A hacker attack at a university has heated up debate about global warming, just weeks before a major climate summit begins. The attack at the end of last week exposed 1,700 e-mail messages and internal documents from some of the world’s leading climate scientists.
Those messages, climate-change skeptics say, show that scientists have distorted evidence to bolster a conclusion that man-made pollution has warmed the planet. Scientists with more moderate views say they are concerned about what appear in the messages to be attempts to pressure journal editors to suppress papers that did not show global warming, or to bend the rules of peer review. The authors of the e-mail messages, meanwhile, argue that some of them have been distorted by critics, and that the writers’ only sin was talking too flippantly in what they thought would remain private communications.
It is still unclear how the data made its way from a server at the University of East Anglia, in England, to the open Web. The messages span several years, but someone seems to have carefully selected e-mail messages containing the names of several prominent scientists.
In a statement issued Monday, officials from the university confirmed that the messages were stolen from a server in its Climatic Research Unit, an incident that was first reported in several blogs and newspapers on Thursday and Friday. The university is working with law-enforcement officials to investigate the matter, and the server that was attacked has been taken offline, said the statement, signed by Simon Dunford, a university spokesman. He called bloggers publishing the e-mail messages “mischievous” and irresponsible.
A Matter of Interpretation
“They’ve engaged in a last-minute smear campaign designed to confuse the public,” said one of the scientists whose e-mail messages were published, Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He argued that the timing was not coincidental, with the United Nations Climate Change Conference set to begin next month in Copenhagen.
Some bloggers and climate scientists see the exposure as heroic. Theories promulgated on blogs include one that a whistle-blower leaked the data, and another that the university had accidentally left the material on an open server. University officials could not be reached on Monday to respond to those theories.
An unknown person posted the filched data to a Russian file-sharing site, in the form of a single compressed file. Someone even attempted to post the e-mail messages to a climate blog run by Mr. Mann and other scientists whose data was compromised. Owners of that blog, RealClimate, said they were able to stop the file from being posted.
Among the messages most discussed by bloggers is one in which a scientist, referring to the journal Nature, said he used “Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years … .” That appears, skeptics say, to be an attempt to make the warming trend look as severe as possible.
The Mike mentioned in the message is Mr. Mann, who says that scientists frequently use “trick” as a compliment, not to refer to an illusion. “When somebody talks about a trick in an e-mail, it’s clear that what he or she is talking about is a clever way to do something, a nice approach,” he said.
Calls for More Openness
Steve McIntyre, who runs the blog Climate Audit, is not convinced. Mr. McIntyre has long questioned the methods and data accuracy of climate scientists, and has pressed them to release raw climate data that the scientists say is protected by confidentiality agreements with governments.
“The issue is much more substantial than just a phrase,” said Mr. McIntyre, who said he does not know whether the earth is getting warmer or not, and who believes the data is actually inconclusive. He said he is analyzing some of the documents dealing with computer code used by the researchers, hoping it will shed more light on their methods. “This is not a small issue, and this is not going away.”
Judith A. Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that at the end of the day, the science will most likely stand up. But she said she hopes that the publishing of the e-mail messages will lead to more openness by climate researchers.
“There is nothing in the e-mails that directly discredits these data sets and findings, although the e-mails reflect some pretty inappropriate behavior with regards to the peer-review and assessment processes,” she said in an e-mail interview.
One message, for instance, talks about an attempt to convince a journal not to publish a certain paper. “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,” said the message. “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.”
“That’s certainly an attempt to influence editors,” argued Patrick J. Michaels, a senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. “It’s an attempt to influence the editors of major scientific journals and essentially blackmail them—to offer them incentives to not publish papers by what they call skeptics or people who they did not like.”
He hopes that this incident will allow journal editors to “be more open to manuscripts from people arguing that [man-made climate change] may be overblown.”
