Professor Phil Jones’s leaked e-mails reveal climate of secrecy and distrust

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

Professor Phil Jones and his colleagues at the University of East Anglia have been hounded by climate sceptics for more than a decade. They were targeted because their research underpinned the conclusion by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the increase in temperature was likely to have been caused by man-made emissions.
The sceptics made dozens of demands for information under the Freedom of Information Act. They wanted to see e-mails sent between the scientists discussing their contributions to the IPCC. They also wanted the computer code used by scientists in constructing their climate change models.
Professor Jones believed that they were fishing for information to try to destroy his work. He also feared that they were seeking to distract him from his research by making him spend his time responding to requests.
The leaked e-mails from Professor Jones and others reveal a culture of secrecy and a determination to release as little information as possible.

In response to one request for data, Professor Jones wrote: “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Sceptics also claimed that the e-mails show that Professor Jones attempted to manipulate data. There is little in the e-mails to support this.
In an interview in The Times on Wednesday Professor John Beddington, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, said that it was wrong for scientists to refuse to disclose their data to critics. He said: “There is a danger that people can manipulate the data, but the benefits from being open far outweigh that danger.”
Many requests for data came from climate sceptics connected with the Climate Audit (CA) blog, which questions the IPCC’s conclusions. Climate Audit is edited by Steve McIntyre, a former mineral industry executive.
In one e-mail sent in 2008, Professor Jones tells a colleague how he managed to persuade the university to refuse information requests from Climate Audit. “When the FoI requests began here, the FoI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half-hour sessions — one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school — the head of school and a few others) became very supportive.”
In possibly the most damning e-mail, Professor Jones asks a colleague at another university to delete e-mails discussing contributions to the IPCC’s fourth Assessment Report. “Mike, Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4?”
The recipient of this e-mail was Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who produced the famous “hockey stick” graph showing a sharp upward turn in global temperatures after 1900.
Sceptics have dubbed Professor Jones, Mr Mann and their colleagues the “hockey team”.
Professor Jones wrote in 2005 that if anyone tried to use FoI legislation to obtain the code behind the computer models used to plot the global temperature record, he would be “hiding behind” data protection laws.
Tom Wigley, another US climate scientist close to Professor Jones, attempted to warn him last year about the implications of refusing requests for information. He wrote: “The trouble here is that withholding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.”