| December 23, 2009 |  |
Patrick Michaels Falsely Blames Comments in Stolen Emails For Resignations At Climate Science Journal
The more opponents of action on climate change say about stolen emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, the more apparent it becomes that they're deliberately misrepresenting the facts, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
The latest example: In a December 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed, CATO Institute Senior Fellow Patrick Michaels falsely blamed comments by climate scientists in the hacked private emails for editorial board resignations at Climate Research, a scientific journal.
Michaels cited a stolen email in which climate scientist Michael Mann raises concerns to his colleagues about continuing to publish papers in Climate Research. Michaels then made this false claim: "After Messrs. [Phil] Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. [Tom] Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results."
Michael's assertion that the scientists whose emails were stolen triggered the resignations at the journal is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened.
In fact, five of the journal's 10 editorial board members resigned because its peer-review process had broken down. In 2003, an editor there published a poorly researched paper—later found to be riddled with errors and partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute—which argued that current global warming was unexceptional. Hans von Storch, a professor at the Meteorological Institute at the University of Hamburg in Germany, who was the journal's editor-in-chief at the time, said in response to Michael's op-ed, "In fact, I left this post on my own, with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper—a [climate change] skeptic's paper, at that."
Fortunately, subsequent published papers corrected the errors in the paper in question, demonstrating how the peer-review process tends to correct such lapses over time.
Michaels is just one of a number of climate legislation opponents who have made false claims about the contents of stolen emails. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), for example, asserted that emails written 10 years apart were part of the same email chain, while Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) libeled the scientists whose emails were stolen.
UCS is maintaining a site to keep the facts straight on debunked stolen email claims.
The Union of Concerned Scientists puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet's most pressing problems. Joining with citizens across the country, we combine technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe, and sustainable future.
