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Climategate: independent report clears the IPCC
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Filed under: sustainable development, Climategate, Muir Russell
By Sylvain Biville, Rue89
Published on 08/07/2010 (1)
After six months of investigation, an independent commission, led by Muir Russell, has ruled out suspicions that British scientists were wrongly accused of manipulating data on global warming. A few criticisms remain about the handling of the case.
Around the world, IPCC scientists continue to work...
The pseudo-scandal helped to derail the Copenhagen summit and succeeded in sowing doubt about man's role in climate change. For the past eight months, researchers at the University of East Anglia have been living like pariahs. Now they can look up. The independent commission of inquiry into the "email affair" has cleared them of any fraudulent practices. "Their rigour and honesty cannot be questioned," said the authors of the long-awaited report, published yesterday Wednesday. The document is supposed to put an end to one of the most distressing episodes in the fight against climate change.
The alleged scandal, dubbed Climategate, began in November 2009, when several hundred private emails from members of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) mysteriously ended up online. This prestigious laboratory, based in Norwich, 170 kilometres north-east of London, is renowned for its global temperature measurements. The CRU therefore has an eminently strategic role. Its data serve as the basis for reports to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the supreme body responsible for predicting the future of the planet.
In one of the emails, dated 16 November 1999, the head of the CRU boasts of having found a "ruse" to "hide the drop" in a temperature curve. With these three words, taken from a fraudulently hacked correspondence, climate sceptics believe they have found irrefutable proof of a global conspiracy against the Western way of life.
Sarah Palin calls herself the muse of the motley coalition of "deniers" who deny the role of mankind in global warming. On December 9, 2009, as the Copenhagen summit opens, the short-lived candidate for the American vice-presidency wrote in the Washington Post: "Climategate exposes a highly politicized scientific circle... This scandal calls into question the proposals on the table in Copenhagen. I have always believed that a government program should be based on sound science, not political judgments.... We cannot say with certainty that human activities are the cause of climate change. What we can say, however, is that the potential benefits of proposed emission reduction policies are far less than their economic cost. And these costs are real.
In Copenhagen, the Climategate will weigh heavily. Saudi Arabia, which as an oil producer has much to lose by regulating CO2 emissions, is using the case as a pretext to challenge the allegedly alarmist conclusions of the IPCC.
In the corridors of the summit (where I was sent by RFI), I remember witnessing the total slaughter of glaciologist Jean Jouzel, vice-president of the IPCC. He was watching several decades of painstaking work to raise awareness of the potentially dramatic consequences of the melting glaciers disappear into thin air under the effect of a fearsome media campaign. By undermining the credibility of the scientific community, Climategate contributed to the failure of Copenhagen. It gave a platform to the "negationists", who are now invited to appear on all television sets.
After Copenhagen, British scientists rehabilitated
After months of media hype, the commission of inquiry into the emails from the University of East Anglia has come to dot the i's and cross the t's, refuting one by one all the accusations of the climate sceptics.
* Data manipulation: false.
The climate sceptics suspected East Anglia researchers were manipulating the figures to make it look like hypothetical global warming. Accusation swept aside: "On the allegations against the attitude of the CRU scientists, we have come to the conclusion that their rigour and honesty cannot be questioned. »
* Retention of information: false.
The climatoskeptics complained about not having access to the data. The board of inquiry's response is unambiguous:" The argument that the CRU has something to hide doesn't hold water. Any independent research has the possibility of downloading the data and writing its own conclusions without having recourse to CRU information. »
* Ostracism: false.
The report rejects the idea that CRU researchers abused their position to prevent the publication of articles signed by climatoskeptics. The investigators found "neither subversion of the (scientific) peer review process nor attempts to influence the editorial policies of scientific journals.
In the face of media pressure, Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, admitted in February that he had considered suicide. Suspended for the duration of the investigation, he was immediately reinstated after the publication of the report. For Vice-Chancellor Edward Acton, quoted by the BBC, the researchers' honour must now be washed away: "Conspiracy theories, untruths and misunderstandings are over. We hope that this rehabilitation of the university's scientists, who have suffered considerably from this episode, will be widely echoed. »
Criticisms remain
East Anglia's climatologists have not come out of this long investigation completely clean. The report questions their "uncooperative" and "defensive" attitude. It also criticizes them for a lack of openness in their work.
But on the whole, the commission's conclusions confirm the two previous opinions on Climategate: that of a parliamentary commission in March and that of an internal committee at the university in April, both of which exonerated the researchers.
Serial reversals for climate sceptics
The climate sceptics are no longer in the wind. They were also thrown back on their ropes on 6 July by another inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government. It validates the IPCC's conclusions on the consequences of global warming. Independently of Climategate, the IPCC has also come under attack for errors in its 2007 report, notably on the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by 2035. "The (IPCC) conclusions are well-founded and do not contain any significant errors," say the Dutch investigators.
In June 2010, a study conducted by the US National Academy of Sciences testified to the isolation of the "negationists" (2). It revealed that 98% of climatologists support, like the IPCC, the principle of an acceleration of climate change linked to human activity, which threatens the future of the planet. The clique of sceptics is therefore made up of only a handful of diehards. Despite the scientific consensus, however, they have managed, from the false email scandal to attacks on the IPCC's credibility, to sow doubt in people's minds.
If the climate negotiations have stalled seven months after Copenhagen, it is because the political momentum in favour of a binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has largely waned, notably under the effect of "negationist" theses.
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