Friday, Jul. 12, 2024
Were scientists caught falsifying data in the hacked emails incident dubbed ‘climategate’?
Nine separate investigations found that climate scientists involved in the “climategate” controversy did not falsify data.
In 2009, the Climatic Research Unit’s servers were hacked. One scientist was reported as saying that he “completed Mike’s nature trick” to “hide the decline” in an email. The “trick” in question simply refers to combining instrumental temperature data and tree ring data.
“Hide the decline” referred not to a temperature decline, but a decline in the reliability of some tree rings as a temperature proxy. This had become an issue in data starting from the year 1960. Also known as the "divergence problem," it had been discussed in the scientific literature since the mid 1990s — 15 years before "climategate."
Steve Mosher, who fueled the conspiracy theory, has since issued a public apology, acknowledging that the scientists’ work was accurate.
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Skeptical Science is a non-profit science education organization. Our goal is to remove a roadblock to climate action by building public resilience against climate misinformation. We achieve this by publishing debunking of climate myths as well as providing resources for educators, communicators, scientists, and the general public. Skeptical Science was founded and is led by John Cook, a Senior Research Fellow with the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne.
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