. [Climate Research] should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication."

Jones e-mail of 8 Jul 2004

An 8 July 2004 e-mail from Phil Jones to Michael Mann said in part:

"The other paper by MM is just garbage. [...] 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!"

The IPCC has stated that its procedures mean there is "no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed." Its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, stated that the papers that had been criticised "were actually discussed in detail in chapter six of the Working Group I report of the [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report]. Furthermore, articles from the journal Climate Research, which was also decried in the emails, have been cited 47 times in the Working Group I report."

Peter Kelemen, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said that "If scientists attempted to exclude critics' peer-reviewed papers from IPCC reports, this was unethical in my view." Rajendra Pachauri responded that the IPCC has "a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which ensures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening."

The independent review commissioned by the University of East Anglia will, inter alia, evaluate whether CRU's peer-review practices comply with best scientific practice.

Jones e-mail of 2 Feb 2005

A 2 February 2005 email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann includes:

"And 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. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days?—our does! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.

Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research at University of East Anglia, Trevor Davies, said that no data was deleted or "otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure". In response to allegations that CRU avoided obligations under the UK Freedom of Information Act, independent investigator Muir Russell plans to review CRU's "policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act".

Jones e-mail of May 2008

In one e-mail, Phil Jones writes to Michael Mann, with the subject line "IPCC & FOI"

"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise…Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address."

Critics say that the e-mails showed that scientists were conspiring to delete e-mails and documents to prevent them from being released. George Monbiot, a supporter of the scientific consensus, wrote that Jones' resignation is warranted on the basis of his statement in this email alone.

The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) oversees the FOI process there, and issued the following statement:

"Destroying requested information outside of an organisation's normal policies is unlawful and may be a criminal offence if done to prevent disclosure."

Trevor Davies responded by saying that despite Jones' suggestion to delete records, no records were actually deleted.

Santer e-mail of 12 Nov 2009

In one e-mail, climate scientist Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory commented on a request for data and correspondence from science blogger Stephen McIntyre under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI):

"My personal opinion is that both FOI requests [for data related to a 2008 paper and for correspondence dating back to 2006] are intrusive and unreasonable. Steven McIntyre provides absolutely no scientific justification or explanation for such requests. ... McIntyre has no interest in improving our scientific understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. He has no interest in rational scientific discourse....We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an "audit" by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues."

In an Associated Press interview, McIntyre disagreed with his portrayal in emails, and said "Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith."

FactCheck noted that the great majority of CRU's data is already freely available, and the scientists were reluctant to supply their own correspondence, code and data to people whose motives seemed questionable to them. It is not clear that any actual obstruction happened, and emails show the scientists discussing with university officials and lawyers their obligations under the new legislation, informing critics that data is already freely available, or that the information has been sent to them. This question is to form part of the East Anglia investigation.

Trenberth e-mail of 12 Oct 2009

An email written by Kevin Trenberth discussed gaps in understanding of recent temperature variations:

"Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes? Where did the heat go?"

"How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!"

"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,"

Trenberth told the Associated Press that the email referred to an article he authored calling for improvement in measuring global warming to describe unusual data, such as rising sea surface temperatures. The word travesty refers to what Trenberth sees as an inadequate observing system that, were it more adequate, would be able to track the warming he believes is there.

In a statement on his NCAR webpage Trenberth states that,

"It is amazing to see this particular quote lambasted so often. It stems from a paper I published this year bemoaning our inability to effectively monitor the energy flows associated with short-term climate variability. It is quite clear from the paper that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in the context of short-term natural variability."

Code and documentation

The CRU files also included temperature reconstruction programs written in Fortran and IDL, programmer comments and a readme file. In a BBC Newsnight report, software engineer John Graham-Cumming found the code to be "below the standard you'd expect in any commercial software" because it lacked clear documentation or an audit history. Graham-Cumming also reported finding a bug in the code's error handling that could result in data loss. Other investigations posted in various editorials and blogs have stated that the comments and readme files indicate that the temperature reconstructions hide and manipulate data to show a temperature increase and question the accurary of the instrumental temperature record.

Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford, noted that the code investigated by Newsnight had nothing at all to do with the HadCRUT temperature record used for climate reconstructions, which is maintained at the Met Office and not at CRU. When he challenged Newsnight on this, they responded that "Our expert's opinion is that this is climate change code" and declined to retract the story. He commented that on the same basis the quality of code he put together for students could be used to discredit other research code.

In his CBS News blog Taking Liberties, columnist Declan McCullagh reported that programmers have found the code to be "undocumented and buggy" and have found logic errors through investigation and debugging. He further stated that "East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way."

Calls for inquiries

In the United Kingdom and United States, there were calls for official inquiries into issues raised by the documents. Guardian columnist George Monbiot, a strong supporter of action to fight man-made global warming, has called for Professor Jones to resign. Lord Lawson, a prominent Brittish Conservative politician and founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation said, "The integrity of the scientific evidence... has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay",. United States Senator Jim Inhofe also planned to demand an inquiry. Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said: "I have sympathy for the climate researchers at the University of East Anglia and other institutions who have been the target of an aggressive campaign by so-called 'sceptics' over a number of years. But I fear that only a thorough investigation could now clear their names.", adding "There needs to be an assurance that these email messages have not revealed inappropriate conduct in the preparation of journal articles and in dealing with requests from other researchers for access to data. This will probably require investigations both by the host institutions and by the relevant journals. There may also be a role for the UK Research Integrity Office to advise on any investigation."

University of East Anglia response

The University of East Anglia was notified of the possible security breach on 17 November, but when the story was published in the press on 20 November they had no statement ready. On 24 November, Trevor Davies, the University of East Anglia pro-vice-chancellor with responsibility for research, rejected calls for Jones' resignation or firing: "We see no reason for Professor Jones to resign and, indeed, we would not accept his resignation. He is a valued and important scientist." The university announced it would conduct an independent review to "address the issue of data security, an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests, and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed". George Monbiot strongly criticised the failure of UEA to present its position promptly when the emails were published, and called it "a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond." Monbiot continued, "The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline." He contrasted this with what he called the exemplary media strategy of the "climate change denial industry".

The university announced on 1 December that Phil Jones was to stand aside as director of the Unit until the completion of an independent review. Two days later, the university announced that Sir Muir Russell would chair the review, and would "examine e-mail exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data" as well as review CRU's policies and practices for "acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review, and disseminating data and research findings" and "their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice". In addition, the investigation would review CRU's compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests and also 'make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds".

Met Office response

On November 23, a spokesman for the Met Office, a UK agency which works with the CRU in providing global-temperature information, said there was no need for an inquiry. "The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be."

On December 5, however, concerned that public confidence in the science had been damaged by leaked e-mails, the Met Office indicated their intention to re-examine 160 years of temperature data, as well as to release temperature records for over 1000 worldwide weather stations online. The Met Office remained confident that its analysis will be shown to be correct and that the data would show a temperature rise over the past 150 years.

Other responses

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC that he considered the affair to be "a serious issue and we will look into it in detail." He later clarified that the IPCC would review the incident to identify lessons to be learned, and he rejected suggestions that the IPCC itself should carry out an investigation. The only investigations being carried out were those of the University of East Anglia and the British police.

Pennsylvania State University announced it would review the work of Michael Mann, in particular looking at anything had not already been addressed in an earlier National Academy of Sciences review which had found some faults with his methodology but agreed with the results. In response, Mann said he would welcome the review.

Reactions to the incident

Climatologists

The CRU's researchers said in a statement that the e-mails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, called the charges that the e-mails involve any "untoward" activity "ludicrous." Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center who is among those implicated in the controversy, said that sceptics were "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious", and called the entire incident a careful, "high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem." The incident was described as a smear campaign by two other leading climate scientists, Eric Steig of University of Washington and Richard Somerville. Kevin E. Trenberth, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who wrote one of the emails cited by sceptics as controversial, stated that climate change sceptics had selectively quoted words and phrases out of context in an attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen global climate summit in December. Trenberth said he was appalled at the release of the e-mails but thought that it might backfire against climate sceptics, as the messages would show "the integrity of scientists."

According to the University of East Anglia, the documents and e-mails had been selected deliberately to undermine the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world's climate in ways that are potentially dangerous. The university said in a statement: "The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way".

Tom Wigley, a director of the CRU until 1993 and now a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, condemned the threats that he and other colleagues had received as "truly stomach-turning", and commented: "None of it affects the science one iota. Accusations of data distortion or faking are baseless. I can rebut and explain all of the apparently incriminating e-mails that I have looked at, but it is going to be very time consuming to do so." In relation to the harassment that he and his colleagues were experiencing, he noted: "This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behaviour - criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past. So this is a worse manifestation but it's happened before so it's not that surprising."

In response to the incident, 1,700 British scientists signed a joint statement circulated by the UK Met Office declaring their "utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities." Met Office chief executive John Hirst and its chief scientist Julia Slingo asked their colleagues to sign the statement "to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change."

Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist derided in the e-mails for doubting human-influenced global warming, said some e-mails showed an effort to block the release of data for independent review. He said some messages discussed discrediting him by claiming he knew his research was wrong in his doctoral dissertation. "This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people's reputations in very serious ways."

Climatologist James Hansen said that the controversy has "no effect on the science" and that while some of the e-mails reflect poor judgment, the evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who agrees with the mainstream view of global warming, wrote that the e-mails reflect a problem with scientists lacking openness about their data and attacking those they disagree with:

"[I]t is difficult to understand the continued circling of the wagons by some climate researchers with guns pointed at sceptical researchers by apparently trying to withhold data and other information of relevance to published research, thwart the peer review process, and keep papers out of assessment reports. Scientists are of course human, and short-term emotional responses to attacks and adversity are to be expected, but I am particularly concerned by this apparent systematic and continuing behavior from scientists that hold editorial positions, serve on important boards and committees and participate in the major assessment reports. It is these issues revealed in the HADCRU emails that concern me the most"

Climatologist Hans von Storch, who also concurs with the mainstream view on global warming, said that the University of East Anglia (UEA) had "violated a fundamental principle of science" by refusing to share data with other researchers. "They play science as a power game," he said.

NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt stated that from the first Freedom of Information request, which was made in 2007, it has continued to be made clear that various national meteorology institutions worldwide have imposed restrictions preventing a complete release of all the data used by the CRU, but that the vast majority of the data in the CRU records is available to the public. He said that the national meteorology institutions should be pressed to remove these restrictions from CRU.

Author and climatologist David Reay of the University of Edinburgh noted that the CRU is:

"just one of many climate-research institutes that provide the underlying scientific basis for climate policy at national and international levels. The conspiracy theorists may be having a field day, but if they really knew academia they would also know that every published paper and data set is continually put through the wringer by other independent research groups. The information that makes it into the IPCC reports is some of the most rigorously tested and debated in any area of science."

The IPCC's head, Rajendra Pachauri, declared his support for the scientists involved: "The persons who have worked on this report and those who have unfortunately been victims of this terrible and illegal act are outstanding scientists." He commented that he could "only surmise that those who carried this out have obviously done it with [the] very clear intention to influence the process in Copenhagen." Stating that "even the allegations made on the basis of the stolen emails have proved incorrect", he criticised "the efforts of skeptics and vested interests, who will do everything possible to maintain the status quo."

One of the IPCC's lead authors, Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, expressed concern at the precedent established by the hack: "[T]his is a criminal act of vandalism and of harassment of a group of scientists that are only going about their business doing science. It represents a whole new escalation in the war on climate scientists who are only trying to get at the truth... What next? Deliberate monkeying with data on servers? Insertion of bugs into climate models?"

Another IPCC lead author, David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, reported receiving numerous hate e-mails in the wake of the incident and said that he believed there was "an organised campaign to discredit individual climate scientists". Andrew Pitman of the University of New South Wales commented: "The major problem is that scientists have to be able to communicate their science without fear or favour and there seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign designed to intimidate some scientists."

Scientific organizations

The American Meteorological Society stated that the incident did not affect the society's position on climate change. They pointed to the breadth of evidence for human influence on climate, stating "For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited."

The American Geophysical Union issued a statement expressing concern that the emails were "being exploited to distort the scientific debate about the urgent issue of climate change" and reaffirming their 2007 position statementwith regard to human influences on climate. They stated that "Science and the scientific method is seldom a linear march to the 'correct' and indisputable answer. Disagreement among scientists is part of the energy that moves inquiry forward."

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has "expressed concern that the hacked emails would weaken global resolve to curb greenhouse-gas emissions". Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the AAAS and executive publisher of the journal Science, said "AAAS takes issues of scientific integrity very seriously. It is fair and appropriate to pursue answers to any allegations of impropriety. It’s important to remember, though, that the reality of climate change is based on a century of robust and well-validated science."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I issued statements explaining that the assessment process, involving hundreds of scientists worldwide, is designed to be transparent and to prevent any individual or small group to manipulate the process. The statement noted that the "internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges".

Elected representatives and governments

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejected the view that the leaked e-mails had damaged the credibility of climate science. Speaking at the Copenhagen conference on climate change, he said: "Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear – that climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that there is no doubt about the scientific evidence that underpins the Copenhagen conference: "Its landmark importance cannot be wished away by the theft of a few emails from one university research centre." Brown commented that the purpose of the climate change sceptics' campaign was clear, and its timing was no coincidence. "It is designed to destabilise and undermine the efforts of the countries gathering in Copenhagen."

During a press briefing on December 7, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "I think scientists are clear on the science. I think many on Capitol Hill are clear on the science. I think that this notion that there is some debate ... on the science is kind of silly."

Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban said he thought the incident would have a "huge impact" on the Copenhagen conference. "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," he told BBC News the week before the summit.

During the annual Queen's Speech debate in the House of Commons on 24 November 2009, the former Conservative Cabinet minister Peter Lilley challenged the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband over the e-mails. Miliband declined to comment on the content of the e-mails but commented: "We should be cautious about using partial emails that have been leaked to somehow cast doubt on the scientific consensus that there is. That is very dangerous and irresponsible because the scientific consensus is clear."

United States Senator Jim Inhofe, an outspoken sceptic of climate change, said "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in." Inhofe stated on Fox News Channel that an official investigation action has commenced, and that it will have an effect on the "cap and trade" legislation.

Public reaction

The incident took place during a time when public certainty in the United States about the cause of global warming was declining. Harris Interactive, in a Harris Poll conducted shortly before the CRU e-mails came to light, reported that those in the United States who answered yes to the question "Do you believe the theory that increased carbon dioxide and other gases released into the atmosphere will, if unchecked lead to global warming and an increase in average temperatures, or not?” had declined by 20% between 2007 and 2009 to 51%.. In December, Angus Reid Strategies conducted a tri-national poll which found that between November, 2009 and December, 2009 those who agreed with "global warming is a fact mostly caused by human activity", declined 11% in Canada (to 52%), 3% in the U.S. (to 46%), and 4% in Britain (to 43%). The same poll found that only about 1 in 5 Canadians had followed the CRU controversy closely, while 57% had not followed to story at all.

Other expert commentary

The science historian Spencer R. Weart, interviewed in the Washington Post, suggested parallels with the tobacco politics covering up the health effects of tobacco for many years. He did not expect the incident to have much effect on public perceptions of climate and climate scientists, as opinions had become fixed since the 1980s with a group of people repeatedly claiming that climate change was not a problem. He said that in the last decade leading climate scientists "have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims", and in recent years "had to spend far too much of their time defending their personal reputations against ignorant or slanderous attacks." He commented that the theft and use of the e-mails was revealing about the social context, "a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers."

Death threats

Following the release of the e-mails, climate scientists at the CRU and elsewhere have received numerous threatening and abusive e-mails. Norfolk Police have interviewed CRU director Phil Jones about death threats made against him following the release of the emails, and death threats against two scientists also are currently under investigation by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. A sceptic and climate scientists in Australia have reported receiving threatening e-mails.

Naming of the incident

Analysis by FactCheck stated that sceptics who allege that the documents show fabrication of evidence of man-made global warming "are portraying the affair as a major scandal: 'Climategate'."

Writing in Time, Bryan Walsh reported that the controversy was dubbed "Climategate" by sceptics of global warming, with "obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up", while advocates of action on climate change dubbed it "Swifthack" in reference to the 2004 "Swiftboating" campaign against US Presidential candidate John Kerry, characterising it as "an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change.". Los Angeles Times entertainment and pop culture writer Patrick Goldstein attributes the origin of the term "Climategate" to the Wall Street Journal. Daily Telegraph commentator Christopher Booker attributes the origin of the term to his colleague, James Delingpole. Delingpole, on the other hand, said that "The person who really coined it was a commenter called “Bulldust” on Watts Up With That site (Anthony Watts' blog)". The comment was "Hmmm how long before this is dubbed ClimateGate?".

Similar incident

The Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, has also been targeted by individuals who have attempted to break into climatologists' offices and computer systems. The University's Professor Andrew Weaver, who is one of the IPCC's lead authors, commented: "One of the sad realities of being a scientist working in this area is you get targeted. I have had no end of nasty emails and phone calls." He believed that the hackers "were trying to find any dirt they could, as they have done in the UK. If they can't find 'dirt', they manufacture it from out-of-context emails or skewed statistics."

See also

• Global warming controversy
• Global warming conspiracy theory