Has Climate Science Been Dishonest?

In places, but not in the measurements. The Climatic Research Unit was defensive about sharing data, the first hockey stick had real statistical flaws, the 97 % figure was stretched, and one reef-fish researcher fabricated results. None of this touches the temperature records, which independent groups, including skeptics, have rebuilt and confirmed.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

Summary

In places, but not in the measurements.  Skeptics were right that the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia was defensive about sharing its data, that the original hockey stick's statistics were biased toward its shape and understated its uncertainty, that the 97 % figure was stretched in public use, and that one researcher fabricated results on reef fish.  They were not shown to be right that the data were faked.  The British review of the leaked e-mails did not doubt the unit's honesty as scientists.  The hockey stick's conclusion for recent centuries has survived.  Surveys that ask climate scientists directly find most of them attribute most of the warming to humans.  And fraud in one field is not evidence that thermometers, satellites and ocean floats run by different groups in different countries have all been faked in the same direction.

This article takes the charges in Don Batten's climate article for Creation Ministries International (CMI)1 one at a time, then sums up where skeptics have been right and where they fail across the whole climate question.  The charge that the temperature records were adjusted fraudulently is answered in Is the Earth Warming?, which finds that over the whole globe the adjustments reduce the warming.

Part 1: The charges

Climategate

CMI says the leaked e-mails of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in 2009 "showed that they had deliberately manipulated and hidden data."1  The British review chaired by Sir Muir Russell found both sides of that.  It found that "their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt," but also "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness", that the unit's "responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive", and "evidence that e-mails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them."2  Skeptics were right that the unit behaved badly about sharing data.  They were not shown to be right that the data were faked, and the records since built by others agree with it.

The hockey stick

CMI calls Michael Mann's 1998–1999 reconstruction of the last thousand years "the lynchpin of the AGW movement" and says it "'erased' the Medieval Warm Period".1  It quotes Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick's 2003 audit, which found that a corrected version made "the late 20th century ... unexceptional compared to the preceding centuries, displaying neither unusually high mean values nor variability."3

Here the skeptics won real points.  McIntyre and McKitrick showed in 2005 that Mann's way of computing principal components was biased toward hockey-stick shapes:  applied to random data with the statistical character of tree rings, "a hockey-stick shaped PC1 is nearly always generated from (trendless) red noise".4  The US National Research Council reviewed the dispute in 2006 and agreed on the method:  "Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions," and the "uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been underestimated."  The same panel judged that the flaw "does not appear to unduly influence reconstructions of hemispheric mean temperature", and concluded "with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries."  For the earlier centuries it was less sure:  it found it "plausible" that recent decades were the warmest of the millennium, and said "Less confidence can be placed" in reconstructions for 900 to 1600.5  Eugene Wahl and Caspar Ammann rebuilt Mann's reconstruction and found McIntyre and McKitrick's warm fifteenth century "without statistical and climatological merit".6  Later reconstructions by other teams, with other methods and many more records, agree that recent warmth exceeds the medieval peak (Creationism and Climate Science).

So the fair score is this.  The original hockey stick had a real statistical flaw and understated its uncertainty, and skeptics deserve credit for finding it.  Its conclusion has survived.  And it was never the "lynchpin":  the case for human-caused warming rests on the instrumental record, the physics of CO2 and the measured heat gain, none of which depend on tree rings.  CMI's claim that "Mann even sued a critic, lost, and then refused to pay the court-ordered costs" concerns a defamation suit, not the science, and is not assessed here.1

The 97 %

CMI says "The claim that 97% of scientists agree that human-generated CO2 will cause catastrophic warming to planet Earth is fake news," and that in John Cook's 2013 study "only 64 of the nearly 12,000 papers actually claimed that most of the warming is caused by human activity".1  CMI is partly right.  Cook's 97 % is the share of abstracts "expressing a position on AGW" that "endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming".7  It says nothing about "catastrophic", and two-thirds of the abstracts took no position.  David Legates and colleagues counted only "0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic."8  The tweet CMI quotes, "climate change is real, man-made and dangerous", went beyond the study, as CMI says.1

But the conclusion CMI draws, that "very few scientists agree even that most of the warming is due to human activity",1 does not follow, because abstracts rarely state a percentage.  Surveys that ask scientists directly give a different answer.  Bart Verheggen and colleagues surveyed 1,868 scientists and found that "90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications ... explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming."9  A 2012 survey of members of the American Meteorological Society by Neil Stenhouse and colleagues found 52 % of all respondents, and 78 % of climate experts who publish mostly on climate, saying warming over the past 150 years was "mostly human".10  Jay Wile, citing a later survey of the same society against the 97 % figure, reported that "67% of the membership believes that climate change is caused more by human activity than by natural processes."11

The Global Warming Petition Project, which CMI cites for "some 31,500 scientists", lists 39 signers trained in climatology, 112 in atmospheric science and 343 in meteorology.12  CMI's "over 500 papers" of 2016 that "seriously questioned" the consensus comes from a list on academia.edu, not a study, and was not checked here.1  None of this settles the science, which turns on measurements, not votes.  CMI is right that a consensus is not an argument.  But it cannot then use petitions as one.

Misconduct and its limits

CMI is right that misconduct has occurred in climate-adjacent research.  It cites a series of papers claiming that acidified water impairs reef fish behaviour.  A team led by Timothy Clark tried to reproduce them and found that end-of-century acidification has "negligible effects" on the behaviours tested, and that the "large effect sizes and small within-group variances" reported earlier "are highly improbable".13  In 2022 the University of Delaware found one of the original researchers, Danielle Dixson, guilty of "fabrication and falsification", and Science retracted one of her papers.14

CMI also says that Peter Ridd, head of James Cook University's Marine Geophysical Laboratory, dismissed after criticising reef research, "has since been vindicated".1  He was not, in the courts.  The High Court of Australia unanimously dismissed his appeal in 2021.  It found that two of the university's censures of him were unjustified because they concerned "the expression of honestly held views by Dr Ridd within his academic expertise", but that his dismissal was justified by other findings, including repeated breaches of confidentiality.15

Fraud in one field of research is evidence against that research.  It is not evidence that thermometers, satellites and ocean floats run by different groups in different countries have all been faked in the same direction.

Part 2: The scorecard

Where skepticism has been right

Pulling together the threads of this article and its siblings, these skeptical claims are supported by the evidence:

  1. Many of the newest climate models are too sensitive, and their builders now say so (How Well Have Climate Predictions Done?).
  2. The tropical upper troposphere has warmed less than models predicted (How Well Have Climate Predictions Done?).
  3. Sensitivity estimated from observations alone comes out lower than the IPCC's central value (How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause?).
  4. The original hockey stick's statistics were flawed and its uncertainty understated (above).
  5. Prominent public forecasts failed: an ice-free Arctic by 2014, drowned nations, empty Australian dams, a dead Great Barrier Reef (How Well Have Climate Predictions Done?).
  6. Arctic sea ice has not declined significantly since 2005. Mark England, Lorenzo Polvani and colleagues found "no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005", which they attribute to natural variability offsetting the human trend.16
  7. The highest emissions scenario was widely misused as "business as usual" (How Well Have Climate Predictions Done?).
  8. The IPCC's 2007 report contained an unsupported claim about the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers, and the IPCC conceded that "the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly."17
  9. Surface warming slowed in the early 2000s. Some mainstream researchers denied it, and a team including Michael Mann and Benjamin Santer later confirmed it: "The evidence presented here contradicts these claims."18
  10. Some reef-fish research was fabricated (above).

Where skepticism fails

And these skeptical claims fail against measurement:

  1. That there has been no warming, or that it stopped (Is the Earth Warming?).
  2. That ocean heat content is flat (Is the Earth Warming?).
  3. That the CO2 rise is natural (Is the Warming Caused by Humans?).
  4. That the sun explains the warming (Is the Warming Caused by Humans?).
  5. That CO2 is saturated, so more does nothing (How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause?).
  6. That climate sensitivity is about 0.5 °C (How Much Warming Does More CO2 Cause?).
  7. That sea-level rise is not accelerating (How Well Have Climate Predictions Done?).
  8. That the global temperature records are fraudulent (Is the Earth Warming?).
  9. That the medieval world was warmer than today (Creationism and Climate Science).

Objections and responses

"Ninety-seven percent is a fraud, and consensus is not science."  The second half is right, and so is part of the first:  the 97 % figure was stretched in public use.  But direct surveys of active climate researchers find a large majority attributing most recent warming to humans, and the case does not rest on any survey (Part 1).

Verdict

Some climate scientists behaved badly, and some climate-adjacent research was faked.  The Climatic Research Unit resisted reasonable requests for data, the first hockey stick used a biased method and understated its uncertainty, the 97 % figure was stretched in public use, the IPCC let an unsupported claim about Himalayan glaciers into its 2007 report, and one reef-fish researcher was found guilty of fabrication.  Skeptics deserve credit for exposing most of this.  None of it shows that the measurements are false.  The temperature records, the satellite records and the ocean floats are run by different groups in different countries, and they agree with one another, with a record rebuilt by a skeptic-founded group, and with the satellite record kept by two skeptics.  CMI is right to say that a consensus is not an argument, and wrong to use a petition as one.  It is wrong that Peter Ridd was vindicated in court.  The fair charge against climate science is bad conduct in places and overstatement in public, not a faked warming.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Batten, Don.  “Climate Change:  A biblical and scientific approach to Anthropogenic Global Warming.”  Creation Ministries International.  Feb 17, 2026 (edition of 2020).  CMI's main statement on modern climate, a long essay by its scientist Don Batten, a former research horticulturalist with the New South Wales Department of Agriculture, written with colleagues.  It sets out a biblical history of climate, a critique of the climate movement, a scientific case for low climate sensitivity and against the temperature records, and a policy section.  This article tests every factual claim in it. ↩

    1. 1a.

      Section Data tampering (fraud?):  “The now-infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph (Figure 5) produced by Michael Mann (Penn State University) and co-authors was the lynchpin of the AGW movement.”  “The graph was exposed as deceptive; it ‘erased’ the Medieval Warm Period from the temperature record, and worse.”  “Mann even sued a critic, lost, and then refused to pay the court-ordered costs.” ↩ ↩

    2. 1b.

      Section The argument from consensus:  “The claim that 97% of scientists agree that human-generated CO2 will cause catastrophic warming to planet Earth is fake news.”  “When the raw data are examined, according to the authors’ own ratings, only 64 of the nearly 12,000 papers actually claimed that most of the warming is caused by human activity.”  “So, the 97% figure is a dishonest twisting of statistics, and the activists’ own raw data show that very few scientists agree even that most of the warming is due to human activity, let alone that it is dangerous.” ↩ ↩

    3. 1c.

      Section Scientists who disagree with the claimed consensus:  “In 2016 alone, over 500 papers were published in peer-reviewed science journals that seriously questioned the supposed ‘consensus’ on climate change.”  CMI's note 32 gives the source as a post by J. G. Matkin on academia.edu. ↩

    4. 1d.

      Section Coral reefs:  “In 2018 Dr Peter Ridd, who had been head of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at JCU for 15 years, was sacked from his tenured position for criticising the quality of (climate alarmist) research that had been published on the Great Barrier Reef, but he has since been vindicated (see ref. 76), although not reinstated.” ↩

    5. 1e.

      Section Data tampering (fraud?):  “The leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists showed that they had deliberately manipulated and hidden data.” ↩

    6. 1f.

      Section The argument from consensus:  “Based on this, former President Obama’s twitter account declared, “Ninety seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”” ↩

  2. 2.

    Independent Climate Change E-mails Review.  The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review.  Edited by Sir Muir Russell.  Jul 2010.  The British inquiry into the leaked e-mails of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, chaired by a former university principal, with findings on the scientists' honesty, their science and their openness.

    1. 2a.

      Paragraph 13:  “we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.”  Paragraph 15:  “But we do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of the CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA”.  Paragraph 18:  “responses to reasonable requests for information were unhelpful and defensive.”  The sentence begins "We find that CRU's".  Paragraph 27:  “there was unhelpfulness in responding to requests and evidence that e-mails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them.” ↩

  3. 3.

    McIntyre, Stephen, and Ross McKitrick.  “Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) proxy data base and northern hemispheric average temperature series.”  Energy & Environment 14(6):751–771.  2003.  The first audit of Mann's 1998 temperature reconstruction by a Canadian mining consultant and an economist, re-running it from the archived data after correcting errors they found.  Their corrected version shows a warm fifteenth century.

    1. 3a.

      Section 4, page 766:  “the late 20th century is unexceptional compared to the preceding centuries, displaying neither unusually high mean values nor variability.” ↩

  4. 4.

    McIntyre, Stephen, and Ross McKitrick.  “Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance.”  Geophysical Research Letters 32:L03710.  2005.  The same authors' peer-reviewed demonstration that the way Mann's study centred its tree-ring data before principal-component analysis tends to produce a hockey-stick shape even from random data, and that its fifteenth-century result lacks statistical significance.

    1. 4a.

      Paragraph 18:  “the effect of the transformation is so strong that a hockey-stick shaped PC1 is nearly always generated from (trendless) red noise with the persistence properties of the North American tree ring network.” ↩

  5. 5.

    National Research Council, Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years.  Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years.  National Academies Press.  2006.  The US National Academy of Sciences' review, requested by Congress, of the hockey-stick dispute and of temperature reconstructions generally.  It agreed with several of the statistical criticisms and with the main conclusion for the last four centuries.

    1. 5a.

      Chapter Summary, page 3:  “It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.”  “Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600.”  Page 4:  “the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.”  Chapter 11, page 113:  “As part of their statistical methods, Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions.”  “In practice, this method, though not recommended, does not appear to unduly influence reconstructions of hemispheric mean temperature”.  “uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been underestimated.” ↩

  6. 6.

    Wahl, Eugene R., and Caspar M. Ammann.  “Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures:  Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence.”  Climatic Change 85:33–69.  2007.  A re-creation of Mann's reconstruction from its data by two NCAR scientists, testing each of McIntyre and McKitrick's criticisms.  It concedes a small adjustment to the early fifteenth century and rejects their warm fifteenth century.

    1. 6a.

      Page 33:  “recent “corrections” to the Mann et al. reconstruction that suggest 15th century temperatures could have been as high as those of the late-20th century are shown to be without statistical and climatological merit.” ↩

  7. 7.

    Cook, John et al.  “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.”  Environmental Research Letters 8(2):024024.  2013.  A rating of 11,944 abstracts of climate papers from 1991–2011 by volunteers associated with the Skeptical Science website, sorting them by whether they endorse, reject or say nothing about human-caused warming, with a second rating by the papers' own authors.

    1. 7a.

      Section Abstract, page 1:  “We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” ↩

  8. 8.

    Legates, David R. et al.  “Climate Consensus and 'Misinformation':  A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change.”  Science & Education 24:299–318.  2015.  A reply by four skeptics, among them the University of Delaware climatologist David Legates, re-counting Cook's abstracts against the stricter definition that most warming since 1950 is human-caused.

    1. 8a.

      Section Abstract:  “However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013 ) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.” ↩

  9. 9.

    Verheggen, Bart et al.  “Scientists' Views about Attribution of Global Warming.”  Environmental Science & Technology 48(16):8963–8971.  2014.  A survey, led from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, of 1,868 scientists who publish on climate, asking them directly how much of recent warming greenhouse gases caused.

    1. 9a.

      Section Abstract:  “90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications (about half of all respondents), explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming.” ↩

  10. 10.

    Stenhouse, Neil et al.  “Meteorologists' Views About Global Warming:  A Survey of American Meteorological Society Professional Members.”  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 95(7):1029–1040.  2014.  A 2012 survey of 1,854 professional members of the American Meteorological Society, broken down by field and by how much each respondent publishes on climate.

    1. 10a.

      Table 1, page 1034:  "Yes; mostly human" answers to whether global warming over the past 150 years is happening and what causes it:  52 % of the 1,821 who answered;  78 % of climate-science experts publishing mostly on climate;  73 % of all who publish mostly on climate. ↩

  11. 11.

    Wile, Jay.  “American Meteorological Society Survey Shows There Is No 97% Consensus on Climate Change.”  Proslogion (blog).  Mar 28, 2016.  A blog post by a young-earth homeschool science author reading a 2016 survey of American Meteorological Society members as evidence against a 97 % consensus, while granting that most respondents attribute warming mainly to humans.

    1. 11a.

      “In the end, 67% of the membership believes that climate change is caused more by human activity than by natural processes.” ↩

  12. 12.

    Global Warming Petition Project, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.  Qualifications of Signers.  n.d.  The petition's own count of its signers by degree and field.

    1. 12a.

      “9,029 PhD;”.  “I) Atmospheric Science (112) II) Climatology (39) III) Meteorology (343) IV) Astronomy (59) V) Astrophysics (26)”. ↩

  13. 13.

    Clark, Timothy D. et al.  “Ocean acidification does not impair the behaviour of coral reef fishes.”  Nature 577:370–375.  2020.  A three-year, multi-species attempt by an international team to reproduce earlier reports that CO2-acidified water makes reef fish swim toward predators.  It found no such effects and argued that the earlier data were statistically improbable.

    1. 13a.

      Section Abstract:  “end-of-century ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes”.  “Using data simulations, we additionally show that the large effect sizes and small within-group variances that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable.” ↩

  14. 14.

    Enserink, Martin.  “Star marine ecologist committed misconduct, university says.”  Science 377(6607):699–700.  Aug 9, 2022.  A news report in Science on the University of Delaware's finding of research misconduct against Danielle Dixson, a former James Cook University student, and on the whistleblowers who raised it.

    1. 14a.

      “The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs.” ↩

  15. 15.

    High Court of Australia.  “Ridd v James Cook University.”  [2021] HCA 32.  Oct 13, 2021.  The final appeal in Peter Ridd's suit against James Cook University over his dismissal, decided unanimously against him, with the Court's own one-page summary of its reasons.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 15a.

      The Court's judgment summary:  “Today, the High Court unanimously dismissed an appeal from a judgment of the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia.”  “The 2016 Censure and part of the basis of the Final Censure were unjustified because they related to the expression of honestly held views by Dr Ridd within his academic expertise.”  “Since Dr Ridd ran his case on an all-or-nothing basis, the termination decision was justified in its reliance upon conduct of Dr Ridd which was the subject of 18 findings of serious misconduct which were not protected by cl 14.” ↩

  16. 16.

    England, Mark R. et al.  “Minimal Arctic sea ice loss in the last 20 years, consistent with internal climate variability.”  Geophysical Research Letters.  2025.  A study by mainstream polar researchers of the pause in Arctic sea-ice loss since 2005, testing it against large sets of climate-model runs.  It finds the pause consistent with natural variability offsetting the human-forced decline.

    1. 16a.

      Section Abstract:  “Over the past two decades, Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”  “The modeling evidence suggests that internal variability has substantially offset anthropogenically forced sea ice loss in recent decades.” ↩

  17. 17.

    Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  IPCC statement on the melting of Himalayan glaciers.  Jan 20, 2010.  The IPCC leadership's one-page correction of an unsupported date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers in its 2007 report.

    1. 17a.

      Page 1:  “In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.” ↩

  18. 18.

    Fyfe, John C. et al.  “Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown.”  Nature Climate Change 6:224–228.  2016.  A perspective by eleven mainstream climate scientists arguing, against a 2015 NOAA paper and others, that surface warming really did slow in the early 2000s, because of natural variability and weak volcanic and solar forcing.

    1. 18a.

      Section Abstract:  “It has been claimed that the early-2000s slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.” ↩