The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee met yesterday for a one off evidence session looking at the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This blog post is a brief summary of the key issues. [Apologies for the use of some jargon that crops up because of the nature of the CRU emails.]

Lord Lawson and Dr Benny Peiser were first up. They represent the Global Warming Policy Foundation who, amusingly, failed to plot 8 temperature values correctly in their logo – I’m not sure that this gives them the authority to question 25 years of academic research on climate data but let’s see what they had to say…

Lawson’s main point was about the fundamental importance of transparency in science (not that Lawson or Peiser have ever been scientists). However, he would not answer the question put to him about who funds his organisation – this was a bit of a cheap shot but it helped make the point that transparency is only important to them in other organisations.

Evan Harris MP did excellent work in setting Lawson up for a fall in his questions about the “…hide the decline…” emails. Lawson was claiming that the details of dendroclimatology divergence were not discussed in any of the subsequent key papers on tree ring based climate reconstructions. Harris then got Lawson to agree that if the CRU scientists could show that they did discuss this matter in their publications then this was not an issue. This comes up again later.

Lawson also brought up an incorrect criticism of satellite measurements, which was subsequently corrected, and claimed that the hockey stick graph was “fraudulent” and periods of it were based on only one tree, claims which he has no evidence to back up.

Ian Stewart MP also asked some questions about work that the GWPF plan to do that highlighted their lack of scientific credentials or ambition. Lawson also brought up an incorrect criticism of satellite measurements, which Prof. Julia Slingo (MetOffice) would subsequently correct, and claimed that the “hockey stick” graph was “fraudulent” and periods of it were based on only one tree, claims which he has no evidence to back up.

Next to be questioned was Richard Thomas CBE, UK Information Commissioner (2002-2009), who provided some quite technical details on Freedom of Information – I’m not too sure what he added to the session. I suspect I do not understand enough about FoI laws but my interpretation of his evidence was that CRU may or may not have done anything wrong and that methodology, if documented, has to be distributed under FoI requests but there is no requirement to document it.

I felt that the most important witness, Prof. Phil Jones (accompanied by UEA vice-chancellor Prof. Edward Acton), did not look particularly well and spoke a bit shakily. He went over quite a bit of the background to CRU’s work and data policies and delt with most of the issues. However, he could have done much better when asked about reproducibility of CRU’s gridded surface temperature products by others: all he needed to say was that as long as someone spent the time collecting the data from meteorological organisations and read some scientific papers then they could, with a bit of work, re-produce the CRU temperature product! Reproducability does not mean that you have to give anyone everything you’ve ever worked on.

This was typical of his statments – it seemed like he missed the point of many of the questions – this was quite a contrast to Lawson who was obviously more comfortable with the rhetoric required to successfully get through these sessions. In particular, Jones’ statement that he’d sent some “awful emails” was probably meant as a joke but it didn’t get any laughs.

It seemed like Phil Jones missed the point of many of the questions – this was quite a contrast to Lawson who was obviously more comfortable with the rhetoric required to successfully get through these sessions.

Evan Harris MP completed his manoeuvre of highlighting Lord Lawson’s misunderstanding of the divergence issue – Phil Jones described that the “trick” was discussed in a Nature paper, where he suspects they were the first group to use the term “divergence”, and that they were explicit in subsequent papers about this issue. I suspect that this will be a key point in the committee’s report.

Harris appeared to be the only member of the committee that understood the background enough to have devised a consistent line of questioning to the witnesses. Indeed, some of the questions from other committee members made it clear their understanding of peer review and research methods was not great.

My live streaming of the event cut out as Sir Muir Russell (Head of the Independent Climate Change E-Mails Review) took the hot seat so I missed his and Prof. John Beddington (Government Chief Scientific Adviser), Prof. Julia Slingo OBE (Chief Scientist, Met Office) and Prof. Bob Watson’s (Chief Scientist, Defra) statements but, reviewing the Gaurdian live blog of the session, there don’t seeem to have been any more bombshells. The most important development was that the quite negative Institute of Physics evidence submission came up – the final group of witnesses felt that it pre-judged the outcome of the enquiry.

My overall impression was that the committee, as well as the GWPF, didn’t seem to understand enough about the scientific process to make progress in this case: papers don’t have a right to be published – they have to be good enough; scientific methods are discussed in papers but no-one publishes computer code of how the analyses were performed (this should probably change though). Phil Jones was also not well prepared to answer general questions from a non-specialist panel and would clearly prefer to deal with arguments in the pages of peer-reviewed journals.

My overall impression was that the committee, as well as the GWPF, didn’t seem to understand enough about the scientific process to make progress in this case.

Update: The Institute of Physics have recently ‘clarified their position’.

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So, what does it really mean?

A little bit of background…

To understand the significance of Glaciergate, we first need to understand how the IPCC works. This is my perspective.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is split into 3 Working Groups:

• WGI: The Physical Science Basis
• WGII: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
• WGIII: Mitigation of Climate Change

Each group produced a separate report in 2007. Each report was about 1000 pages long. All this information was also summarised in a Synthesis Report. This was the fourth IPCC report round, the others were in 1990, 1995 and 2001.

WGI reviews and synthesises all the work on the physics and chemistry of the Earth system and tries to make projections of how things like temperature, rainfall and atmospheric circulation will change in the future. I refer to this report a lot in my work as a meteorologist/climatologist.

I know a little about Working Group II – as well as climatologists, it is written by hydrologists, glaciologists, economists, social scientists and medical scientists and considers the potential impacts of climate change.

I have very little idea about what goes on in WGIII. I also confess that I’ve never looked at the WGIII report. WGs II and III rely on a certain degree of informed speculation; it is their business to ask what the world would be like, and what we could do about it, if certain things happen based on the projections from WGI.

Was the Himalayan meltdown a “central claim” (as reported by The Times) in the IPCC report?

The 2035 date relating to the Himalayas appeared in one sentence in Chapter 10 of the Working Group II report. So this is one sentence in nearly 3000 pages. As far as I can see (please correct me if I’m wrong) the 2035 claim was not repeated in the WGII Summary for Policymakers or the overall Synthesis Report. Furthermore, as investigated by the Deltoid Blog, this prediction about the Himalayas was almost universally ignored by the press in 2007 when the report was published. The 2035 prediction was clearly not a central claim.

How did the “2035″ date get into the report?

As we said above, WGII is relatively speculative by nature. In this context, was Glaciergate a reviewing error rather than an attempt to distort the science? Well, one of the reviewers for this section (Dr. Hayley Fowler from the University of Newcastle, see here for the reviewer comments for WGII Chapter 10) actually picked up the unjustified “2035″ claim and suggested some proper peer reviewed papers to improve the relevant section. The report author’s response to Dr. Fowler’s comment was: “unable to get hold of the suggested references”. This response is clearly not adequate but it is more than conceivable that one of many suggested revisions was missed rather than ignored deliberately to overstate the impact of a changing climate.

Indeed, this is the first questioning of anything in the IPCC report that I can remember since it was published in 2007 – that says a lot for the usual skill and thoroughness of the report reviewers, despite the failure in this one case, and suggests that there wasn’t a systematic effort to exaggerate climate impacts.

Most importantly, though, the WGII glacier claim changes absolutely nothing about the fundamental science behind climate change that appears in WGI. To dismiss the IPCC because of Glaciergate is like saying you wont trust anything in The Times newspaper because they once printed a football result wrong. The WGI science is all robust and, if anything, quite conservative in its claims and projections.

“Dr Rajendra Pachauri (IPCC Chair) is a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics and no formal climate science qualifications”

The Express article also makes the above statement as if it also undermines the whole of the IPCC. If anything, it just shows that the reporter has very little idea what the IPCC actually does. Pachauri has worked in several different scientific disciplines and has headed a large organisation before. In my mind, that more than qualifies him to head the IPCC.

Anyway, if you’re looking for people with in depth knowledge of specific fields, then there are the WG Chairs. For example, WGI was chaired by Susan Solomon, who stands a pretty good chance of being awarded a Nobel prize for her work in the 1980s on the ozone “hole”. Beneath the WG Chairs, each chapter has at least 1 co-ordinating author and 1 lead author. Beneath them, each chapter also has many contributing authors, all experts in their field.  Their work is all reviewed by other experts.

This attack on Pachauri doesn’t hold up.

“The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific consensus over climate change”

This claim was made in the Times article, with the other cited cracks being the CRU email theft and something about sea level rise estimates. This claim seems to assume that “consensus” means that no new work is going on in the climate sciences or at least demonstrates a complete ignorance of how science works.

Things will change in the science, which is exactly why the plans for the next IPCC report (due in 2014) are already well under way. These are exciting (and, if I’m honest, a little depressing) times for climate science so its disappointing that many people outside the research community don’t want to know about it!

Andrew Russell, a climate & weather researcher at the University of Manchester. This post was been reproduced (and slightly updated) from a post that originally appeared on Andy Russell’s Blog on 18/1/2010.

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