The Mainstream Media Fails to Report the Facts on Climategate

While the mainstream media continues to report on the 'climategate' emails and documents, there are growing concerns over media bias. Here are two recent examples of news stories which have significant problems.

So that you can check the facts for yourself, I have included the appropriate links here. This does impose a limitation, if one of the news sources changes or removes its story, there will be a broken link in this article. However, for the purpose of record keeping, I have taken copies of the 4 files involved, and if you ever want to obtain a copy, please don't hesitate to drop me a message. (And, no, I won't be deleting the files!)

Story 1: Climate talks seek calm after storm at draft text
This article quotes Al Gore talking with CNN about 'climategate' as follows: "Well, they took a few phrases out of context. These are private emails, more than 10 years old, and they've tried to blow it up into something that it's really not," Gore told CNN.'

However, if you simply check the email archive released by a whistle blower, which is now readily available online, you can see that there are messages which cover many years, including this one; showing the CRU director, Phil Jones, in discussion with a Meteorological Office employee on 12-November, 2009. The emails span multiple years (indicating that they were collected by a whistle blower connected to the group not a hacker), and many messages are recent. Any journalist reporting on this topic could carry out a check of the emails, and this would improve the quality of interviews with important leaders, such as Al Gore, or even improve the quality of their reporting on other journalist's interviews.

Story 2: Questions and answers on the climate e-mail controversy
This article explains the climategate controversy with a gentle, 'don't be concerned' bias. For example it delves into the 'hide the decline' quote from Phil Jones, and concludes "It didn't mean declining temperatures."

However, yes, it absolutely did mean hiding declining temperatures. What the climatologists had were two graphs of temperatures from different sources that pointed in different directions. And what Jones did to solve this problem was to use the data from one graph (which pointed upward) to replace the data at the end of the second graph (which pointed downward). This is rather like having to stock charts, where one shows an increase in a company's stock price with time, and the other shows a decrease in another company's stock price. Let's say you don't like the declining company's stock price, so for this portion of the stock price graph, you simply replace those prices with those of the increasing stock. Unfortunately for stock brokers, and fortunately for investors, such activities are not permitted in the world of finance. And typically in science, if not climatology, one would not mix information in this way either.

And this was not an obscure graph in an obscure publication. In fact, it was used on the cover of the influential World Meteorological Office (WMO) Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. Instead of showing disagreement between different measures of temperature (as it should) it has been 'fudged' to make the temperature lines agree. So, yes, it did mean 'hide the decline' in temperatures. Which way did the errant plot point, after its adjustment? Upward, of course! Indeed, unsurprisingly, it agrees rather well with the data that was used to adjust it. Mingling data in this way to obtain a correlation would result in a poor grade in most high school science classes, as well trained journalists should know.

I encourage you to examine the cover (and the entire report) of this WMO report to draw your own conclusion, it is available here. The green line on the main graphic on the cover should head downward towards the end of the plot. I am sure that you will agree that this would present a less worrying initial impression on the state of the global climate.

The implication of this inability of the temperature measures to agree with one another is, of course, extremely important. This means that we cannot rely on the measurements in the temperature records going back in time (which is important in order to demonstrate that we have an urgent calamity on our hands). As we should all be aware after the financial crisis, the scare over WMDs, and so on, urgent calamities are critical in modern politics.

There are undoubtedly many other observations to be made from the climategate files. What should the public make for example of the requests to delete emails, and generally obstruct freedom of information requests, for example? If journalists spent a little more time investigating these files, rather than attempting to minimize their importance, more people might be inclined to find their information in newspapers, rather than finding it for themselves on the web!