Well, Climategate is another name for the Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident and it [...]]]> There are probably few out there that haven’t heard the term “Climategate” over the last couple of weeks, but what I’m not sure people are aware of is what it is and what information these infamous emails contain.  So….what the heck is Climategate?

Well, Climategate is another name for the Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident and it is just that.  Some unknown souls, that I don’t think were affiliated with the Nixon administration, but evidently are not in strict agreement with the whole idea of climate change, decided to hack into the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England.  They stole over 1,000 emails, took phrases out of context, and anonymously disseminated them around the World.  Nobody really knows why they did this, but it is believed that is was done in an effort to sabotage the Copenhagen global climate summit which is currently underway.  Without going into some drawn-out explanation about this whole thing why don’t we just look at three of the emails uncovered in this little operation.  

The emails are mainly between climatologists Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, and Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University, one of the originators of the graph of temperature trends famously named the “hockey stick graph” (seen above).

Email #1:  An excerpt from one November 1999 e-mail authored by Phil Jones reads:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Naturetrick 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.” 

Email #2:  Mann e-mail of 11 Mar 2003

 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.”

Email #3: Trenberth e-mail of 12 Oct 2009

An email written by Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, discussed gaps in understanding of recent temperature variations:

“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,”

 Of course these comments were taken severely out of context which makes them terribly misleading.  And just to make things a little more clear, according to PSU’s Mann, that statistical “trick” that Jones refers to in one e-mail — simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures.

What I think we need to understand is that scientist are going to talk to one another in a much different way than they would talk to the general public.  In engineering school we used tricks all the time to change loads or make things easier to handle mathematically.  Trying to explain this to a bunch of anti-climate change activists, that are at times making death threats on scientists, is needless to say, impossible. 

The only email that looked suspicious at all to me is that first one that mentions tricks and hidden information.  However, after hearing the explanation, it makes a lot of sense, especially with an engineering background and some familiarity with the method of scientific calculations.  

In fact, the only thing that Climategate is exposing in my mind is that we are in a full fledged political war over climate change and it’s not for the right reasons.  We have to realize that oil, and other non-renewable sources of energy are huge, huge, huge, business.  So yes, this is about money.  There are quite a lot of people in this World that have built their careers and fortunes, as well as the career of their children, on non-renewable energy sources.  These people are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and perhaps kill to keep their livelihood in tact.

With renewable energy, we have the potential to make oil about as useful as a 1969 VW bug.  This would put the fortunes of many very rich people at risk.  And we know that when money is involved, people will at times behave in very strange ways.  Climategate was certainly one of those strange events.