Click here for general club info, how to join, and members/affiliates.

Most of you have probably heard by now about "Climategate," the recent scandal involving some very suspicious leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit.

But for those of you who haven't, allow me to summarize: earlier this month, an alleged anonymous hacker broke into a server used by the CRU of Norwich, England, and spread around thousands of emails and other documents detailing rather interesting bits of correspondence about climate change.

Here are a couple of articles on the subject that express a fair amount of variation on people's reactions to this issue:

[link] - Telegraph
[link] - The Economist

The emails include discussions about the famous "hockey stick" graph, which shows a fairly level constant temperature which then suddenly shoots up in recent years, mimicking the shape of a hockey stick. One such suspicious email, sent by the CRU's director, Phil Jones, in 1999 stated: “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.”



Hide the decline. Is this strange phrasing just a colloquial use of the word "trick," referring to something many scientists do, or does it indicate something more sinister? After all, it's not uncommon in science to leave out a small set of data that doesn't make sense and doesn't fit a much larger overall pattern.

Regardless of whether the CRU was actively fudging their data, which remains a subject of some debate, there's little doubt that they were interfering with the peer review process in regard to their data. They were doing this primarily by ensuring that their data was "peer reviewed" by other members of the Unit, collaborating to approve these findings. Additionally, they actively strove to discredit any scientific journal that published work by their critics, vehemently decrying the journals as "fringe journals" so that they were much less likely to be taken seriously.

Even more unfortunate is the way in which they attempted to impede Britain's Freedom of Information Act, which allows a person to legally request data from any publicly-funded organization. Upon the request of a British skeptic to see CRU emails, this email was privately written within the CRU: “Mike, can you delete any e-mails you may have with Keith [Briffa] re AR4? Keith will do likewise.” (AR4 refers to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.) NASA evidently refused to provide information under America's equivalent Freedom of Information Act as well, and is now likely to face charges for doing so.

All of these recent events may be very fishy indeed, but it's hard for the layman to draw many relevant conclusions about it. After all, even if the CRU is internally corrupt, it's doubtful that a majority of climate change researchers are. Therefore, this month's question is: What do you think this means for global warming? Do these events lead you to believe that human-caused climate change is a non-issue, or do you believe that there are enough honest researchers out there with the same results that it's still as serious an issue as ever? Or somewhere in between?

I guess I could say that I'm undecided on the issue as of yet, mostly because I haven't looked into whether other organizations pursuing climate change research have been investigated and found to be trustworthy. I do, however, think that they need to be investigated. The CRU is the leading organization devoted to this cause, and are the organization responsible for whether or not nations invest pretty heavy funds in dealing with the climate issue. The only reason the CRU's dishonesty came to light was probably due to illegal activities on the part of hackers, but only under investigation and compliance with Freedom of Information Acts can we know for sure that similar problems don't exist in other climate research organizations.

-*Ferahgo-the-Assassin