While some scientists involved in the international scandal now known as "Climategate" have admitted some raw data supporting the man-made global warming theory is now missing, the Penn State professor em-broiled in the controversy said the data in question has nothing to do with any of his work.
But when reached Monday, Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann was able to offer some explanation as to why the data is now unavailable.
The controversy over hundreds of illegally obtained
e-mails leaked from a server at the University of East Anglia has created an uproar in the scientific community.
The director of the British university's climate change research center contacted his colleagues with the request they delete certain exchanges regarding data on global warming -- which skeptics have said indicate the scientists either manipulated or fabricated the data.
Mann said Sunday he did not follow through with the requests and believes there were no scientists who did comply.
Some of the scientists involved have since admitted they deleted e-mails concerning the data -- also confirming this week that some of the data they were referring to is now missing.
The missing data concerns surface temperatures from around the globe collected by a group within the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, Mann said. A lot of this work was done "decades ago" and wasn't stored on a computer, he said.
"What they're referring to is that some of the old adjustments are lost in files that disappeared into oblivion," Mann said.
But, he said, the basic data on the surface temperatures comes from a common data source that is still available.
Mann said Sunday he believes the debate about the e-mails is part of a "smear campaign" led by people who are against the theory of man-made climate change.
The e-mails were leaked one week before the United Nations-sponsored Copenhagen climate summit, which President Barack Obama will attend along with other world leaders and scientists.
Stephen McIntyre, the editor of the Climate Audit blog and an early critic of Mann's research, said he doesn't think "Climategate" should affect the summit.
"There is not a shred of evidence that this has anything to do with Copenhagen or fossil fuels," McIntyre said, whose blog aims to re-examine climatologists' research.
McIntyre said he doesn't agree with the results of Mann's articles and cited what he called "the Wegman report," published in 2006 by the Chairman of the Statistics Committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He said that research criticizes Mann's findings.
McIntyre said he has been searching public data sources from East Anglia's climate research unit for some time. Data from that unit that should be public, he said, is missing.
"If I ask for something, it's not because I can't find it --it's because it isn't there," he said, although he added Mann has made a "more genuine effort than most scientists in this field to place data online."
