The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales. The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as , suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades Briffa It is also examined more recently in Wilmking which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem.
So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature. More on the hockey stick divergence problem The highlighted quote is this: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.
Trenberth is actually discussing a paper he'd recently published that discusses the planet's energy budget - how much net energy is flowing into our climate and where it's going Trenberth In Trenberth's paper, he discusses how we know the planet is continually heating due to increasing carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, surface temperature sometimes shows short term cooling periods. This is due to internal variability and Trenberth was lamenting that our observation systems can't comprehensively track all the energy flow through the climate system.
More on Trenberth's travesty An important point to realise is that the emails involve a handful of scientists discussing a few pieces of climate data.
Even without this data, there is still an overwhelming and consistent body of evidence, painstakingly compiled by independent scientific teams from institutions across the world. What do they find? The planet is steadily accumulating heat.
When you add up all the heat building in the oceans, land and atmosphere plus the energy required to melt glaciers and ice sheets, the planet has been accumulating heat at a rate of , Gigawatts over the past 40 years Murphy Considering a typical nuclear power plant has an output of 1 Gigawatt, imagine over , power plants pouring their energy output directly into heating our land and oceans, melting ice and warming the air.
This build-up of heat is causing ice loss across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Both Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at an accelerated rate Velicogna ,. Even East Antarctica, previously thought to be too cold and stable, is now losing ice mass Chen Glacier shrinkage is accelerating.
Arctic sea ice has fallen so sharply, observations exceed even the IPCC worst case scenario. The combination of warming oceans and melting ice has resulted in sea level rise tracking the upper limit of IPCC predictions.
Rising temperatures have impacted animal and plant species worldwide. The distribution of tree lines, plants and many species of animals are moving into cooler regions towards the poles. As the onset of spring is happening earlier each year, animal and plant species are responding to the shift in seasons. Scientists observe that frog breeding, bird nesting, flowering and migration patterns are all occurring earlier in the year Parmeson There are many other physical signs of widespread warming.
The height of the tropopause, a layer in our atmosphere, is rising Santer The tropical belt is widening Seidel These results are all consistent with global warming. Humans are emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - 29 billion tonnes in CDIAC.
Greenhouse theory predicts that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will trap heat energy as it escapes out to space. What do we observe? Carbon dioxide absorbs heat at certain wavelengths. Satellites over the past 40 years find less heat escaping to space at these wavelengths Harries , Griggs , Chen Where does the heat go? Surface measurements find more heat returning back to the Earth's surface Philipona Tellingly, the increase occurs at those same carbon dioxide absorption wavelengths Evans This is the human fingerprint in global warming.
Early speculation that the release of the emails and documents came from a one-off hack also appear to be wrong. Digital forensic analysis shows that the zipped archive of emails and documents was not produced on a single date. Instead it was created by copying the files over a number of weeks, with bursts on 30 September , 10 October and 16 November.
On the last date a folder of computer analysis code by Osborn was added to the package. The digital forensics on the files indicate that they were created on a computer set at some times four hours behind GMT, and at others five hours behind — plants the hacker on the eastern seaboard of Canada or the US. Then early on 17 November, RealClimate's blog was hacked, locking out legitimate administrators, and the hacker tried to create a blogpost claiming that global warming was a myth, and enclosing the emails and documents.
Gavin Schmidt, one of the RealClimate administrators, says that "my information is that it was a hack into [CRU's] backup mail server". But who was the hacker, and what were they after? Jeff Condon, who runs the climate-sceptical Air Vent blog — which posted one of the links to the archive — told the Guardian that the content of the emails and documents actually points to someone who is not expert in the topic.
Referring to an email it includes from Tim Osborn which says "we usually stop the series in ", Condon says that: "The only interesting detail in that email was the data, but that's not what the person wrote. What that means to me is that whomever posted these emails doesn't have a terribly deep understanding of the issues in paleoclimate science. Although the emails themselves featured some scientists who do know the issues and had some very nice details in them.
But how would an outside hacker get in? Although UEA has security in place, it has seen a number of accidental security breaches of the UEA system in the recent past. On one occasion a server was configured wrongly, so that anyone outside doing a search would "fall through" to directories of files.
UEA closed that hole after being alerted about it. A misconfigured server could have left just the hole that a capable hacker with a determination to find the data being denied via FoI requests could have exploited. International US UK.
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