Climate "Smoking Guns" and Stolen Email: Motavalli on Fox Business

For my fourth appearance on Fox Business, the subject was global warming and a supposed “smoking gun” that emerged from 160 megabytes of data stolen from servers at England’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. For climate skeptics, this was a “gotcha” moment because CRU director Phil Jones said in an unearthed email that he had used a “trick” to “hide the decline [in global temperatures].” As you can see in this video, host Charles Payne used the occasion to call on President Obama to rethink the entire U.S. approach to global warming:

Let me be clear: As I said on the show, scientists who manipulate data should be fired, and I can see two investigations coming out of this. One would try to identify the culprits who stole the data (a serious crime) and the other would work to confirm the integrity of any research that may have been, to paraphrase Lillian Hellman, cut to conform to the current fashion.

Climate change is a high-stakes battleground, and the email disclosures come at a critical time, with global talks scheduled to start in Copenhagen in a few weeks, and the Senate debating energy and climate policy. The implications for the auto industry and its carbon dioxide-emitting tailpipes are obvious.

R.K. Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that there is “virtually no possibility” that the biases of a few scientists could have affected the IPCC’s fourth assessment report from 2007. But he also said about Jones’ emails, “I really think people should be discreet…In this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet…If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC authors’ meeting then there are others who would chew him up.”

Of course, discretion isn’t the only issue. Scientists shouldn’t want to change their data to reach unwarranted conclusions. Some commentators have called on Jones to resign, but Pachauri is not one of them. I think Jones should explain himself more fully, going beyond calling any suggestion of manipulation “complete rubbish” and saying that the email in question was “written in haste.”

It’s probably true that the quotes were taken out of context, but any explanation is not likely end the controversy. Climate science is dauntingly complicated and nuanced, and scientists notoriously ill-equipped to explain it to the public. Even if Fox Business had Jones on, he’d have little chance of making himself understood: As the old political maxim goes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

I also mentioned two books on Fox: my own Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change  (2004), which shows climate effects already in progress; and The Republican War on Science (2005) by Chris Mooney. There’s a paper trail when it comes to manipulating climate data.