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The Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident came to light in November 2009 with the unauthorised release of documents, allegedly obtained by hacking of a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich. Unknown persons allegedly stole and anonymously disseminated thousands of e-mails and other documents made over the course of 13 years. Selected information from these documents has been distributed by opponents of the case for anthropogenic global warming in a controversy dubbed Climategate. The university confirmed that "data, including personal information about individuals, appears to have been illegally taken from the university and elements published selectively on a number of websites." and expressed concern "that personal information about individuals may have been compromised." Norfolk police are investigating the incident and, along with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), are also investigating death threats that were subsequently made against climate scientists named in the e-mails.

The controversy arose after various allegations were made including that climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific information, interfered with the peer-review process to prevent dissenting scientific papers from being published, deleted e-mails and raw data to prevent data being revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, and manipulated data to make the case for global warming appear stronger than skeptics claim it is. Climate scientists issued rebuttals and described the incident as a smear campaign, accusing the climate change sceptics of selectively quoting words and phrases out of context in an attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen global climate summit.

On November 24, the University of East Anglia announced it would conduct an independent review of the matter and subsequently announced that the CRU's director, Professor Phil Jones, would temporarily stand aside from his post during the investigation.

Unauthorised publication

Unidentified persons accessed a server used by the Climatic Research Unit, posting online copies of e-mails and documents that they found. The incident involved the unauthorised publication of more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 other documents, consisting of 160 MB of data in total. The University of East Anglia stated that the server from which the files were taken was not one that could easily have been accessed and the files could not have been released inadvertently.

The breach was first discovered after someone hacked the server of the RealClimate website on 17 November and uploaded a copy of the stolen files. According to Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate, "At around 6.20am (EST) Nov 17th, somebody hacked into the RC server from an IP address associated with a computer somewhere in Turkey, disabled access from the legitimate users, and uploaded a file FOIA.zip to our server." A link to the file on the RealClimate server was posted from a Russian IP address to the Climate Audit blog at 7.24 am (EST) with the comment "A miracle just happened". The hack was discovered by Schmidt only a couple of minutes after it had occurred. He temporarily shut down the website and deleted the uploaded file. RealClimate notified the University of East Anglia of the incident.

On 19 November the files were uploaded to a server in Tomsk before being copied to numerous locations across the Internet. An anonymous statement, posted from a Saudi Arabian IP address to the climate-sceptic blog The Air Vent, defended the hacking on the grounds that climate science is "too important to be kept under wraps" and described the material as "a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents."

The alleged theft is being investigated by the Norfolk Constabulary working alongside the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit. The Norfolk police confirmed that they were "investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia". The identity of the supposed hackers is as yet unknown.

Following the release of the e-mails, climate scientists at the CRU and elsewhere have received numerous threatening and abusive e-mails. Norfolk Police have interviewed CRU director Phil Jones about death threats made against him following the release of the emails, and death threats against two scientists also are currently under investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. Climate scientists in Australia have reported receiving threatening e-mails including references to where they live and warnings to "be careful" about how some people might react to their scientific findings.

Content of the documents

The stolen material comprised more than 1,000 e-mails, 2,000 documents, as well as commented source code, pertaining to climate change research covering a period from 1996 until 2009. Some of the e-mails included discussions of how to combat the arguments of climate change sceptics, unflattering comments about sceptics, queries from journalists, drafts of scientific papers, and discussions of efforts to shut out dissenters and their points of view, and destroying various files in order to prevent data being revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. In an interview with The Guardian, Phil Jones confirmed that the e-mails that had sparked the most controversy appeared to be genuine.

On November 24 the University of East Anglia issued a statement on the contents of the e-mails. The statement noted: "There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest quality of scientific investigation and interpretation. CRU’s peer-reviewed publications are consistent with, and have contributed to, the overwhelming scientific consensus that the climate is being strongly influenced by human activity."

E-mails

The vast majority of the e-mails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate research, such as data analysis and details of scientific conferences. The controversy has focused on a small number of e-mails, particularly those sent to or from climatologists Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, and Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University (PSU), one of the originators of the graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph".

Jones e-mail of 16 Nov 1999

An excerpt from one November 1999 e-mail authored by Phil Jones reads:

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Some critics cite this sentence as evidence that temperature statistics are being manipulated. Several scientific sources have said that the decline being referred to is a decline in tree ring climate proxy metrics, not temperature.

The e-mail refered to Jones's preparation of a chart for the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) statement on the status of global climate in 1999. The University of East Anglia responded to the email:

"This email referred to a "trick" of adding recent instrumental data to the end of temperature reconstructions that were based on proxy data."

Writing in The Times, Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the UEA, described what had been done:

"They draw the line to follow the tree-ring reconstruction up to 1960 and the measured temperature after that."

Time quoted Michael Mann:

According to PSU's Mann, that statistical "trick" that Jones refers to in one e-mail — which has been trumpeted by skeptics — simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures.

RealClimate characterizes the e-mail excerpt as follows:

The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the 'trick' is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term "trick" to refer to a "a good way to deal with a problem", rather than something that is "secret", and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the 'decline', it is well known that Keith Briffa's maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the "divergence problem" — see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommended not using the post-1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while 'hiding' is probably a poor choice of words (since it is 'hidden' in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Mann describes the "trick" as simply a concise way of showing the two kinds of data together while still clearly indicating which was which and has denied that there was anything "hidden or inappropriate" about it and that his method of combining proxy data had been corroborated by numerous statistical tests and matched thermometer readings taken over the past 150 years.

Stephen McIntyre claims in this paper that the "trick to hide the decline" consisted in discarding the tree ring data starting from 1961, because the proxy data for this years demonstrated a sharp decrease of temperatures, contrary to the real data - casting therefore doubt on reliability of all the tree ring data reconstruction.

Mann e-mail of 11 Mar 2003

In one e-mail, as a response to an e-mail indicating that a paper in the scientific journal Climate Research had questioned assertions that the 20th century was abnormally warm, Mann wrote:

I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."

Mann told the Wall Street Journal that he didn't feel there was anything wrong in saying "we shouldn't be publishing in a journal that's activist."

Mann was not alone in expressing concern about the peer review process of the journal. Half of the journal's editorial board, including editor-in-chief Hans von Storch, resigned in the wake of controversy surrounding the article's publication. The publisher later admitted that the paper's major findings could not "be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication."

Jones e-mail of 8 Jul 2004

An 8 July 2004 e-mail from Phil Jones to Michael Mann said in part:

"The other paper by MM is just garbage. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Peter Kelemen, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said that "If scientists attempted to exclude critics' peer-reviewed papers from IPCC reports, this was unethical in my view." Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, responded that the IPCC has "a very transparent, a very comprehensive process which ensures that even if someone wants to leave out a piece of peer reviewed literature there is virtually no possibility of that happening."

The University of East Anglia's commission will evaluate whether CRU's peer-review practices comply with best scientific practice.

Jones e-mail of 2 Feb 2005

A 2 February 2005 email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann includes:

"And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs 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 to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days?—our does! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.

Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research at CRU, Trevor Davies, said that no data was deleted or "otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure". In response to allegations that CRU avoided obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, independent investigator Muir Russell plans to review CRU's "policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act".

Trenberth e-mail of 12 Oct 2009

An email written by Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, discussed gaps in understanding of recent temperature variations:

"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,"

However, Trenberth told the Associated Press that the phrase was actually used in reference to an article he authored calling for improvement in measuring global warming to describe unusual data, such as rising sea surface temperatures. The word travesty refers to what Trenberth sees as an inadequate observing system that, were it more adequate, would be able to track the warming he believes is there.

Code and documentation

The stolen files also included temperature reconstruction programs written in Fortran and IDL, including programmer comments and a readme file. In a BBC Newsnight report, software engineer John Graham-Cumming found the code to be "below commercial standards." Other investigations posted in various editorials and blogs have claimed that the comments and readme files indicate that the temperature reconstructions hide and manipulate data to show a temperature increase and question the accurary of the instrumental temperature record.

Libertarian columnist Declan McCullagh, in an editorial for CBS News, has claimed that programmers have found the code to be "undocumented and buggy" and have found logic errors through investigation and debugging. He further stated that "East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way."

Calls for inquiries

In the United Kingdom and United States, there were calls for official inquiries into issues raised by the documents, and calls for Jones' firing or resignation. Climate change sceptic Lord Lawson said "The integrity of the scientific evidence... has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay", and the climate sceptic Senator Jim Inhofe also planned to demand an inquiry. Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said: "There needs to be an assurance that these email messages have not revealed inappropriate conduct in the preparation of journal articles and in dealing with requests from other researchers for access to data. This will probably require investigations both by the host institutions and by the relevant journals." A government scientific agency could also conduct an inquiry, he said.

University of East Anglia response

Shortly after the release of the e-mails, Trevor Davies, the University of East Anglia pro-vice-chancellor with responsibility for research, rejected calls for Jones' resignation or firing: "We see no reason for Professor Jones to resign and, indeed, we would not accept his resignation. He is a valued and important scientist." The university announced it would conduct an independent review to "address the issue of data security, an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests, and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed". George Monbiot strongly criticized the UEA's response, calling it "a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond." Monbiot continued, "The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline."

The university announced on 1 December that Phil Jones was to stand aside temporarily as director of the Unit during the investigation. Two days later, the university announced that Sir Muir Russell would chair the review, and would "examine e-mail exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data" as well as review CRU's policies and practices for "acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review, and disseminating data and research findings" and "their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice". In addition, the investigation would review CRU's compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests and also 'make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds".

Met Office response

On November 23, a spokesman for the Met Office, a UK agency which works with the CRU in providing global-temperature information, said there was no need for an inquiry. "The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be."

On December 5, however, concerned that public confidence in the science had been damaged by leaked e-mails, the Met Office indicated their intention to re-examine 160 years of temperature data, as well as to release temperature records for over 1000 worldwide weather stations online. The Met Office remained confident that its analysis will be shown to be correct and that the data would show a temperature rise over the past 150 years.

Other responses

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC that he considered the affair to be "a serious issue and we will look into it in detail." He later clarified that the IPCC would review the incident to identify lessons to be learned, and he rejected suggestions that the IPCC itself should carry out an investigation. The only investigations being carried out were those of the University of East Anglia and the British police.

Pennsylvania State University announced it would review the work of Michael Mann, in particular looking at anything had not already been addressed in an earlier National Academy of Sciences review which had found some faults with his methodology but agreed with the results. In response, Mann said he would welcome the review.

Reactions to the incident

Climatologists

The CRU's researchers said in a statement that the e-mails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, called the charges that the e-mails involve any "untoward" activity "ludicrous." Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center who is among those implicated in the controversy, said that sceptics were "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious", and called the entire incident a careful, "high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem." Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said that he was appalled at the release of the e-mails but thought that it might backfire against climate sceptics, as the messages would show "the integrity of scientists." He has also said that the theft may be aimed at undermining talks at the December 2009 Copenhagen global climate summit.

According to the University of East Anglia, the documents and e-mails had been selected deliberately to undermine the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world's climate in ways that are potentially dangerous. The university said in a statement: "The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way".

Tom Wigley, a director of the CRU until 1993 and now a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, condemned the threats that he and other colleagues had received as "truly stomach-turning", and commented: "None of it affects the science one iota. Accusations of data distortion or faking are baseless. I can rebut and explain all of the apparently incriminating e-mails that I have looked at, but it is going to be very time consuming to do so." In relation to the harassment that he and his colleagues were experiencing, he noted: "This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behaviour - criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past. So this is a worse manifestation but it's happened before so it's not that surprising."

One of the scientists whose e-mails were disclosed, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, stated that climate change sceptics had selectively quoted words and phrases out of context in an attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen global climate summit in December. Other prominent climate scientists, such as Richard Somerville, have called the incident a smear campaign.

The author and climatologist David Reay of the University of Edinburgh noted that the CRU "is just one of many climate-research institutes that provide the underlying scientific basis for climate policy at national and international levels. The conspiracy theorists may be having a field day, but if they really knew academia they would also know that every published paper and data set is continually put through the wringer by other independent research groups. The information that makes it into the IPCC reports is some of the most rigorously tested and debated in any area of science."

The IPCC's head, Rajendra Pachauri, declared his support for the scientists involved: "The persons who have worked on this report and those who have unfortunately been victims of this terrible and illegal act are outstanding scientists." He commented that he could "only surmise that those who carried this out have obviously done it with very clear intention to influence the process in Copenhagen."

One of the IPCC's lead authors, Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, expressed concern at the precedent established by the hack: "his is a criminal act of vandalism and of harassment of a group of scientists that are only going about their business doing science. It represents a whole new escalation in the war on climate scientists who are only trying to get at the truth... What next? Deliberate monkeying with data on servers? Insertion of bugs into climate models?"

Another IPCC lead author, David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, reported receiving numerous hate e-mails in the wake of the incident and said that he believed there was "an organised campaign to discredit individual climate scientists". Andrew Pitman of the University of New South Wales commented: "The major problem is that scientists have to be able to communicate their science without fear or favour and there seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign designed to intimidate some scientists."

In response to the incident, 1,700 British scientists signed a joint statement circulated by the UK Met Office declaring their "utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities." Met Office chief executive John Hirst and its chief scientist Julia Slingo asked their colleagues to sign the statement "to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change."

Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist derided in the e-mails for doubting human-influenced global warming, said some e-mails showed an effort to block the release of data for independent review. He said some messages discussed discrediting him by claiming he knew his research was wrong in his doctoral dissertation. "This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people's reputations in very serious ways."

Climatologist James Hansen said that the controversy has "no effect on the science" and that while some of the e-mails reflect poor judgment, the evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who agrees with the mainstream view of global warming, wrote that the e-mails reflect a problem with scientists lacking openness about their data and attacking those they disagree with: "t is difficult to understand the continued circling of the wagons by some climate researchers with guns pointed at sceptical researchers by apparently trying to withhold data and other information of relevance to published research, thwart the peer review process, and keep papers out of assessment reports. Scientists are of course human, and short-term emotional responses to attacks and adversity are to be expected, but I am particularly concerned by this apparent systematic and continuing behavior from scientists that hold editorial positions, serve on important boards and committees and participate in the major assessment reports. It is these issues revealed in the HADCRU emails that concern me the most "

Climatologist Hans von Storch, who also concurs with the mainstream view on global warming, said that the University of East Anglia (UEA) had "violated a fundamental principle of science" by refusing to share data with other researchers. "They play science as a power game," he said.

Scientific organizations

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I issued statements explaining that the assessment process, involving hundreds of scientists worldwide, is designed to be transparent and to prevent any individual or small group to manipulate the process. The statement noted that the "internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges".

The American Meteorological Society stated that the incident did not affect the society's position on climate change. They pointed to the breadth of evidence for human influence on climate, stating "For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited."

The American Geophysical Union issued a statement expressing concern that the emails were "being exploited to distort the scientific debate about the urgent issue of climate change" and reaffirming their 2007 position statement with regard to human influences on climate. They stated that "Science and the scientific method is seldom a linear march to the 'correct' and indisputable answer. Disagreement among scientists is part of the energy that moves inquiry forward."

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has "expressed concern that the hacked emails would weaken global resolve to curb greenhouse-gas emissions". Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the AAAS and executive publisher of the journal Science, said "AAAS takes issues of scientific integrity very seriously. It is fair and appropriate to pursue answers to any allegations of impropriety. It’s important to remember, though, that the reality of climate change is based on a century of robust and well-validated science."

Elected representatives and governments

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejected the view that the leaked e-mails had damaged the credibility of climate science. Speaking at the Copenhagen conference on climate change, he said: "Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear – that climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that there is no doubt about the scientific evidence that underpins the Copenhagen conference: "Its landmark importance cannot be wished away by the theft of a few emails from one university research centre." Brown commented that the purpose of the climate change skeptics' campaign was clear, and its timing was no coincidence. "It is designed to destabilise and undermine the efforts of the countries gathering in Copenhagen."

During a press briefing on December 7, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "I think scientists are clear on the science. I think many on Capitol Hill are clear on the science. I think that this notion that there is some debate ... on the science is kind of silly."

Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban said he thought the incident will have a "huge impact" on the Copenhagen conference. "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," he told BBC News the week before the summit.

During the annual Queen's Speech debate in the House of Commons on 24 November 2009, the former Conservative Cabinet minister Peter Lilley challenged the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband over the e-mails. Miliband declined to comment on the content of the e-mails but commented: "We should be cautious about using partial emails that have been leaked to somehow cast doubt on the scientific consensus that there is. That is very dangerous and irresponsible because the scientific consensus is clear."

Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, an outspoken sceptic of climate change, said "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in." Inhofe stated on Fox News that an official investigation action has commenced, and that it will have an effect on the "Cap and Trade" legistlation.

Other expert commentary

Professor Roger Pielke Sr., an atmospheric scientist at CIRES at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a professor emeritus and former climatologist at Colorado State University and an active critic of the IPCC process stated, " ... (W)ith respect to the RealClimate dismissal of the emails, however, there are serious issues exposed by the emails — including the goal of these scientists to prevent proper scientific disclosure of their data, as well as to control what papers appear in the peer reviewed literature and climate assessments. The IPCC assessment, with which major policy decisions are being made, involves the individuals in the emails who have senior leadership positions."

The science historian Spencer R. Weart, interviewed in the Washington Post, commented that the theft of the e-mails and the reaction to them was "a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers."

Similar incidents

The Canadian Center for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, has also been targeted by individuals who have attempted to break into climatologists' offices and computer systems. The University's Professor Andrew Weaver, who is one of the IPCC's lead authors, commented: "One of the sad realities of being a scientist working in this area is you get targeted. I have had no end of nasty emails and phone calls." He believed that the hackers "were trying to find any dirt they could, as they have done in the UK. If they can't find 'dirt', they manufacture it from out-of-context emails or skewed statistics."

See also

• Global warming controversy
• Climate change in the United Kingdom

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• Misplaced Pages neutral point of view disputes from December 2009
• Climate change assessment and attribution
• Environmental controversies
• Global warming
• Environmental skepticism
• Ethics of science and technology
• Hacking (computer security)
• 2009 in science
• 2009 in England