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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Leaked climate docs: the schools involved investigate

The head of the Climatic Research Unit is temporarily standing down as its …

The infamous trove of documents hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climactic Research Unit (CRU) has now prompted the head of the group to temporarily stand aside as university administrators arrange for an independent inquiry into the matter. Penn State, home of another researcher (Michael Mann) whose correspondence was included in the leak, will apparently consider whether a formal inquiry is required. 

And, contrary to the expectations of many, the documents will apparently influence climate negotiations scheduled for Copenhagen; Saudi Arabia considers them evidence that supports its existing position.

Universities react

First, the latest from East Anglia, which is placing all the relevant information on a single webpage. The head of the institution's CRU, Phil Jones, has announced that he will step down from that position as the university pursues an independent investigation of events.The scope of that inquiry may be quite broad, as the events involved everything from a breach of the university's computer systems to possible abuses of the UK's Freedom of Information statutes by everyone involved.

The university will let the new investigator determine the scope of the matters: "We have, therefore, decided to conduct an independent review, which will 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," said a school statement. 

East Anglia expects that the outline for the review should be sorted out within the next few weeks, but the actual investigation will clearly take longer.

Second, Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Penn State who is a participant in some of the e-mail correspondence, will also see his host university look into his activities, according to a student newspaper. In this case, the university will simply determine whether any sort of formal investigation will be needed. Again, the initial inquiry may be brief, but any formal academic investigation tends to take a significant amount of time.

What (some of) the fuss is about

The focus of much of the outrage that followed the public release of the private e-mails has been on the HadCRUT temperature figures generated in part by the CRU. Unfortunately, many of those commenting on matters apparently don't understand what's involved with HadCRUT, so it may be informative to discuss how those temperature figures are produced.

HadCRUT3, the current iteration, is an attempt to reconstruct global temperature trends from instrument data. That's actually much more difficult than it sounds. Most instrument data comes from various national weather services, and may come in different data formats, with different accuracies and with varied geographic distributions. A single station location may even be moved over time, with changes in altitude or local microclimates that need to be adjusted for. 

Simply getting all of the information into a single, standardized form, and adjusting the data to compensate for instrument changes and uneven geographic distribution, is almost certainly a nightmare.

The temperature data itself has been the source of much of the controversy. The CRU obtains some of the data directly from public sources; according to the CRU, 95 percent of it can be accessed from the Global Historical Climatology Network. The remaining five percent has been the subject of repeated requests under the UK's Freedom of Information Act. The CRU, however, was bound by contractual agreements with its sources not to release the data.

The fact that the requests generally came from noted climate skeptics made the CRU team even more unhappy. Some of Jones' e-mails suggest that he would rather destroy the data than turn it over, which is certainly not in keeping with the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act, and definitely represents a breach of scientific ethics. 

Also featuring in the public controversy, 20 years ago the CRU discarded its own copies of some of the unadjusted data when it moved to new facilities (the discarded material was on paper and magnetic tapes).

A further issue is the code that compiled the data into a global mean temperature figure, as portions of that code were leaked as well, including many comments from an extremely frustrated coder. Some of these relate to the quality of other sections of code, and others to the quality of the data reformatting done to the various temperature inputs.

In any case, it's important to emphasize what this code is not. It's not a climate model that projects likely changes into the future, so it doesn't do any forecasting. Nor does it handle non-instrument proxies for temperatures, such as tree rings (those are the sorts of studies that Michael Mann pursues). It simply handles the data since 1860.

(Researchers at the CRU are also involved in producing climate models and proxy reconstructions, so it's likely that some of the code for these activities was also part of the material that went public. But most of the recent attention appears to have focused on the HadCRUT data and code.) 

And, as the CRU points out, it's one of several organizations providing global instrument temperature values; even if you decide to ignore its work, NASA and NOAA produce figures that, statistically speaking, are indistinguishable. Finally, the instrument record itself, as others have eloquently detailed, is just one piece of a large body of evidence about climate change.

CRU (top) and Goddard data show very similar trends. (Click for larger version)

It's also important to note that, as with the e-mails, context is everything, and it's often not being provided by those commenting on excerpts. A comment that has attracted a lot of attention was attached to a section of code that performs a mathematical transformation on some of the data: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL [sic] correction for decline!!" But the actual call to the transformation was commented out, suggesting it was a bit of experimenting that didn't make it into the production version.


There are other instances of questionable behavior in the e-mails, like times where the scientists went after journal editors who approved what they considered scientifically invalid articles on climate science (something that echoes the controversies over the publication of some pro-Intelligent Design papers). But the genuine ethical lapses here seem to have involved information-sharing by those at the CRU.

For better or worse, however, academic investigations tend to drag on interminably, and often wind up subject to appeal, so it may be years before Jones' status, and that of others at the CRU, gets decided. Given that many who are outraged over the contents of the documents have already made decisions about them, anything short of a total repudiation of the entire CRU is unlikely to satisfy them.

The documents' appearance has led many to speculate that their public disclosure was timed to influence the Copenhagen climate negotiations, which will take place next week. If so, the leakers could be disappointed, as most governmental and NGO representatives involved with the negotiations appear to have followed the lead of the scientific community and concluded that the documents tell us very little about the state of climate science as a whole.

But that doesn't mean the documents won't be mentioned in Denmark. Saudi Arabia's representative told the BBC, "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change." Of course, that's probably not a significant change in that nation's negotiating position.


The prestigious journal Nature, which has published a number of significant climatology papers, has published an editorial on the documents, and the public response to them. It derides some of that response as "paranoid," and indicates that the editorial staff at the journal has not seen anything that would cause it to revisit past publications. "It is Nature's policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern," the editorial states, "but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies."

The UEA has also named the person who will head its independent review (Sir Muir Russell) and specified its scope.

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