From time to time I am forced by Mrs Watson to watch the Ministry of Truth (aka the BBC) and I almost inevitably come away disappointed. Often, I come away angry. Recently we have been treated to a dreadful submarine drama Vigil (reviewed in this column) followed more recently by a lame and inaccurate portrayal of the fascist movement in Swinging Sixties London in Ridley Road. What should have been a comedy—these fledging fascists were a pathetic bunch of losers—was dramatised using a fictional main character and even glamourised to some extent their utter misfit of a leader, Colin Jordan. Last night, under duress, I watched The Trick and concluded that it is another 90 minutes of my life I will not get back.
The Trick is about the series of incidents around what became known as ‘Climategate’ (the term was coined by journalist James Dellingpole) described in Wikipedia as the ‘Climate Research Unit email controversy’ of the first decade of this century. The Climate Research Unit is based at the University of East Anglia and in 2009 its computer system was subjected to hacking and lost over 1000 emails and 3000 documents. It was never discovered who hacked and stole the data, but the contents were leaked and a story emerged of scientists, led by Professor Phil Jones having over-egged the global warming pudding. And indeed, they had.
Writing at the time—and in advance of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee investigation which exonerated Jones and his team from misconduct—Bjørn Lomborg, a leading expert on climate change wrote:
“What the stolen emails revealed was a group of the world’s most influential climatologists arguing, brainstorming, and plotting together to enforce what amounts to a party line on climate change. Data that didn’t support their assumptions about global warming were fudged. Experts who disagreed with their conclusions were denigrated as “idiots” and “garbage.” Peer-reviewed journals that dared to publish contrarian articles were threatened with boycotts. Dissent was stifled, facts were suppressed, scrutiny was blocked, and the free flow of information was choked off.”
Like your correspondent, Lomborg is not a climate change denier. We only question the causes, the speed and the proposed solutions. Referring to the “tragedy of “Climategate”, Lomborg stated:
“Global warming is not a hoax, but at a time when opinion polls reveal rising public skepticism about climate change, this unsavory glimpse of scientists trying to cook the data could be just the excuse too many people are waiting for to tune it all out.”
It must be said that, since Lomborg wrote that in 2009, things have changed. Thanks to the climate doom mongers and the hectoring of the ‘dancing queen’ and chief doom goblin Greta Thunberg, any discussion about climate change has, effectively, been shut down. According to them, largely without the evidence to support it, it is happening at the speed they say it is, we are the sole cause of it and drastic cutbacks in carbon emissions are the only solution.
Certainly, the BBC were willing accomplices to this in The Trick. The righteousness of Jones’ claims was not questioned, the methods he had used to make them were glossed over and not an opportunity was missed via the character of one of his advisers—a young man with a baby daughter—to impress on us the state of emergency that we are in. He looks at her lovingly in her cot and wonders if the planet will still be here for her. He shares his concerns with his father and points to all the dark forces at work to discredit the theory of global warming. The character of Jones is allowed to make outrageous statements indicating that we are heading for total global meltdown.
So, what did Jones do and why? According to Lomborg:
“What seems to have motivated the scientists involved in Climategate was the arrogant belief that that the way to save the world was to conceal or misrepresent ambiguous and contradictory findings about global warming that might “confuse” the public. But substituting spin for scientific rigor is a terrible strategy.”
To the credit of the makers of The Trick—probably as it was unavoidable—they do explain part of what Jones did. His team were creating records of climate temperatures using proxy data from the annular or growth rings of trees that had existed long before temperature records were kept. Wider rings indicate better growth that year and therefore a higher temperature. It was not necessarily clear to the public (or journal peer reviewers and editors) that these were proxy as opposed to direct measures of temperature and Jones did admit that this was unconventional. At one point, starting in the 1980s, the annular ring records showed that they were narrowing, despite the recorded data for temperature change showing that the temperatures rose. This was inconvenient for Jones and his team who were determined to show a ‘hockey stick’ graph effect of global warming. To achieve this, two types of data were used to produce a single graph which showed continuous global warming since before records were kept into the period since records were kept. This was ‘the trick’ to which Jones had referred in hacked emails and they published the data in peer reviewed journals without revealing this.
Within the world of academic publishing this is called ‘falsification’ and it is a very serious charge which violates both publication and research ethics and constitutes academic fraud. In addition to Jones’ over-egging of the pudding it is also plausible that his opponents did the same using selective and decontextualised quotes to support their argument. That is certainly portrayed in The Trick. I can find little evidence to support it although New Scientist does say that Jones’ mention of ‘the trick’ was taken out of context. But he did say it and despite his exoneration by the Select Committee (“The MPs had seen no evidence to support claims that Jones had tampered with data or interfered with the peer-review process.”) he did offer to revise the paper in which the falsified data had originally been presented.
The Trick gives a very sympathetic portrayal of Jones who appears early in the piece to be a broken man. I have no doubt that events and the aftermath took its toll on him and far be it from me to heap any further anxiety on the man or to direct further approbation towards him. But the truth is—as admitted by Jones—that they were as vitriolic in their attacks on their critics as their critics were of them. That is not mentioned in The Trick where Jones is portrayed purely as a victim. Jones returned to his job at the university. In my 30 years plus as an academic I have seen people sacked or severely censured for lesser breaches of publication and research ethics than those that were at the centre if Climategate. The excuse for the exoneration and rehabilitation of Jones was that ‘the science stacked up’. They had come to the right conclusions for the wrong reasons…and they knew it. The lesson for budding academics here is, if you are tempted to breach ethics, then it will depend—whether real, fabricated or falsified—on what your results show.
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