Who's to blame for Climategate?

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The publication of damning emails about climate change could literally change the world. Gordon Rayner reports.

By Gordon Rayner
Published: 7:31PM GMT 27 Nov 2009

The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich. To the uninitiated, it has the look of a Seventies bus station waiting for the council to pull it down.

Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy which just might influence the entire future of our planet.

A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.

At first, the fallout was restricted to a row between climate change experts, played out in scientific journals and specialist internet blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, "Climategate" has become a white hot political issue which has been seized upon by global warming sceptics and now threatens to overshadow next month's crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen.

In the US, where the CRU emails have been cited as proof of "the greatest act of scientific fraud in history", there are very real fears that hardline Republicans – together with powerful Right-wing media organisations – will use the scandal to scupper President Obama's proposed legislation to cap carbon emissions.

In Australia, the world's worst carbon dioxide polluter per capita, 10 opposition front bench MPs have resigned in protest at a proposed carbon bill, their resolve seemingly strengthened by the emergence of the emails.

And here in the UK, although the main political parties agree that global warming does exist and is man-made, there have been calls for the head of the CRU to resign over the scandal, and demands for a full-scale public inquiry from the former chancellor Lord Lawson who, this week, launched a new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to challenge the consensus on global warming policy.

Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails exposed by the anonymous hacker.

In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote: "I've just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline."

Gotcha! say the global warming sceptics who have argued for years that average temperatures on Earth are, in reality, either stable or going down. Professor Jones defended himself by claiming the word "trick" was used out of context and simply referred to a legitimate method of handling data. But there was more.

An email sent by one of Prof Jones's colleagues said: "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."

Prof Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another email in which he said sceptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send it to anyone". By chance, he now admits he has "accidentally" deleted some of the raw data.

Another message said the CRU's method of collating data "renders the station counts totally meaningless... so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Prof Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the emails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well." On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.

Although Prof Jones is not what you could call a household name (though he soon might be) he is, without doubt, one of the world's most influential proponents of the theory of man-made global warming.

The CRU has the largest archive of global temperature data in the world, and its research formed the basis of the United Nations' key document on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007.

But Prof Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the US House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Prof Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.

Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the emails as final proof that global warming is nothing more than a hoax which is being covered up by governments who have themselves been duped.

Suddenly, Phil Jones is the name on the lips of every Right-wing commentator in the US, some of whom have warned that President Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has described the emails as a "game-changer" for Obama cap and trade bills. Fox's climate change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Prof Jones was guilty of an "unprecedented co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information". Meanwhile Matt Drudge, arguably the most influential reporter on the internet and the man who broke the story of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the email scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website.

Nor are journalists the only ones predicting Climategate will influence US policy. Senator Peter King suggested the emails would "have some impact in slowing down or stopping the cap and trade bill" while fellow Republican senator James Inhofe has called for an investigation into the emails – some of which were sent to government-funded researchers in the US – and alerted the relevant US government agencies to their content.

President Obama's climate tsar Carol Browner has even been forced to make a public statement on the emails, insisting the science on global warming remains sound.

In Australia, meanwhile, the scandal has helped stoke a growing rift in the opposition Liberal Party, which had been poised to back Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution bill, but which is hopelessly split on the issue after 10 of its most senior politicians resigned, threatening to challenge party leader Malcolm Turnbull if he does not oppose the legislation.

Many critics have expressed incredulity that Prof Jones has not been sacked, but his fate is of little consequence compared with the effect the scandal could have on world climate change policy.

Prof Jones is in little doubt that the timing of the leak – two weeks before the start of the Copenhagen conference – was a "concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change" at the most sensitive possible time. Next month's Copenhagen conference has been billed as the last chance for world leaders to prevent an irreversible change to the planet's climate. Unless they can reach a binding agreement on reducing global emissions, mankind could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.

The hacker who exposed the emails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement – an outcome which is likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the US, such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that the CRU emails were evidence of what "could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history" and suggested that "nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud".

However Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, believes world leaders will pay little attention to the scandal surrounding the CRU, arguing that politics, not science, will decide the fate of the Copenhagen summit.

"The politicians won't be swayed by this," he said. "It's basic physics that the world is being warmed by greenhouse gases, and politicians can see through the sceptics' arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won't be because of these emails. And in the US, President Obama's cap and trade bills will be decided by 12 or 13 Democratic senators who represent states with large coal and oil reserves."

Mr Ward does not believe the emails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported Lord Lawson's calls for an independent investigation so the matter can be cleared up.

He said: "I don't believe there is any evidence here of fraud, but it's regrettable that this has happened and I regret the fact that some members of the research community have dismissed out of hand those who have tried to make a counter-argument."

Whether or not Climategate influences the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, it seems that its long-term legacy will be to make the ongoing war of words between "warmists" and "coolists" more poisonous than ever.