Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and emails

http://www.examiner.com/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y2009m11d20-ClimateGate--Climate-centers-server-hacked-revealing-documents-and-emails

by nice1 • 17 years ago

171 199 17 years ago

examiner.com

ugh4• 17 years ago

Just one thing I would like to point out: many quoted statements in the article are not in any way damning. At least not without further context.

To pick out just one quote: In what way is comment moderation on RealClimate problematic?

tome17• 17 years ago

Indeed.

For example: As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.

Well, whose fault is that it's not about truth but about perception. Of course it is the fault of those very well funded pressure groups who represent the vested interests of CO2 emission.

iamwil• 17 years ago

It sounded more of a conversation between marketers than scientists--or at least what we think scientists ought to do. In reality, even science does some PR and marketing, it's just where you draw the line.

dkarl2• 17 years ago

I think this is an excellent point. The issue is unavoidably political; scientists are being forced to respond to political arguments and pressure. Of course, when put in a political arena and forced to deal with political attacks, scientists start to talk like politicians. I'm a software engineer, and we talk this way at work sometimes. It's happens when we're dealing with sales or executive types who aren't amenable to technical arguments. Don't let these guys see that email, because then they'll replace all our Cisco routers with cheese wheels, ha ha ha except sadly not kidding!

The bottom line is that the real science happens in labs and in scientific journals, and the climate change debate is perforce dominated by people who have never been closer to the science than reading a book or article written by somebody with an agenda who talked to a few scientists who keep up with the climate change literature. (That's the only way the debate can be open and democratic.) That's the closest people get to the science, but scientists are forced to deal with their questions and complaints and flights of fantasy anyway. Of course scientists don't sound very scientific when they're forced to do this job, because it isn't science.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

> As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.

It also fits if you read this as a take on the attacks the climate scientists are facing, not on their own case. There's just not enough context in the article to determine exactly what these correspondents mean by the snippets quoted from what they've written.

viggity• 17 years ago

Because they say:

"RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website"

How is it neutral when these particular guys are running it? In addition, they're giving other people heads up that they can censor the material!

ugh4• 17 years ago

This: [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] was most certainly added by the author of the above linked article to explain the abbreviation.

cedsav2• 17 years ago

I understood the part in brackets as being an editor comment, not part of the actual email.

The quote is: "Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [RealClimate.org - A supposed neutral climate change website] Rein any way you think would be helpful.".

febeling• 17 years ago

But some are blatantly:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

tome17• 17 years ago

Could you explain to me exactly what that sentence means in its original context, because it's certainly not clear to me that it's "blatantly" anything.

Sure, it looks like it's pretty damning. But what is the context, and what did he actually do?

ugh4• 17 years ago

Might be. If trick means what you think it means. If hide means what you think it means.

I have often seen people use "trick" meaning "useful change" and "hide" meaning "doesn't show incorrect results". Without context there is no way to tell. Such a statement is somewhat worrying, but not exactly blatant in any way.

bmallerd• 17 years ago

I'd like to point out that "Nature" possibly refers to the high impact scientific journal. If this is the case, then "trick" can be understood as roughly equal to "hack" (clever manipulation) in programmer terms. This Mike person used, and documented, his hack in a peer reviewed publication and someone else found it useful. How is this damning? Please don't assume experts in other fields are dumb. They probably arn't.

krschultz7• 17 years ago

You don't think moderation of a neutral site by one side of a debate might be giving the appearance that "the debate is over"? Maybe the debate isn't over and its just about who has control of the appearance of the debate.

zzzmarcus• 17 years ago

The only one that seemed pretty bad to me was: The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

They often claim to be able to explain, or even to have predicted, the recent cooler years by weather patterns etc., yet here they don't seem to believe their own explanations.

igrekel• 17 years ago

Most of these comments from the email don't seem to be that much of a problem really, unless you really believed that these people were not humans. And if people are offended that they had this idea of "bad hands" remember that their results existed for a long while and when opposition appeared it was financed by large corporations and interest groups withe the explicit goal of denying their findings.

Sadly that is what happens when you put people in a tough spot in terms of public relations, public relations concerns start to take over everything.

pierrefar4• 17 years ago

When you're a skeptic looking for "evidence", you'll find plenty in there.

When you're a scientist looking for an informal discussion about thinking critically about the evidence and data interpretation, you'll also find plenty in there.

izend• 17 years ago

However, the way Al Gore has presented Climate Change has not at all been like scientific discussion, it has been portrait as a topic where the discussion and debate is over. That is my problem with individual such as Al Gore because statements like this,

"Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important."

show me there is still room to discuss and debate the evidence.

tome17• 17 years ago

There may be room for debate, but is there time for debate?

Is there a plausible case that we cannot afford to wait?

pierrefar4• 17 years ago

There is plenty of room for debate if the skeptics stop polarizing and politicizing the debate.

Also, if anyone in this debate can be counted on to change their mind, it's the scientists: we do it all the time when shown evidence to the contrary of the current belief. I sincerely doubt that your average skeptic walking into this debate is actually willing to change their mind if shown evidence. Their mind is already made up and it won't change.

So yes, plenty of room for debate, but it needs the right mentality.

BTW, I once convinced a very creationist skeptic that evolution just might be correct in like 3 hours. How? He was willing to listen and see that there just might be an alternative explanation to the things he's seeing. He was willing to accept a different point of view and my job was to present my case. Luckily I did OK.

spoondan• 17 years ago

OK. We get it: You don't like Al Gore. But he is completely, utterly irrelevant to this discussion. He's your bugaboo. Bringing him up is just trolling.

Also, the quote you've selected is quite obviously not the author saying, "These data can legitimately be used to prove urban warming." He's rather plainly saying that he thinks the data will be misinterpreted and so needs to be placed in its proper context. This is neither nefarious nor even the least bit notable.

dkarl2• 17 years ago

thinking critically about the evidence and data interpretation

NOT trying to start a flame war, but I think there's a parallel here between science and Biblical criticism. In both cases, if you start with the preconception that the data has one simple and obvious message, then you will project your own biases onto it. Real analysis starts when you acknowledge that it's very difficult to tease meaning out of data that has very complex and partly unknowable context, which speaks directly to only a small number of situations, and which must be extrapolated to cover situations that have no direct analog in the data.

Yet popular science, like popular religion, must engage people by offering meaning and understanding that is accessible with much less effort. Popular science is therefore (unavoidably) guilty of encouraging blithe and simplistic interpretations of data, because that's the only way you can encourage people to think.

crystalis3• 17 years ago

"Dear Phil and Gabi, I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people." [emphasis theirs]

A lot of the excerpted emails look like this- fairly understandable examples of scorn directed to people who produce "crap criticism". You wouldn't want anyone trying to square the circle to email you to dispute your work, would you?

jerf3• 17 years ago

I'm basically a skeptic on climate stuff, but I'd encourage people to wait a bit before jumping to conclusions. Some of the pull quotes in this article seem sort of damning, but I can easily come up with perfectly legitimate reasons for some of the others, and for all I know there are legitimate reasons for the ones that look damning out of context. The Golden Rule also dictates that I cut them the same slack that I would want given to me if my private emails got out; we all talk differently in private than we would if we were talking to the world, and there's nothing wrong with that.

DanielBMarkham8• 17 years ago

Agreed.

You can pull anything out of context and make it sound like anything.

Almost.

At some point it becomes very difficult to say it's all a trap, however. If the size of the data is as large as indicated, it should be fairly trivial to determine this one way or the other.

If the discussions did proceed as indicated, this data might make a great study in how science is carried out behind closed doors, so aside from the political squawking, there could be something here of real long-term value to science. I bet you'd never get these guys to publicly admit what their internal discussions were like.

jerf3• 17 years ago

"If the size of the data is as large as indicated, it should be fairly trivial to determine this one way or the other."

That's why I said we should wait, rather than claiming this is meaningless. This data set, if legitimate as it seems to be, is large enough to draw conclusions from, and if there are issues clearly indicated, OK, conclude away, once the data is in. I'm just not willing to conclude anything from a handful of selected quotes from a clearly biased source. And if those are the best quotes, I'm generally unimpressed.

NikkiA2• 17 years ago

The 'data' was claimed as lost 2 months ago, by these same folks conversing in the emails. They only noticed they had 'lost' the data when a FOIA request was made - which they specifically claim as instructing their employees that it doesn't exist.

So, good luck with finding anything in that 'data' that confirms or denies anything, it's been lost so that the public doesn't get to see it.

Anything with this level of corruption in the scientific community deserves a serious amount of scepticism.

seldo• 17 years ago

There's really no smoking gun in the linked post. They highlight quotes that look damning out of context, but even just taking the surrounding sentence as context they seem a lot more innocent.

vannevar• 17 years ago

If you take time to read the quotes, you'll see that most of the annotations plastered over the quotes are inaccurate. Far from scandalous, these are precisely the kind of communications I'd expect to see from a group of professionals who are constantly being harassed by wingnuts and cranks. The 'truth doesn't matter' quote is particularly ironic, as it obviously refers to the cranks and not the author's own viewpoint.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

Well, the whole text is apparently out there, if you are worried that the quotes are taken out of context.

jerf3• 17 years ago

Yeah, but while I can justify the occasional surf to HN and some blog posts during downtime at work, it's hard to justify groveling over 130-ish MB of emails. I'm also ambivalent on the ethics of that; if bad stuff really is there then I guess it could be whistleblowing (there is a lot of public money at stake here), but if it all turns out to be squeaky clean it's not ethical to go pawing through these, just because they've gone public. Obviously, there's some chicken-and-egg problem here in the "so how do we tell if bad stuff was happening?"

lincolnq• 17 years ago

I'm not too surprised at this. I think this is a great case study on groupthink.

I've observed groupthink / "the outside is the enemy" behaviour in several groups that I've participated in. It can be caused by one person setting the tone of the group (e.g., by making jokes), and then everyone else follows along. In this case, I could imagine a joke about skeptics, or perhaps someone misguidedly suggesting it was the group's "mission" to convince people that climate change was a big problem to be fixed.

Setting that sort of tone, especially early in the group's formation, usually quickly blossoms into an us-vs.-them mentality. Sometimes that's ok, but if you are trying to claim that you are objective, it's highly counterproductive -- and the worst part is that it's hard to realize how harmful groupthink can be when you are genuinely trying to learn something.

Anyway, if you want to reduce this effect in groups you're in, you have to have a sharp groupthink detector and you have to be fearless about saying stuff that's counter to the group's tone. I've defused groupthink situations by visibly becoming offended when I recognize that groupthink is occurring: it's usually fairly easy to explain why you're offended, and (in most kinds of groups) people usually have social pressure to stay away from discussions which will offend others. The problem is that the groupthinky memes can be fun, so you may be seen as a captain buzzkill.

crux_3• 17 years ago

Yet people doing climate science have enemies, and not imagined ones. This is not just group-think conjuring an imaginary "them."

This is true regardless of whether you believe in their integrity or not, and as a result they can no longer behave objectively, even if it turns out that their conclusions were reached in a thoroughly objective manner.

dschobel4• 17 years ago

If the scientists can no longer behave objectively then they've already lost everything.

sp332• 17 years ago

Just because they're really out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid.

cjoh• 17 years ago

The EXAMINER is an organization filled with political operatives, not anybody interested in telling any form of truth. They're about as bad as Fox news at choosing between facts and agenda.

tome17• 17 years ago

Interesting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examiner.com

Examiners are paid based on page views, or the "Gawker-model," made famous by the blog Gawker.com. The more page views an Examiner generates, the more they are reportedly paid.[citation needed]

thaumaturgy2• 17 years ago

Huh, odd that Wikipedia had a "citation needed" note on there. This indeed is exactly their business model; we found the same while scouting the news publishing market.

by• 17 years ago

http://dnb.powerprofiles.com/profile/874831126/ANSCHUTZ+COMP... http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn... http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/The-Anschut...

motters• 17 years ago

Even if you are a climate change skeptic, apply typical journalistic investigation here. Perhaps the apparent damning statements are taken out of context. Science is not about certainty, and there is always debate about what the data really means. Also, those reporting the leak may not be politically neutral, and may have their own hidden agendas.

limist2• 17 years ago

The leaked files are available here at least: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=75J4XO4T

If there's a better place to get/post it, please advise.

limist2• 17 years ago

Also, this is the blog where the files were first leaked to:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/leaked-foia-file...

DanielBMarkham8• 17 years ago

The problem here has always been the nature of the debate, not the nature of the science.

You can make a good case that these are just scientists blowing off steam in informal e-mails -- or you could make the case that this is evidence that scientific integrity has gone in the crapper.

I take a third view: the problem here is that people do not want to have an honest debate. This is evident by the emotional content of the emails -- "idiots", etc. If you view yourself as the annointed and people who criticize you as stupid rabble, then it becomes very, very difficult to correct course when you screw up (as you inevitably will)

Getting emotionally attached to something and viewing yourself as an expert are potentially intellectually crippling things to do, whether it's climate science or database design.

Vivtek3• 17 years ago

I find it odd to say that the climatologists are the ones uninterested in an "honest debate". Not to mention that "honest debate" would involve acknowledging who has the, you know, expertise in the field.

The reason they use the word "idiots" is that it is a descriptive term. Some random schmoe with an opinion is not engaged in "debate" when he questions scientific fact, and the emotional charge here is entirely due to the fact that public opinion seems to think that such entitlement is perfectly legitimate, when in point of fact it is a waste of everyone's time.

DanielBMarkham8• 17 years ago

Some random schmoe with an opinion is not engaged in "debate" when he questions scientific fact

Sigh.

I'll do this one time, and then I have to get back to work.

Here's the deal: science is not dependent on "smarts". I can take a 4-year-old kid and we can test Newton's Laws of Motion just fine without any knowledge of algebra. In fact, the whole point about science being based on reproducible experiments is that we take appeal to authority out of the mix. If we still keep appeal to authority as a legitimate scientific tool of investigation then we might as well be studying phrenology or Lysenksoism (look it up).

Now the appropriate response is: but this isn't about science, this is about prevailing scientific opinion -- the best guess we have at what might happen. If you're prepared to go there, that's awesome, because then we're in a spot where we're talking about how political decisions get made, both inside and outside of science. But in that case, both sides are more on equal ground because the topics are all about how different groups arrive at various forms of consensus, not science.

It's when you get the two mixed up that the discussion gets really out of whack (to my lights, at least)

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

If these people are competent climatologists and all their critics are just incompetent lobbyists with a vested interest, then hiding data and sexing up interpretations makes very little sense. In fact it is very counter productive.

Hiding stuff only makes sense when your oponent is competent enough to find your mistakes and you have a vested interest in covering up your mistakes.

InclinedPlane10• 17 years ago

Science doesn't recognize authority. Science recognizes the data. And theories backed by the data. The wonderful thing about science is that "some random schmoe" can come along and upset all of the conventional wisdom in a field by proving a new theory with data.

Defensiveness of this sort is unheplful to the legitimate pursuit of science. You can disagree with people, you can tell them bluntly "your ideas are not backed in any way by the data" (indeed, the most crushing insult in science, far more potent than a term like "idiot"), but when you defend a position merely because it's the position of the experts and ignore the data then you have stopped doing science and have engaged in either politics, religion, or both.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

I've followed Steve McIntyre for awhile, and it is in fact shameful, damning, and unscientific how ardently climate scientists have fought to keep their data from him when he has requested it to check their models. The problem seems to be particularly acute among the old guard of the profession. Seeing the other side of the conversation doesn't add a whole lot, we already knew what bastards they are.

For those who haven't checked out Steve's work, look at http://www.climateaudit.org/ . But be warned, if you're looking for politics over numbers, he will put you to sleep. And the server is getting hammered at the moment. But please book mark it and go back later. His blog is an important piece of the internet, what we all thought the internet could be before lolcats disillusioned us.

It doesn't surprise me to see a lot of people here coming to the climate scientists' defense. They are, after all, a popular and respected group in society at the moment. But when you cherry-pick data, create unreproducible models, and then refuse to share your data with other people, you ought to lose a little bit of that respect. We will get precisely the quality of science we enforce, which at present is any quality of science the authoritative voices in the area chose to give us.

When Steve has been successful at obtaining the data he wants, he has been able to find flaws in various analyses. If you come from a scientific perspective, that ought to be great news! Independent confirmation or refutation of results increases the quality of our knowledge. But if you come from a political perspective then Steve is bad news indeed.

Why climate scientists are respected and treated as the high priests of truth while they hide data from the world and McIntyre is treated as a vaguely dangerous rogue, I don't understand it. I suspect it's politics. But in a perfect world there would be a thousand McIntyre's and they wouldn't have to fight for data. It would be available in public online databases, hosting paid for by tax dollars. That ought to be the least we ask of any science with the potential to route trillions of dollars in government spending policy over the next decade.

But sadly, when bad science comes to light, all we get instead is a circling of the wagons around the favored group. Why? Again, I suspect politics.

ellyagg• 17 years ago

That's one of the worst things I noticed from the data, the overwhelming and negative responses to Steve Mcintyre. Mcintyre is not some demagogue. He's extremely dry and analytical. Why are they strategizing on how to give him dirty, annoying, and obfuscated data?

I don't care if climate scientists consider Mcintyre an adversary. Does everyone remember how the shuttle software is written? The testing team has an adversarial relationship with the developers. This is how quality work is forged. If these guys can't stand to have an adversary review their work, I submit that something is seriously awry.

Peer review isn't strong enough right now. If you read these docs, you find that they are asking that reviewers be hand-picked for "objectivity", and it's clear from the context that this means "not global warming skeptics". Peer review needs to be more adversarial. I don't think the scientific literature is much less important than the shuttle software.

If the scientific method is working, then the data and methods should be able to withstand ANYONE'S scrutiny. It should be completely open. Most people here are strong supporters of open source software. Don't tell me for one second that free and open scientific debate doesn't benefit exactly as much from being open.

tome17• 17 years ago

I think it's easy to work against an adversary when you're being paid to spend your time doing exactly that.

Climate research funding is not paid so well as to give researchers time to deal with these specific issues. Maybe it should be. But it isn't.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

As a follow-up, I don't think it would be unreasonable for climate scientists operating on public funds to be required to take the following steps:

1) Archive a copy of all raw data series used in publications with a public database

2) Archive a copy of the final processed data series used in publications with the same database.

3) Archive a copy of the source code used to produce figures and tables with the same database.

The default stance for publicly-funded science should be openness, not secrecy.

Hell, these would be good steps for any serious journal to take, on any subject, regardless of federal funding.

edit: Example of the pathology we need to fight:

>>"We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an "audit" by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues. In my opinion, Steven McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to this McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research. As you know, I have refused to send McIntyre the "derived" model data he requests, since all of the primary model data necessary to replicate our results are freely available to him. I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully. I will be consulting LLNL's Legal Affairs Office in order to determine how the DOE and LLNL should respond to any FOI requests that we receive from McIntyre."

DanielBMarkham8• 17 years ago

I hope that this entire debate results in a new set of ethical standards for publicly-funded research. At the minimum I would support the open and free release of all unaltered data, a "Chinese wall" between researchers and activists (of whatever breed), and the requirement for all science based on "best guess" to say so in bold print, much like the language we have when investing with a prospectus. The standard of proof being used should be available in clear understandable language.

I fear that by the time the political debate ends, a lot of good research is going to become collateral damage, which would be an awful result.

yummyfajitas7• 17 years ago

Actually, I what you describe would be a useful requirement for all journal publications, not just in climate.

This is useful not just for the purposes of auditing, but also for the purpose of scientific progress. I would be able to build on other people's work much faster if I could download and modify their code rather than just rebuilding it myself.

hop• 17 years ago

I'm agnostic on climate change - haven't scrutinized the data myself. That said...

Climate scientists that produce polarizing studies - either the world is freezing or boiling (mostly the latter) get fame, fortune, respect from colleagues and huge grants to further their groundbreaking research. They are more incentivised to create a wow factor than to be rigorous and subjective with the data.

gjm113• 17 years ago

Title as submitted here is pure flamebait. Most of the quoted statements aren't in fact problematic at all (many of them I would in fact describe as so obviously not-problematic as to call into question the integrity of the person offering them up as evidence of dishonesty, and I wouldn't be surprised if every one of them turned out to have an innocent explanation), but even if each of those quotations demonstrated that the person who sent it had no integrity whatever, that would not justify the scare-quotes around "scientists" (dishonest scientists are still scientists), nor the blanket condemnation of "the climate scientists", as if the ones whose emails have been pilfered are the only climate scientists in the world.

Better would be something like "Leaked email archive allegedly calls into question the integrity of a few climate scientists". Better still would be "62MB of climate science emails leaked; here are some alarming quotations" or something.

jordyhoyt• 17 years ago

"Dishonest scientists are still scientists"

I disagree. If they are not following the scientific method, but fudging their data to agree with their pre-determined conclusions, they are not scientists.

gjm113• 17 years ago

1. Assuming, for the sake of argument, the most uncharitable interpretation possible for all the quotations on display at the Examiner, it seems to me that most of them do not involve any sort of data-fudging.

2. I appreciate the rhetorical point you're making, but I prefer to distinguish between "not a scientist", "bad scientist" and "evildoing scientist". (But I do agree that if someone's found to have been falsifying results, whatever scientific work they've done is of little use to anyone unless there's some reliable way to disentangle the fraudulent and non-fraudulent bits.)

nkurz4• 17 years ago

I agree that the title is bad, but it is empirically effective.

I earlier submitted a parallel article with pretty much the title that you suggested, and it went nowhere:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952082

  Leaked FOIA files 62 mb of gold

Even before me, 'ellyagg' submitted an even closer parallel with a non-sensational title. It also has not garnered any discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951915

  Climate News: Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

So while I personally will continue to submit with the title of the original article rather than bait, one could argue that having a discussion is better than not having a discussion.

gjm113• 17 years ago

Considering the rather poor heat-to-light ratio in this discussion, I'm not sure that "get as much discussion as possible" is a terribly good goal. In any case, there's a "tragedy of the commons" risk here: every submitter, considered separately, wants to get their submission read and commented on, so every submitter wants to tweak their titles to be "empirically effective", and if that determines the actual titles then we end up with a front page full of sensationalist titles, all of them less informative than if everyone had refrained from attention-grabbing. And then everyone is worse off.

patio11• 17 years ago

In many scientific fields, having one's research methodology and professional communications publicized would not be considered a bad thing.

Perhaps that was a low blow.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

Y'know, I hang out around smart people who like science, and I read a lot of science, and I do some science, so I get asked about science a lot.

And when I've said that I'm not convinced that there's human global warming happening, I've been called all sorts of nasty names. I didn't say it isn't happening; I just said the information I've seen doesn't convince me. I see a lot of strongly held beliefs that global warming is happening, but the actual data seemed murky at best to me. In short, I wasn't convinced either way.

But by casually interested people, I got called all sorts of terrible names. "Denier", things like that. Compared to a creationist as someone who obviously doesn't get it, who just has beliefs by faith.

Really? I say the data hasn't convince me, that makes me a denier and a creationist? This whole thing has seemed much more like a religion than science to me. There's some science happening, but a lot of people want and need this to be true as a part of their identity rather than science. It doesn't surprise me at all that you see corruption from scientists in a culture like that. It goes against everything science is supposed to be.

tome17• 17 years ago

Sure, there's a nasty popular undercurrent of slating anyone who expresses doubt. I've experienced it myself. But that shouldn't have a bearing on the facts of a situation.

dschobel4• 17 years ago

I think most honest people found themselves in the situation as you.

I'm starting to think it's a good thing that American society by and large is ignorant of science issues.

Any time you incentivize scientific research with fame and fortune in popular society, you end up with crap like this.

Let's keep popular acclaim to things which don't matter, such as sports.

martian• 17 years ago

Fair point. And the thing about climate science is that while you may or may not disagree about global warming, the strategies we would employ to fight global warming are the same strategies we should be employing regardless.

Take the issue of renewable energy. It might prevent global warming, but it also promotes energy independence, reduces pollution generally, allays fears about peak-oil or peak-coal.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

There's an optimum amount to fund such research if you are viewing the issue dispassionately, and an amount that you will fund it if everybody is afraid the world will end next year if we don't. To me, it is obvious that the first amount is better. This is one of the few issues where hackers defend intellectual dishonesty as something that makes us do "what we should be doing anyway". I'm sorry, I don't buy it.

InclinedPlane10• 17 years ago

Peak-coal? Really? The last I checked there was enough coal in the ground to last several hundred years more, at least. As for oil, there's a pretty damned good chance that our extraction technology will improve (as has been the trend) and our ability to use new sources, like shale, will improve as well (as has been the trend).

Peddling the "fossil fuels will run out, we should find alternatives" line is a dangerous path. It risks a lot of very stubborn people saying "really? well, let's just find out, to the bitter end" and calling that bluff. And there is a very real possibility (even if you are skeptical and put that possibility at, say, 10% or less) that the world ends up using every last drop of coal, and far more oil than we ever thought possible, and ultimately burning 10x, 20x or more fossil fuels than have been burned so far.

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

Global warming - not exactly sure; climate change, undeniable; human-induced climate change, undoubtedly IMO. We don't need a net global increase to produce catastrophic global climate problems.

British weather reports are becoming dominated by flooding - there are several causes including climate change, poor location of housing, deforestation.

Ignoring climate change based on fossil-fuel emissions we still are running out of fossil fuels and need to find other secondary energy sources. If those sources are renewable then this prevents us having the same problem again in a few years when, say, Uranium reserves are depleted. We should then have an extremely strong impetus to ween ourselves off our current high levels of power consumption and to exploit to the greatest extent we can clean renewable power sources. If we do this then we also are tackling part of the cause of the [potential] greenhouse effect anyway.

If you're in a building and you smell smoke, see it in the corridors, feel warmer; you can assume that the smoke is coming in through a window from another building, or you can pull the fire alarm - there may not be sufficient evidence for either position, but some people it seems want to wait until their clothes catch fire before making their move. It would be too late.

- http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/11/the-coming-ur... current supplies run dry in 2013 unless new fields are found and exploited.

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

Global warming - not exactly sure; climate change, undeniable; human-induced climate change, undoubtedly IMO

That's the issue. (I upvoted you btw) That the climate is going through a short period of less than stable behaviour is certainly evident. It's also evident that it's gone through such behavior in the past, with both more and less variance. There have been ice ages FFS, and that had nothing to do with man.

It seems like we are having an influence in our current whether patterns, but we simply have nowhere near the amount of data to know this beyond theory.

To say that we are - without doubt - causing the earth's climate to change when we can't predict the "change" accurately is scientifically irresponsible.

jberryman2• 17 years ago

You're certainly entitled to be unconvinced and shouldn't be berated for your skepticism. That said...

Honest question: do you have a background in climate science or something similar? I'm a science nut too, but I don't know how I could begin to look at the _data_ involved here and come up with any sort of conclusion at all.

So what I do is advocate for public policy decisions that are in line with the very strong scientific consensus: that human-caused climate change is real and a serious threat to life on the planet.

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

> I'm a science nut too, but I don't know how I could begin to look at the _data_ involved here and come up with any sort of conclusion at all.

> So what I do is advocate for public policy decisions that are in line with the very strong scientific consensus: that human-caused climate change is real and a serious threat to life on the planet.

You don't know yourself, so you advocate for spending billions of dollars than could be spent doing lots of other important things.

The very strong scientific consensus? I don't see it. I don't see reproducible, falsifiable experiments that can be made by disinterested parties to check climate change. That's what scares me.

Astronomy? I can, and have, checked it myself.

Physics? Friend of mine and girlfriend of mine are physicists; they've tested and re-checked many famous physics experiments for learning purposes as part of their studies.

Microeconomics? Can be tested. Has been tested. I trust it.

Macroeconomics? Skeptical of it, because of it's proneness to confirmation bias, politicization, inability to falsify it, and many historical errors that it's made in the past without even a serious mea culpa from the error-makers. Usually they just add a caveat, or say that whatever proved them wrong actually shows they're correct.

So climate change? I'm not convinced. Reproducible, falsifiable results. Show me - "Here are the average temperatures and temperature variances in 30 regions in the globe this year. We predict the average temperature will rise by X% and variance will rise by Y% in at least 25 of these regions over the next five years. We absolutely don't expect the temperatures or variances to fall in any of these 12 regions most affected; that happening would cast serious doubt on our model."

Something like that - they don't do it. But a bad hurricane season hits? Evidence of climate change. It's hotter than normal somewhere? Evidence of climate change. It's colder than normal? Evidence of climate change. No climate change? Well, hell, it's still evidence of climate change.

> Honest question: do you have a background in climate science or something similar?

Honest answer: A hell of a lot more than Al Gore, and 99.99% of people who strongly, passionately believe that "We need to do something!"

petercooper2• 17 years ago

In the climate debate there doesn't seem to be a common "climate agnostic" position yet, perhaps we should put our flags in the ground and define one. After all, you don't need to be an atheist or a theist when it comes to religion, so there's no need to make a claim either way on this stuff either.

robotrout4• 17 years ago

To whomever hacked these emails, I thank you. I really think this was a valuable service to mankind that you've achieved.

You've lifted up the robes of the priesthood, and exposed them to be at best, flawed scientists, and at worst, social engineers. Whether this knowledge will have any effect on the truly brainwashed, we see that it doesn't, but it will have an effect on saner minds.

The marketing geniuses who turned 'global warming' into 'climate change','carbon dioxide' into 'carbon', and migrating polar bears into victims, will surely not be knocked out by this, but they're deleting emails this morning, you can be sure!

CWuestefeld2• 17 years ago

Emotionally, I'm glad it happened. But that doesn't make it right. The hackers were stealing, there's no getting around that fact. The end doesn't justify the means.

robotrout4• 17 years ago

    The end doesn't justify the means.

Sir, you appear to have a highly developed moral sense. I respectfully submit that you haven't really analyzed that sentence carefully, however.

Many means are justified by their ends. It's left to history to decide if the means really were justified. Some things, like Hiroshima, we still agonize over, 50 years later, whether the end justified the means. As for hacking some scientist's emails, and possibly saving hundreds of thousands or even millions of human lives by stopping a gross misallocation of resources? Yeah, I could sleep with a smile on my face on that one. No qualms about justification in my mind.

antonovka2• 17 years ago

You're ranting like a loon about brainwashing, cheering on the hacking of private e-mail, and you're getting upvoted for it?

If my e-mail was hacked and out-of-context quotes were levied to take ignorant pot shots at my work, I would be beyond livid. This behavior is absolutely inappropriate and I hope the perpetrator is caught and jailed.

robotrout4• 17 years ago

Thanks for sharing your valuable insights on this issue.

Of course, the email wasn't private, was it? It's a government funded (your money) institution. That actually, perversely, makes this crime even more illegal. Governments seem to have more rights than private citizens.

So, you're right, it was a crime. You're also right, I'm cheering it. But you're wrong about who is ranting. It's you who is ranting.

antipaganda3• 17 years ago

Well, as long as we see ALL the emails, they can't be taken out of context, eh? (What? Communications methods other than emails? Preposterous.)

nkurz4• 17 years ago

The quotes used as examples in this article really don't do justice to the damage that will be done by this leak. If the documents turn out to be authentic, many of the participants will be spending years to come defending themselves from academic disciplinary committees and criminal prosecutions. Beyond the superficial 'blowing off steam', there's conspiracy to destroy evidence in advance of FOIA requests, tax evasion, and overtly political data manipulation.

It's ugly. It seems likely this will derail Copenhagen, and probably destroy the political momentum for Climate Change legislation for years to come.

The sad part is that this really isn't an outcome desired by anyone who actually cares about climate change as a scientific issue. This is a political win for Big Oil, rather than resolution of the issues. Rather than refocusing the issue on the science (as desired by the true skeptics) the issue becomes politicized even further. A different team takes the lead, but the science gets left even further behind.

tome17• 17 years ago

This confuses me. FOI in the UK only applies to government agencies. How can a scientific body be required to release information?

cschneid2• 17 years ago

Guessing, but it's quite possible they did work in the scope of government funding, exposing it to this kind of access.

nkurz4• 17 years ago

I'm not familiar with their status under UK law, but there definitely have been recent FOI requests that went through regarding data and files pertaining to the IPCC report. Perhaps because report was government funded, perhaps because the the University hosting the data is government funded? The leaked emails show the back chatter regarding preparation for fulfilling the requests.

In any case, here's one of the emails in question:

  From: Phil Jones
  To: “Michael E. Mann”
  Subject: IPCC & FOI
  Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

  Mike,

  Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith
  re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment
  – minor family crisis.
  Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I
  don’t have his new email address. We will be getting
  Caspar to do likewise. 
  I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in 
  the Nature paper!!
  Cheers
  Phil

  Prof. Phil Jones
  Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
  School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
  University of East Anglia
  Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
  NR4 7TJ
  UK

I haven't read the original, only the out of context copy here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/real-files-or-fake

The addressee is Michael Mann, the lead author of the IPCC chapter on Climate Change. Note that even the subject line makes reference to FOI.

forensic2• 17 years ago

Government funding = public is entitled to the data.

hzzn• 17 years ago

A quote from

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/GlobWarm.HTM

    The science, reduced to its simplest terms, is that carbon dioxide
    is known to be effective at trapping solar heat. So are water
    vapor (the source of 90% of earth's natural greenhouse effect),
    methane, and other gases. The natural carbon dioxide content of the
    atmosphere has doubled in the last 200 years, climate is getting
    warmer, so the logical conclusion is that there is a connection
    between the two trends. If you feel uncomfortably warm at night and
    wake up to find someone has put another blanket over you, you don't
    need to look beyond that to identify the source of the warming.

    * Nobody - nobody - argues with the carbon dioxide trend. It's
    established beyond doubt.

    * The debate over whether climate is getting warmer is mostly over.

    * The debate now is over whether the connection between warming and
    human emission of carbon dioxide is real, or whether there are other
    causes of climate change at work.

    * The real issue is whether the benefits of taking action will
    outweigh the costs and regulatory burdens.

    * There are some who argue that warming will be beneficial by
    reducing energy demands for heating, lengthening growing seasons,
    and creating larger habitable and arable territory.

    The case for human-caused global warming is simultaneously a lot
    clearer than George W. Bush believes, and a whole lot less so than
    Al Gore does. There are legitimate questions about the data, past
    climate reconstructions, and the computer modeling still to be
    answered.

JulianMorrison• 17 years ago

That sounds like scientists talking shop in the understanding they are trying to extract structure out of intrinsically messy data, from a complex and imperfectly modeled real world that contains causes unaccounted-for, while not leaking the mess to a public and skeptics who really don't understand how the real world looks and who expect clean sharp lines in the visible work product.

joecode2• 17 years ago

I'm reposting this comment by "by" that got lost in the comments below. While all this seems pretty damming, it could be misinformation.

Examiner.com seems to be owned by Clarity Digital Group who are in turn owned by the Anschutz Company. The primary business of the Anschutz Company appears to be "Support Activities for Oil and Gas Operations". http://dnb.powerprofiles.com/profile/874831126/ANSCHUTZ+COMP.... http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn.... http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/The-Anschut...

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joecode2• 17 years ago

what, i'm being voted down? so sources don't matter? i don't know whether the emails are authentic or not, but certainly there is cause for concern, no?

if you look at the other articles of the author, tony hake, you will see they invariably fall into the "climate change skeptic" realm. maybe that's fine, maybe not. the warning is simply: wait for verification before jumping to any conclusions.

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Maktab3• 17 years ago

The Examiner was not the source for the documents and emails, it merely picked up on the story after it had appeared on some climate change skeptic sites first. It had no role in this other than reporting on a story that already had legs. Therefore the organisation's background and corporate structure is irrelevant to this issue and bringing it up offers nothing new or of value to the discussion.

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chrisb• 17 years ago

See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cr... for the other side of the story.

The oft-made claim about the non-availability of the climate model data can be proven false by visiting:

http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php - contains all the models used in the IPCC AR4

http://tamino.wordpress.com/climate-data-links/ - contains a huge amount of climate data.

Of course, all this data is extremely complex, but it cannot be claimed that it is unavailable.

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dzlobin• 17 years ago

This is a great thing to do to show the world the truth. But I must say, unlike politicians and celebrities, I admire the scientists' acceptance of everything and no attempt to fight this.

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1gor• 17 years ago

  If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics
  camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this,
  we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.

Shameful. Going after your scientific opponents 'through official channels' and getting them fired?

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Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and emails

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