Pierrehumbert, who made news just a few weeks ago with an "Open Letter to Steve Levitt" that eviscerated the SuperFreakonomics co-author for some rank stupidity on the topic of solar panels, has a point. I'm sure I don't want anyone breaking into my home computer network and posting all my private e-mails and documents for the world to see. It would be an embarrassing invasion of privacy.

But in the context of the political battle over climate change, Pierrehumbert is making the wrong point. Who cares? The only meaningful response to this crisis is to get out in front, explain the context of each and every e-mail, and address forthrightly whatever improprieties may or may not exist. Because there may well be more to come.  The Competitive Enterprise Institute just announced that it is suing NASA for what it calls a "failure to respond" to Freedom of Information requests that it has filed attempting to gain access to e-mail discussions conducted by U.S. government climate researchers.  Republican legislators are already opening up investigations into whether the climate change e-mails prove a conspiracy to fudge global warming data or exclude outsider viewpoints from peer-reviewed journals.

We will be living with the content of these e-mails for the foreseeable future, whether or not anyone gets prosecuted and/or convicted of breaking into government property. You better believe that if Republicans retake the House or Senate any time soon, we will see the likes of Sen. James Inhofe or Rep. Jim Barton waving their printouts in front of cherry-picked witnesses and declaiming about how this brouhaha proves once and for all that global warming is a hoax.

Of course, they do nothing of the sort, but in politics, the truth is less important than the perception of the truth. Whining about invasions of privacy isn't going to help. Energy analyst Geoffrey Styles gets at the heart of it in a post he published today, "Do Leaked E-mails Undermine the Scientific Consensus?"

Anyone who has spent five minutes peering behind the veil of academic politics wouldn't be terribly surprised at some of the caustic, small-minded, and downright vindictive comments that pepper the... e-mails that have turned up around the Internet. Nevertheless, most of us aren't involved in work that is integral to a global effort to understand and avert the worst outcomes of something on the scale of climate change. These folks are expected to hold themselves to a higher standard, and if they don't, it jeopardizes not just their own reputations but the public's perception of the findings of the larger body of climate science. When I read an e-mail in which one noted climate researcher asks another not to refer to a particular subject in his reply, but just say yes or no, or another indicating the author would delete some data points from a graph showing a recent change in the trend, I'm reminded of some precautionary advice I received at the very beginning of my oil trading career: "Avoid even the appearance of evil."

The basic issue here that many of those responding from the climate change community seem unable or unwilling to grasp is that their real problem is not how particular individuals or groups might exploit this information, but how the information itself could undermine the faith of the public in the integrity of climate science. I use the word faith deliberately, because for most of us it boils down to that. The number of people actually equipped to read the scientific papers in question and ascertain whether the manipulation of charts and data implicated in some of the leaked e-mails is serious or not is vanishingly small, compared to the much larger number of us who must simply take it on faith that the scientists studying the climate and reporting on alarming changes in it are behaving in a fair, transparent, and unself-interested way, to the greatest extent humanly possible. It would be hard for most of us to read the e-mails in question objectively and not have that faith shaken, at least a bit.

My own faith in climate science hasn't been shaken by this episode, but I'm pretty dumfounded at behavior that hands what Pierrehumbert calls the "inactivists" -- many of whom are working as fronts for the energy industry -- a big stick to clobber me with. Please don't hide behind invasion of privacy. It's only going to get hotter from here on out.

And there's nothing we can do about it.

Based on melting arctic ice and other evidence, it is clear that global warming has begun and existing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will lead to further temperature increases. The timing of the global peak of oil production is less certain, although there is a growing view that maximum production will occur within the next decade. Global climate change and the global peak of oil production will undermine the economic logic and profitability of long-distance, global supply chains of imports and exports. They will lead to a condition of peak globalization, after which the volume of goods traded internationally (measured by ton-miles of freight) will decline. While policies designed to reduce oil depletion and greenhouse gas emissions may work to delay the onset of peak globalization, it is the conclusion of this paper that they will be unable to prevent it.

Curtis doesn't come out and say so directly, but given the fact that his paper appeared in the journal "Ecological Economics" and ecological economists, as a rule, tend to take a dim view of globalization and its assorted capitalist depredations against the environment, one assumes that he's not all that unhappy about the prospect of relocalization. When Curtis writes that "The economic logic of the comparative advantage of global supply chains will be overcome by both increasing transportation costs and interruptions and delays in the transit of freight," he doesn't sound too broken up about it.

But there are some fairly mighty assumptions in his opening paragraph, not least being the imminence of peak oil, the certainty of catastrophic climate change, and human inability to do anything meaningful about either or both of these threats. Additionally, Curtis sees climate change and peak oil working in concert -- but they could just as easily work at cross-purposes.

For example, we've already seen rising oil prices contribute to a global recession, which, in large parts of the world, has led to drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The economic impact of peak oil, in that sense, may actually postpone, or delay global warming.

There's also an implied presupposition that technological innovation has, for all intents and purposes, stopped. As energy prices climb, not only won't we find new, renewable cost-effective sources of energy, but we also won't devise more efficient ways to use what we've got -- freighters and airplanes that consume less fuel, for example. Curtis believes that "Offsetting technologies and policies are very unlikely to be implemented in sufficient magnitude or with sufficient promptness to counter peak globalization."

He could be right. The hitherto unstoppable advance of the Industrial Revolution could be reaching its high point right now. Curtis doesn't prove this will happen in his paper so much as he lays out the "pathways" that could lead us there. But whether wrong or right, the fascinating thing is that the answer to the question could well be provided during our lifetimes.

Some context: Phil Jones is the director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, a critically important institution in climate change science. Michael Mann is an American climate researcher perhaps most famous for coming up with the hockey stick graph purporting to show that the globe warmed unprecedentedly rapidly in the last half of the 20th century. IPCC = International Panel on Climate Change. FOI = Freedom of Information. AR4 = Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. CA = Climate Audit, a blog maintained by Steve McIntyre, a leading climate skeptic. Sometime last week, an unknown hacker broke into CRU's computer systems and downloaded hundreds of e-mails and other documents relating to climate change research and posted them on the Internet.

It should go without saying that writing an e-mail that includes Freedom of Information in the subject line and advises other people to delete e-mails is an act of amazing boneheadedness. At the very least, it stinks to high heaven. Of all the hacked e-mails I've been able to review so far, this one strikes me as the most damning, coming, as it does, in the context of others that make it clear that Jones was dead set on resisting Freedom of Information requests.

So why would he do such a thing?

According to a report by Olive Heffernan in Nature magazine this past August, the story starts, more or less, with the publication of the original hockey stick paper in Nature in 1998. From early on, two Canadians, Ross McKittrick and Steve McIntyre, attacked Mann's conclusions and questioned his data. In the political fight over  climate change, their attacks received quite a bit of publicity, particularly from Republican legislators in the U.S. determined to stop any movement toward action on climate change.

From Nature:

McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog, is best known for questioning the validity of the statistical analyses used to create the "hockey stick" graph ...

More recently, McIntyre has turned his attention to criticizing the quality of global temperature data held by institutes such as NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Several organizations worldwide collect and report global average temperature data for each month. Of these, a temperature data set held jointly by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter, known as HadCRU, extends back the farthest, beginning in 1850.

Since 2002, McIntyre has repeatedly asked Phil Jones, director of CRU, for access to the HadCRU data. Although the data are made available in a processed gridded format that shows the global temperature trend, the raw station data are currently restricted to academics. While Jones has made data available to some academics, he has refused to supply McIntyre with the data. Between 24 July and 29 July of this year, CRU received 58 freedom of information act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated with Climate Audit. In the past month, the UK Met Office, which receives a cleaned-up version of the raw data from CRU, has received ten requests of its own.

Fifty-eight FOI requests in five days!

So why won't CRU comply?

According to Heffernan:

Jones says that he tried to help when he first received data requests from McIntyre back in 2002, but says that he soon became inundated with requests that he could not fulfill, or that he did not have the time to respond to. He says that, in some cases, he simply couldn't hand over entire data sets because of long-standing confidentiality agreements with other nations that restrict their use.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist who helps run the RealClimate blog and is closely affiliated with many of the key players in this story, amplified this line of defense in one of his comments responding to the hacked e-mails contretemps here:

Because, as [Jones] has explained frequently, that in order to get the maximum amount of data available they gave assurances and signed memoranda with many national weather services not to distribute raw data that the NWS's would rather sell.

This argument may or not be true -- there appears to be some confusion over whether or not written copies of these confidentiality agreements exist. Insofar as I have been able to tell, the FOI requests were denied, so perhaps there was some legal basis for doing so.

But there's a much more personal and political struggle going on here.

Bluntly put, the climate scientists who have devoted their careers to proving global warming is happening do not believe that Steve McIntyre is a legitimate scientist whose real goal is the advancement of climate change science. They believe his primary goal is to undermine their work by any means necessary, and that any data they give him will be misused, abused and ultimately become political fodder for the conservative forces who are fighting any efforts to do anything about climate change.

You can't put it more clearly than does Thomas Karl, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, in one of the hacked e-mails.

We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an "audit" by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues. In my opinion, Steven McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to this McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research. As you know, I have refused to send McIntyre the "derived" model data he requests, since all of the primary model data necessary to replicate our results are freely available to him. I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully. I will be consulting LLNL's Legal Affairs Office in order to determine how the DOE and LLNL should respond to any FOI requests that we receive from McIntyre.

From the perspective of the climate scientists involved, it seems clear that they did not trust McIntyre, did not feel that his FOI requests were legitimate scientific inquiry, and were determined to do whatever possible to resist him.

Does that exculpate them? Absolutely not. Does it explain why Phil Jones thought that private e-mails from climate researchers discussing the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC should be deleted? Nope, not at all. Does it demonstrate that scientific progress, despite supposedly being based on the accumulation of data and the testing of theories, can be a messy, messy business, full of personal intrigue and antipathies? Absolutely yes.

To climate skeptics, the e-mails prove that global warming is a conspiracy theory. At Wonk Room, Brad Johnson rounded up the politicized reaction:

• If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW," says the Telegraph's James Delingpole.
• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss "repetitive, false data of higher temperatures."
• The National Review's Chris Horner salivates, "The blue-dress moment may have arrived."
• "The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century," blares Michelle Malkin.
• The Australia Herald-Sun's Andrew Bolt claims the emails are "proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in modern [sic] science."

RealClimate, a blog maintained by real climate scientists, is busy doing damage control. This story will no doubt rage for weeks, so I'm just going to pick one example of the back and forth before trying to take some time to go deeper, if merited.

Here's an e-mail that has gotten particular attention, with the supposedly damning language bolded:

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.

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) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers, Phil

Here's RealClimate's explanation:

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 recommend 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.

So what's going on here? Put aside the question of whether the words "trick" or "hide" have nefarious or innocuous meanings. The scientific problem is that in attempting to reconstruct temperatures in the past, climate scientists are often faced with the problem that there were no humans standing around holding thermometers and writing down temperatures. So scientists use "proxies" -- tree rings, or ice cores, or fossilized clams, or lake pollen trapped in sediment. The "divergence problem" referred to above references a case where in one particular instance, tree ring variations in density did not match actual recorded temperatures after 1960.

That poses a conundrum, although not one that throws the entire science of multiproxy paleoclimate reconstruction into doubt.  More importantly, t the divergence problem, as RealClimate notes, is not a secret. It's exactly the kind of thing that climate scientists feast on. Such problems are discussed and debated every day by climate scientists (and every other kind of scientist.) The great thing about science is that the process of gathering  more data, improving models and theories is infinitely ongoing, and working out how to handle puzzlers like this, both in private e-mails and in the peer-reviewed literature, is what scientists live for.

Overall, the more data we have, the more clear it has become to the vast majority of scientists working in this field that the earth has gotten significantly hotter at an alarming rate in the last century, most likely due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And if there really is a smoking gun in the hacked e-mails that convicts scientists of fraudulent behavior or faking data, well, let's hear it. I'm not convinced by the above example. But if enough scientists are, that's a different matter.