The real Hadley Centre might not be so innocent

Met Office Hadley Centre (Photo courtesy MOHC)

The Met Office Hadley Centre might not be entirely innocent of scientific sin, even if it is not the same institution as the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) from which some insider, as seems likely, took 168 MB of documents, code, and e-mails four days ago.

In the initial excitement of the discovery of a 61-MB archive of leaked files from the CRU, Anthony Watts, of the blog Watts Up With That, erroneously referred to the institution as "the Hadley CRU" and even published a night-time photograph of the actual Hadley Centre. Many other blogs, on-line magazines, and other on-line publications (including, regrettably, this page) repeated that error, which Watts has since corrected in both his headline and his illustration.

Mr. Watts has not yet shared exactly why he confused the identity of these two institutions. But in fact the Hadley Centre has several issues of its own that might possibly account for the initial confusion.

Climatic Research Unit (Photo courtesy CRU)

First and foremost, the Met Office Hadley Centre (HC) has a reputation for climate alarmism at least as high as that of CRU. In its own mission and other statements, it declares that it exists to advise the British government on climate change and its likely effects. Other climate-alarmist blogs take its position seriously, but at least one climate "moderate" blog, OmniClimate, does not. In covering a story of a set of planned predictive statements supposedly to be issued by the HC, predicting climate change down to the level of individual counties in England and Scotland, OmniClimate said this:

Perhaps more importantly, the trouble with long-term climate predictions is not just due to their intrinsic temporal timeframe, spanning decades. Even admitting that as a possibilty (and I have my strong doubts about it), still the problem of how to go from planet-wide analyses to a regional level has not been solved. And by regions I am talking “continents”.

How did anybody at the Hadley Centre manage to compute anything meaningful at the level of Yorkshire or East Anglia? Is there anything they have not told us, a major breakthrough in climate science that will be revealed to the masses by Thursday next?

Or have they just computed and published figures that have no basis in Science?

Second, as GreenWiseBusiness has noted with approval, the HC frequently collaborates with an institution identified as "the University of East Anglia" but in all probability the CRU. This collaboration apparently continues today, as the HC has not issued any statement thus far even acknowledging that anything untoward has occurred either at or relating to the CRU.

Third, Peter Stott, one of the HC's most prominent scientists, was addressed, copied, or otherwise mentioned no less than twenty-eight times in the e-mails contained in the CRU archive. None of the 1073 messages were actually written by Stott. However, Stott was copied on several messages containing some of the most embarrassingly intemperate statements that anyone at the CRU, or allied with it, made. They include Kevin Trenberth's now-infamous statement that the inability of their favorite anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theories to account for the lack of warming recently observed was a "travesty," and Michael Mann's vituperative exchange with Robert Matthews, science correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph. This paragraph by Mann is a prize example:

Owing to pressures on my time, I will not be able to respond to any further inquiries from you. Given your extremely poor past record of reporting on climate change issues, however, I will leave you with some final words. Professional journalists I am used to dealing with do not rely upon un-peer-reviewed claims off internet sites for their sources of information. They rely instead on peer-reviewed scientific research, and mainstream, rather than fringe, scientific opinion.

Mann wrote this in response to an inquiry by Matthews that was made in an eminently civil and respectful manner. Matthews would go on, in spite of the above, to print an article showing that the earth was warmer during the Middle Ages than it is today--which he was attempting to give Mann a chance to rebut, a chance that, as may be seen above, Mann did not take. Furthermore, Mann's statement about "peer-reviewed" and "un-peer-reviewed" claims is especially ironic, given Phil Jones' vow, now also widely reported, to keep Chris De Freitas' contrary report out of an IPCC journal.

Thus Peter Stott was receiving copies of e-mails either from or two some of the same prominent figures who now have seen their previous intemperate remarks, or damaging statements, published widely on-line. Why he never uttered a word of protest against such behavior, and furthermore, endorsed or at least condoned the continued association of the HC and the CRU while such things were going on, begs explanation.

Thus whether "the real Hadley Centre" is any different from the CRU, about which the recent embarrassing disclosures have now been made, is far from clear. Their own reputation for claims that some consider grandiose, their continued collaboration with the CRU, and their apparent willingness to associate with people who conduct scientific affairs in an often unscientific and frankly uncivil manner, suggests that they might suffer from some of the same internal problems that are now known to plague the CRU.

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