Cooking up a heat wave

Environment | 'Climategate' scandal reveals alarming tactics of influential climate scientists | Timothy Lamer

Illustration by Dem10/iStock

The earth has warmed over the last several decades, and humanity may be partly responsible, but the science behind that claim was dealt a severe blow late last month.

Just as world leaders were preparing to meet in Copenhagen to discuss climate change, thousands of hacked emails and documents from one of the world's leading climate research institutes raised fundamental questions about the science behind global warming theory. The emails came from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England, and they revealed a pattern of groupthink and deception among influential climate scientists.

The "Climategate" scandal that ensued has three main elements:

• The manipulation of (often poor) data. In one email, CRU director Phil Jones discusses a "trick" he used "to hide the decline" in some temperature readings. In another lengthy document, a computer programmer for CRU laments "the hopeless state of our databases," which were riddled with false information and guesswork: "It's botch after botch after botch." Another emailer, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, shows an intense desire for the science to produce a specific result: "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."