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The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate
... Consider researcher Tom Wigley’s email describing his adjustments to mid-20th century global temperature data in order to lower an inconvenient warming "blip." According to the global warming hypothesis, late 20th century man-made warming was supposed to be faster than earlier natural warming. But the data show rapid "natural" warming in the 1930s. Adjusting the 1940 temperature blip downward makes a better-looking trend line in support of the notion of rapidly accelerating man-made warming. Collecting and evaluating temperature data requires the exercise of scientific judgment, but Wigley's emails suggest a convenient correction of 0.15 degree Celsius that fits the man-made global warming hypothesis. The adjustment may be reasonable—changes in instrumentation might need to be accounted for—but all raw data and the methodologies used to adjust them should be publicly available so others can check them to make sure.

In another set of troubling emails, the CRU crew and associates discussed how to freeze out researchers and editors who expressed doubts about the man-made climate change. For example, an email from CRU’s leader Phil Jones saying that he and Kevin Trenberth would keep two dissenting scientific articles out of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" In addition, the CRU crew evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppress the publication of articles that they disliked. If they actually succeeded, this compounds the tragedy. Eliminating dissenting voices distorts the peer review process and the resulting scientific literature. The world's policymakers rarely enjoy access to complete information, but the Climategate emails suggest they have been robbed of the chance to get the best information available.

In the wake of the Climategate leaks, some researchers are openly decrying the scientific censorship exercised by powerful gatekeepers associated with the CRU. Climatologist Eduardo Zorita at the German Institute for Coastal Research has publicly declared that "editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed." Zorita adds, "In this atmosphere, PhD students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'." Zorita evidently believes even after the email scandal that he will be punished by editors and reviewers for denouncing the CRU crew: "By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication."

Now under pressure, the CRU has finally agreed to publicly release all of its temperature data. Just how valuable this will be has been thrown into doubt, however, since the CRU has admitted, "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data." This raises legitimate scientific questions about how the lost original data were manipulated to produce the "value-added." The Times (London) reported that Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said. ...

...One of the leaked emails from CRU’s Phil Jones appears to confirm this data interdependence: "Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center." Given this interdependence, Jones’ appeal to correlation with other data sets to support the validity of the CRU data is less convincing than one would hope. To the contrary, the fact that the three data sets correlate so well may instead provoke concerns about the validity of all three. ...