Is Climategate Important?

When asked about Climategate, the thousands of letters and files leaked from Climatic Research Unit, a branch of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, Al Gore says that they are not relevant, that they are ten years old and only concern a few researchers. He is either misinformed or lying since the most recent email was from November, 2009 - just days before the leak. Even the politically neutral PolitiFact discounts the emails. They are wrong and here's why.

Back when I was in college physics, the joke was "first draw the graph then plot the data." This meant that regardless of your actual outcome, you should make sure that your data fit the "correct" graph. There was also a take-off of Planke's Constant which was "that number which when added to, subtracted from, multiplied by, or divided into your result gives the correct one." All of this is harmless when dealing with freshmen lab results where the margin of error of the equipment is greater than the amounts being measured. It is much more serious when top researchers are using it. The CRU emails show that top climate researchers have dealt in this sort of "fixing". They know what the results should be so they have been playing with the data until the results are right.

So what? They are only a small group, right? There are two problems with this logic. The first is that these are the guys at the top. There are three sets of world temperature accepted by climate researchers and CRU provides one of them. If we hear that the top auditor at Enron is hiding problems, should we ignore him and believe the guys lower down (which is what happened)?

The second problem is that climate research is a small field. If one group is fudging the figures, others should notice it and question it. CRU's figures should not match the others'. This brings up an ugly truth about climate research - they are all doing it, either to hide the real measures or because they believed institutions like CRU and figured that their data must be wrong. Just because the CRU emails were limited to a few researchers does not mean that the others are all acting honestly. More likely most of them are doing the same thing. There are several indications of this in the CRU emails - the ease with which they could get editors of prominent publications fired is one example.

Once you know that a group of prominent researchers has been modifying data in order to tell a cleaner story (as a guest on the Daily Show described it) then you have to question everyone else's results. Given the small size and political nature of climate research, it would be amazing if the warming proponents had not adopted a siege meantality, hiding any weakness in their findings and exaggerating their successes.