Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics - 生態環境討論

來源網址：http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html

Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics
By ANDREW C. REVKIN / The New York Times

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a
British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say
they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human
influence on climate change.

The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate
researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be
released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and
casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for
their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that
portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data,
some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick”
in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist
refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to
withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun, this is a
mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long
faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the
documents.

Portions of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under
siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data
glitch could be turned against them.

The cache of e-mails also includes references to journalists, including this
reporter, and queries from journalists related to articles they were
reporting.

Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on
Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the
police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They added, however,
that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet
was authentic.

But several scientists and others contacted by the Times confirmed that they
were the authors or recipients of specific e-mails included in the file.

The revelations are bound to inflame the public debate as hundreds of
negotiators prepare to hammer out an international climate accord at meetings
in Copenhagen next month, and at least one scientist speculated that the
timing was not coincidental.

The documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research
on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists. But the
evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so
broad and deep that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall
argument.

In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discussed
whether a string of recent years of relatively stable temperatures undermined
scientific models that predict long-term warming.

“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,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

Other scientists went on to rebut him, saying that the fluctuations were not
inconsistent with a continuing warming trend.

Dr. Trenberth said Friday that he was appalled at the release of the
e-mails, which he said were private discussions.

But he added that he thought the revelations might backfire against climate
skeptics. If anything, he said, he thought that the messages showed “the
integrity of scientists.”

Still, some of the comments might lend themselves to sinister
interpretations.

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the
last two millennia, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East
Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by
another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide a decline” in temperatures.

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State, confirmed in an interview that
the e-mail was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor
but noted that scientists often use the word “trick” to refer to a good way
to solve a problem, “and not something secret.” “It sounds incriminating,
but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,”
Dr. Mann said.

Dr. Jones, writing in an e-mail, declined to be interviewed and pasted in
the university’s statement.

Stephen McIntyre, a blogger who has for years been using his Web site,
climateaudit.org, to challenge data used to chart climate patterns and came
in for heated criticism in some e-mails, called the revelations “quite
breathtaking.”

But several scientists whose names appear repeatedly in the e-mails said
they merely revealed that scientists are human beings, and did nothing to
undercut the body of research on global warming.

“Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, a
climatologist at NASA whose e-mail exchanges with colleagues over a variety
of recent climate studies were included in the cache. “Newton may have been
an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”

He said the breach at the University of East Anglia was discovered after
hackers who had gained access to the correspondence sought Tuesday to hack
into a different server supporting realclimate.org, a blog unrelated to NASA
that he runs with several other scientists pressing the case for global
warming.

The intruders sought to create a mock blog post there and to upload the full
batch of files from Britain – nearly 200 megabytes’ worth.

That effort was thwarted, Dr. Schmidt said, and scientists immediately
notified colleagues at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research
Unit. Nearly all the material in the hacked files, which quickly spread to a
variety of servers, originated with or was sent to climate scientists at the
school.

The first posts that revealed details from the files appeared on Thursday at
The Air Vent, a Web site devoted to skeptics’ arguments. Almost instantly
readers there and elsewhere began posting excerpts that they felt illustrated
scientific bias or dishonesty.

At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some of the
science undergirding the global warming consensus, his instinct was to ignore
the correspondence as “just the way scientists talk.”

But on Friday, he said, after reading more deeply, he felt that some
exchanges reflected a concerted effort to block the release of data for
independent review.

He said that some e-mails mused about a way to discredit him by challenging
the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by
claiming he knew his research was wrong.

“This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people
’s reputations in very serious ways,” he said.

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