Turning tricks

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Mark Twain wrote those words in the early 20th century, but he may as well have been commenting on “ClimateGate,” the controversy that began late last month after anonymous perpetrators illegally hacked the servers of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. The hackers subsequently distributed on the Internet thousands of documents and personal e-mails, as well as computer code used in climate modeling. The data that has been disseminated appears to have been specifically selected to embarrass and discredit global-warming scientists right before the global climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, December 6-18, and there’s no question that, to a certain extent, the hackers have been successful.

Auntie would be remiss not to point out that Twain was writing figuratively when he rated “statistics” above “damned lies”; he was commenting on his own ineptitude with figures. Apparently, the deniers of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, including Rush Limbaugh, the entire staff of Fox News and right-wing Republican Sen. James “Truth Squad” Inhofe from Oklahoma, are infected with a similar form of numerophobia. Rather than wade through the voluminous scientific evidence that indicates AGW is happening and challenge the data, they broadcast snippets from out-of-context e-mails and say these prove that climate change is a damned lie. Unfortunately, they’re being quite literal.

The most damning e-mail in the skeptics’ eyes is the “trick.” In 1999, climate scientist Phil Jones wrote to a colleague, stating, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick … to hide the decline.” Deniers say this proves Jones falsified data. What Jones actually did is use an accepted statistical method to replace so-called proxy data from tree rings—which are used to estimate temperatures before 1850, before instruments were available, but are a poor indicator of rising temperatures over time—with instrument-measured data for the years after 1960. The technique was originally used in scientist Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph in 1998, and although it has been vigorously debated and subsequently revised in the scientific community during the past 10 years, it has withstood the test of time. Auntie is pretty sure we won’t be able to say the same thing about ClimateGate.