---
title: "Climatic Research Unit email controversy"
chunk: 5/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:22:41.916840+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Climatologists ===
Among the scientists whose emails were disclosed, the CRU's researchers said in a statement that the emails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas. Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, said that sceptics were "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious" and called the entire incident a careful, "high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem". Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said that he was appalled at the release of the emails but thought that it might backfire against climate sceptics, as the messages would show "the integrity of scientists". He also said that climate change sceptics had selectively quoted words and phrases out of context and that the timing suggested an attempt to undermine talks at the December 2009 Copenhagen global climate summit. Tom Wigley, a former director of the CRU and now head of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, condemned the threats that he and other colleagues had received as "truly stomach-turning", and commented: "None of it affects the science one iota. Accusations of data distortion or faking are baseless. I can rebut and explain all of the apparently incriminating e-mails that I have looked at, but it is going to be very time consuming to do so." In relation to the harassment that he and his colleagues were experiencing, he said: "This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behaviour – criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past. So this is a worse manifestation but it's happened before so it's not that surprising."
Other prominent climate scientists, such as Richard Somerville, called the incident a smear campaign. David Reay of the University of Edinburgh said that the CRU "is just one of many climate-research institutes that provide the underlying scientific basis for climate policy at national and international levels. The conspiracy theorists may be having a field day, but if they really knew academia they would also know that every published paper and data set is continually put through the wringer by other independent research groups. The information that makes it into the IPCC reports is some of the most rigorously tested and debated in any area of science." Stephen Schneider compared the political attacks on climate scientists to the witch-hunts of McCarthyism.
James Hansen said that the controversy has "no effect on the science" and that while some of the emails reflect poor judgment, the evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.
One of the IPCC's lead authors, Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, expressed concern at the precedent established by this incident: "[T]his is a criminal act of vandalism and of harassment of a group of scientists that are only going about their business doing science. It represents a whole new escalation in the war on climate scientists who are only trying to get at the truth... What next? Deliberate monkeying with data on servers? Insertion of bugs into climate models?" Another IPCC lead author, David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, reported receiving hate emails in the wake of the incident and said that he believed that there was "an organised campaign to discredit individual climate scientists". Andrew Pitman of the University of New South Wales commented: "The major problem is that scientists have to be able to communicate their science without fear or favour and there seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign designed to intimidate some scientists."
In response to the incident, 1,700 British scientists signed a joint statement circulated by the UK Met Office declaring their "utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities".
Patrick J. Michaels, who was criticised in the emails and who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming, said: "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud". He said that some emails showed an effort to block the release of data for independent review and that some messages discussed discrediting him by stating that he knew his research was wrong in his doctoral dissertation, "This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people's reputations in very serious ways."
Judith Curry wrote that, in her opinion, "there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and 'tribalism' in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process". She hoped that the affair would change the approach of scientists to providing their data to the public and their response to criticisms of their work. She had herself learned to be careful about what to put in emails when a "disgruntled employee" made a freedom of information request. Mann described these comments as "somewhat naive" considering that in recent years scientists had become much more open with their data. He said that sceptics "will always complain about something else, want something more. Eventually, as we see, they've found a way to get access to private communications between scientists."
Hans von Storch, who also concurs with the mainstream view on global warming, said that the University of East Anglia (UEA) had "violated a fundamental principle of science" by refusing to share data with other researchers. "They play science as a power game," he said. On 24 November 2009 the university had stated that 95% of the raw station data was accessible via the Global Historical Climatology Network, and had been for several years. They were already working with the Met Office to obtain permissions to release the remaining raw data.