The following is a very rough, google-assisted translation of Marcel Crok's article about a dutch scientist being put under pressure by the Hockey Team. If there are any Dutch speakers reading this, I'm grateful for any corrections you can give me. I'm not convinced I have captured all the subtleties of what Crok is saying. [Update: here is Marcel's own translation]
Many researchers and journalists will have been curious to see if their own name was among the thousands of hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit. Many of the discussions in the e-mails relate to the so-called hockey stick graph, so there was a reasonable probability that mention would be made of Natuurwetenschap & Techniek (NWT), which in February 2005 was the first media outlet in the world to cover the critique of the hockey stick by Canadians Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick
After some searching, the hockey article appears, referred to as "that Dutch magazine". This is in an email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann dated February 11, 2005, approximately two weeks after the article appeared in NWT. Both Mann and Jones must have read the article, since in late January the Canadian newspaper the National Post printed a translation of the document and Ross McKitrick also put a translation on his website.
In the e-mail Jones writes:
"KNMI are doing the same re Rob van Dorland and that Dutch magazine [NWT, ed]. The chief scientist at KNMI has got involved as Rob didn't say the things attributed to him.”
By "doing the same" Jones is referring to the writing of a background story on the KNMI website (as KNMI in fact did. The second line is controversial, because it suggests that Rob van Dorland of the KNMI was quoted wrongly in my piece in NWT. At the time Van Dorland said in NWT:
"For now I consider it an isolated incident, but it is very strange that the climate reconstruction of Mann passed both peer review rounds of the IPCC itself without anyone really having checked it. I think this issue will be on the agenda at the next IPCC meeting in May in Beijing."
Always a hockey stick
When Van Dorland then gave this response, I found it, to be honest, rather bland, verging on spineless, given the criticism that McIntyre and McKitrick were making of the hockey stick graph, a graph showing the temperature in the northern hemisphere over the past one thousand years. Briefly, they showed in their scientific paper in Geophysical Research Letters that the statistical method that Michael Mann had used ALWAYS yields a hockey stick, even if you just use noise or stock prices. The method picks out the fact that some time series in the twentieth century go up "by chance" (because of noise), and it then gives these series more "weight" than other signals and presto, there is the hockey stick.
The e-mail from Jones to Mann shows that they didn't find the observation of Van Dorland so reasonable. Mann, Jones and other members of the 'hockey team' (as the researchers who created these temperature reconstructions are known) must have contacted Van Dorland about his remarks. Van Dorland, who at that time was lead author of Chapter 2 of the fourth IPCC report then made a strange volte-face and after the article appeared in NWT at the end of January 2005 suddenly distanced himself from the quotation in NWT. He was quoted incorrectly. His position within the IPCC was obviously very important to him and he'd have to create a tall story.
Back on Monday, January 10, 2005, I had received the following e-mail from Rob van Dorland in response to the draft article that I had sent him. Van Dorland wrote: "Dear Marcel, You have done some very thorough research! I read the story with interest, and have also posted some comments (in red) about the quotes and the IPCC. Talk to you more about this. Sincerely, Rob "
He was very positive about the article, but would only respond if he had read the actual scientific paper of McIntyre and McKitrick (MM). So on Monday I sent him the article by MM and then called him on Tuesday. From that conversation came the quote at which he later took offence. My impression is that he never told colleagues that we had had that phone call.
'The problem'
I heard later from an employee of VROM that Van Dorland was telling everyone that I had quoted him incorrectly and also that the entire article was labeled "unreliable" in climate circles, although the quote was actually independent of the detailed criticisms of McIntyre and McKitrick. Last year I interviewed Van Dorland for my book on a completely different subject (the greenhouse effect) and we looked back at the hockey stick affair. Van Dorland then intimated that his statements had got him "into trouble" internationally. With the e-mail from Jones to Mann, everything falls into place.
I have never taken the matter further. Later in 2005 I received the [a prize for science writing] for the article, which we editors at NWT considered a nice reward for all the detective work involved in unearthing the story. The leaked e-mails have once again raked up the subject, however. NWT asked me this week to do an article about the link between Climategate and "that Dutch magazine". Then Simon Rozendaal of Elsevier also picked up on it.
I asked Van Dorland this week by e-mail and telephone for a reaction, but he was furious and did not respond. Hans von Storch, also mentioned in the e-mail from Jones did, however, want to speak about it. On the passage concerning Van Dorland he said: "The e-mail clearly reveals that they put him under pressure."
Not on the agenda
The relevant section in NWT about von Storch is this:
"The two Canadians are no longer one voice crying in the wilderness. On Cotber 22, 2004 in Science, Dr Zorita and his colleague Dr Hans von Storch, a specialist in climate statistics at the same institute, published a critical article about the hockey stick focussing on a different part of Mann's analysis. After studying McIntyre's findings at our reuqest, von Storch agrees that "simulations with red noise do lead to hockey sticks. McIntyre and McKitrick's criticism of the hockey stick from 1998 is entirely valid on this point."
Jones wrote this in response to Mann: "Hans von Storch will probably regret the things he said." Von Storch told me on the phone that he was not put under pressure at the time: "They know that it's pointless with me."
Although this whole affair is of course a storm in a teacup compared to the other cases that were found in the hacked e-mails - such as not releasing data, even under the UK Freedom of Information Act, the suppression of criticism from the research community, the omission of some data and the unwelcome influence on the peer review process - the e-mail proves that Dutch IPCC staff are not always immune to the pressure that is sometime exercised by influential IPCC authors. For this reason it is unfortunate that Van Dorland did not respond. The CRU hack makes clear that the IPCC is not nearly as transparent and open as politicians and the public think. The time is now for more openness and to try to clean up their act. We invite Van Dorland to respond to this blog.
Was this issue on the agenda of the IPCC, as Van Dorland said in NWT? Well, not really, because as Jones wrote to Mann: "IPCC will not be discussing this in Beijing in May - except as part of Chapter 6."