Pardon the Interruption: OUTRAGE

If you have not heard by now, a major breaking story is unfolding involving the release of internal e-mail correspondence, attached files (including pieces of code which others are scrambling to analyze) and other data stolen from the Hadley Climate Center in Britain. The Hadley Center is one of the most influential organizations amongst the delegates to the International Panel on Climate Change and one of the loudest voices backing the theory of anthropogenic global warming as a potentially imminent disaster looming large enough that international laws are required to curb the danger. Some of their leading figures are now potentially implicated in a scandal - see this link....or for a less biased report - follow this link. Thankfully the mainstream media is starting to catch up with this story as the exchanges are being verified.

We recognize that the Telegraph is a biased publication and that they have a long history of backing the climate skeptics position, but the mainstream media is dragging its heals even reporting the possibility that there may have been fraud, scientific bullying, British law violations, and cruel comments flying about for a decade at Hadley CRU. Normally, I'm all for journalistic integrity and for being certain that the story is legitimate before commenting, but I am rather sold on the following facts:

1) The Hadley Center was indeed hacked - possibly by an insider with an axe to grind - the CRU has admitted this in public announcements.

2) The data is likely to be legitimate - the stuff leaking out is the tip of the iceberg, but what we have seen so far is chilling and, unless some innocent explanation presents itself on a number of occasions - borderline criminal - however the global warming blogosphere has been hard at work the last two days analyzing the information and there seems to be a consensus that the information in the header files of each e-mail is far too specific and thorough to have been faked.

3) At a minimum, even with the most innocent interpretation imaginable, we have evidence that if the IPCC funded AGW scientists don't like your position, they won't publish your paper in the mainstream journals and now...they plan to boycott secondary peer-reviewed journals that publish the contrary position to the "consensus." At the core of the scientific method is a foundation based on honest and open *debate.* If you are confident in your position on global warming, you sholdn't fear the opposing position appearing in peer-reviewed journals. You should publish responses and you should answer their questions in open debate. The lengths the Hadley Center has apparently gone through to tweak their data, keep that data out of the hands of researchers who they believe are not sympathetic to their party line, bully climate skeptics out of the profession and extort millions upon millions of dollars worth of grant money from western nations despite their own confessed internal doubts about the validity of their claims is mind boggling.

This has been a most distressing day. My field is rapidly losing credibility because a group of us decided we were above the rest and in a position to play God with the climate system and with the government policies of every developed nation. The following things will happen if any of this turns out to be substantiated:

a) Funding will be harder to come by for research institutions like mine which are inextricably linked to AGW theory.

b) If the climate does cool as I believe it will in the next 20 years (in response to a cooling Pacific Decadal Oscillation and reduce total solar irradiance), the public opinion on global warming will swing too far the other way. People will never listen to climate scientists again and this could be disastrous if there does in fact turn out to be human impacts on the climate system that need to be dealt with far into the future.

c) Climate change will be added to the list of great scientific hoaxes - probably somewhere near the top along with SETI and the DDT panic.

d) People entrenched in the AGW camp will dig themselves in even deeper and become impossible for people like me to work with. The field will become divided and progress based on open debate and communication will be impossible.

GISS (NASA's remote sensing branch - currently their research dollars are primarily focused on satellite-based estimates of global temperature (atmosphere and sea-surface) and ice cover) has already been caught tweaking the data on at least one rather embarrassing occasion. If we have indeed caught the Hadley Center at the heart of a major string of unethical actions recorded for all to see in their e-mail exchanges, any good scientist should be outraged. Unfortunately, the many good scientists with whom I work spent today rationalizing and coming up with as many reasons not to be worried as they could. A fellow student passed off some of the most insensitive and unethical sounding quotes as "e-mail chatter...people say stupid things in e-mail that they don't really believe." One of the professors remarked when the story hit his desk (courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which, as far as I know, is a relatively balanced rag politically, though it does have a pro-business bias, for obvious reasons), "well sure...the right wingers are going to be all over this and making it more than what it is." Another student noted that everything was being taken out of context and he couldn't believe that any respected scientist would be unethical enough to behave the way it appeared (really? Ever heard of some of the horrible medical experiments conducted by both the US and Germany during WWII?).

I will wait before coming to final conclusions, because it's fair to wonder whether some of this is not as bad as it looks...but it suffices to say that I'm gravely concerned.