Climate change cover-up? You better believe it

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=climate-change-cover-up-you-better-2009-11-24

by Daishiman • 17 years ago

39 47 17 years ago

miked• 17 years ago

While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information unveil something below impressive scientific and personal behavior, they can also be seen as the frustrated responses of people working on complex data under deadline while being harassed by political opponents.

"Apparent slowness"? Bullshit. The emails show a very active ongoing effort to suppress release of information and to "hide the decline", irreproducible results, appalling sloppiness in model construction. And now this apologia for anti-scientific behavior from a True Believer.

kls• 17 years ago

You quoted the exact same line that grabbed me as well. Sorry on this one, scientist are held to a different standard than the rest of the population. Any other scientist in any other field, would be summarily discredited for a fraction of the ethical violations that these individuals engaged in. All of their work should now be subjected to scrutiny and should be re-validated by a independent party.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

IMHO their work should be re-validated, if it fails to meet the standard, and if even a minor portion of their work appears to show purposeful tampering or deceit, then all of their work should be black-listed as well as these scientists themselves.

Politics and game-playing is only an ethical violation. Tampering with ANY data is a violation of the very nature of being a scientist, and any 'scientist' willing to violate the core principles of the art cannot and should not be recognized as a scientist in any way, shape or form and neither should anything they produced be recognized in anyway as being scientific without complete validation from an impartial independent party.

ncarlson2• 17 years ago

I must be the only one, but I cannot for the life of me make sense of any of these stories. Every story I read about these leaked emails is drowned in sarcasm. I don't know up from down.

Can someone explain what exactly is going on in plain English?

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

I'll try.

1) Climate science has gotten very emotional -- both for those who think the planet's climate is in danger of spinning out of control and for those who do not.

2) For years the critics/deniers/skeptics have argued that the scientists in the field of climatology have not been working on the up and up. In other words, that there was a conspiracy to prevent the truth from getting out. These people were laughed at.

3) Somebody illegally broke into one place that does climate research and stole a bunch of emails

4) These emails show frustrated scientists who are trying to stack the deck in web forums, trying to prevent people with opposing views from being published, deleting critical data, fudging the numbers, lying to the press, and admitting to each other privately that something is very wrong

5) All hell breaks loose. Those on the side of the "end is coming" take to the web and print media with robust defenses of the scientists in question, pointing out how stressed out they are, how emails can be taken out of context, how the skeptics are mostly morons, how there's much more data than just being produced by this unit, etc. Detractors (so far) are mostly just countering by quoting the scientists themselves and demanding that if the research isn't totally open and reproducible, it's not science. Some have also demanded that the scientists in question step down (I count myself as one of these)

That's as unbiased as I can get. As for my own bias, I have no idea what the earth's climate is doing, but I know a rigged game when I see one, and the nature of the debate on climate science has been in the toliet for a long time. It's good to see a little sunshine getting in. I hope it leads to better standards and higher ethical guidelines. If this is as serious as folks make out, it's even more critical that every little piece of research is beyond reproach. We have a long ways to go before we get there, unfortunately.

ncarlson2• 17 years ago

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Elepsis• 17 years ago

Point 4 of your summary is not entirely unbiased -- it's still not clear whether the emails show that numbers are truly being fudged or that truly critical data has been deleted on purpose. Because the meaning of the emails is unclear, it is what's being debated in all of these articles. Do the mails indeed show manipulation, lying and a consensus that "something is very wrong"? That's not a closed question.

cwan• 17 years ago

Pretty good summary. I would add that there's a summary and references of some of the emails here: http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/11/climategate-executi...

For point #3 - there is speculation that the emails were leaked (and not "illegally hacked") not only because it would seem a correspondent saw a number of the emails prior to their release to the general public but because it only contained emails that would be gathered as if in preparation to meet a FOIA request. If they were leaked, the person(s) who did so could be protected under whistleblower legislation and would have done so legally.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/ent... "It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)"

rjurney• 17 years ago

Thanks, now I at least sort of know what the hell is going on.

etal• 17 years ago

Overcoming Bias gets the gist right:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/its-news-on-academia-n...

The links from that post are other reasonably unemotional commentaries.

dejb• 17 years ago

From the article

> If you don’t like this state of affairs join me in trying to develop a more reliable consensus mechanism on such topics: prediction markets.

It would be great if people were rewarded or punished based on the eventual utility and correctness of their statements rather than their immediate appeal. In a sense people are using their reputation as a currency in a prediction market of sorts just by recording their thoughts and opinions publicly. In the future this information should be easy to aggregate. You could imagine a public 'credibility score' much like a credit score. In this current debate it seems there will be substantial loss of reputation for those you nail their colours to the wrong mast.

alan-crowe2• 17 years ago

The big question is what happens if we do nothing about climate change. Do we end up spending hundreds of billions of dollars coping with the changes or do we end up spending tens of trillions of dollars coping with the changes? Since we are contemplating spending trillions of dollars to prevent climate change we can act on the answer to that question and a reliable answer is worth trillions of dollars.

It is natural to expect that the Climate Research Unit would have been performing its major work within a framework of internal controls designed to permit the appointment of a third party to audit the quality of the work. If the auditor was of the opinion that the work was of sufficient quality it could go forward as input to intergovernment treaty making. If not, then governments could look elsewhere for advice or commission further research work from other hands.

The recent leaks have confirmed that the CRU never attempted to institute apropriate internal controls, attempts to replicate past results internally have failed, and there is nothing to audit. You find the sarcasm you encounter to be confusing because it is misdirected.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

> Has there ever been a nuclear reactor built anywhere in the world that didn't rely on government to get it done? Sounds like socialism, doesn't it? Hello France? USSR? USA?

I'm a huge proponent of nuclear power - I think it's one of the cleaner and safer ways to provide energy, and I think nuclear fission combined with fossil fuels is probably enough to last until we develop fusion or hydrogen based power.

Anyway, the reason there's been no nuclear plants built without government action is because it's illegal to build a nuclear plant without government action, since processed uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons. I imagine you'd see more nuclear plants if the restrictions were lessened, and I reckon there'd be plenty of private investors to do it, though I'm not sure it's altogether a good idea in this case.

That said, nuclear power restricted to government-only is the reason it hasn't been built privately, and it's too bad it's forbidden from some areas. Nuclear power would be a godsend to a number of areas on the planet where the local ecosystem is particularly sensitive to pollution and the terrain isn't suitable for wind, solar, or hydroelectric.

diego_moita• 17 years ago

I am scared of nuclear power. I understand, believe and agree that we have today the technical means to use it safely. However, I also believe that its safety is directly dependent on being handled by competent, serious and accountable people. Now, I leave in Brazil (a country already able to enrich Uranium) and I know very well that third world authorities are the last people on earth I would trust my safety and health.

It might be a good idea in civilized countries; not in Brazil, Russia, Iran, India, China, etc.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

You have to take into account the types of technology being used for nuclear energy. Enrichment in todays day and age is rather unnecessary and IMO makes a countries (read: Iran) reasoning to use it very dubious.

There are many safeguarded reactor designs (like the CANDU) that mean using them to produce plutonium for weaponization very difficult, in fact it's generally much easier to just build generally-unsafeguarded research reactors and harvest it from there (exactly what India did). The safeguarded reactors can be used to harvest tritium, which India did use to make a boosted fission weapon (fusion bomb). However tritium is regularly produced for medical reasons, and major demands are going to be required for the ITER and any commercial fusion plants.

Presently due to the lack of unsafeguarded reactors in western countries, there is a major shortage of medical isotopes due to the closure of one reactor. This brings up other questions in the nuclear debate that many environmentalists don't want to touch, which is: Without nuclear reactors, how will the 20 million people annually who require radioactive isotopes (generally only producible in reactors that can produce plutonium) for medical diagnosis be diagnosed and treated (many times with radioactive isotopes again, either from the same reactors or using tritium produced from safeguarded reactors)?

The simple suggestion to eradicate nuclear energy is absurd. We need better safeguards and controls, but any countries willing to 'play by the rules' should at least have access to safeguarded reactors. In fact, any environmentalist worth their weight should be petitioning their own government to help provide grants for China to produce safeguarded nuclear reactors. If coal mining no longer becomes economically profitable inside China, then a huge swathe of the worlds fossil fuel emissions will be removed.

Incidentally a single coal plant can easily emit more radioactive material than every nuclear reactor in operation today. So ironically increasing our use of radioactive fuels, will drastically decrease the emissions of radioactive materials, specifically in some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

mtts2• 17 years ago

"I think nuclear fission combined with fossil fuels is probably enough to last until we develop fusion or hydrogen based power."

Problem is there isn't enough usable uranium on the planet to make increasing the number of active nuclear plants viable for more than a couple of decades.

That, and a lot of what there is, is in places that make Saudi Arabia seem enlightened (Niger).

"Anyway, the reason there's been no nuclear plants built without government action is because it's illegal to build a nuclear plant without government action"

I think you will find that in most parts of the world, building power plants in general, not just nuclear plants, is done by the government, not by the free market.

tome• 17 years ago

Yes there is. There's plenty of uranium in seawater. See here:

http://www.withouthotair.com

DanielBMarkham4• 17 years ago

I've been a Scientific American reader for over a decade now.

(sigh)Each issue gets worse and worse -- the magazine has moved from science to advocacy, and in a huge way.

Sadly, this commentary just continues the trend. Right now the signal-to-noise ratio is about 1-10. If it continues to drop I'll have to go somewhere else for scientific-oriented news.

Come on, guys. You can do better than this!

logjam• 17 years ago

The piece is clearly labeled as opinion and analysis. Opinion, analysis, and advocacy is part of many actual scientific journals, as it is of science itself. Go browse Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA for starters.

Now, why don't you enlighten us with exactly what you find wrong with the opinion or analysis in this piece, and provide a little more signal yourself. Science is cited in the opinion piece. Do you have an argument with the science cited? Or with the opinion?

gritzko3• 17 years ago

Sorry, that is just very poor advocacy. Accusations, spinning the facts, etc.

yummyfajitas2• 17 years ago

There is no scientific content in the article. There is no analysis. There is nothing but a few scientific words, with 5 paragraphs (out of 9) devoted attacking skeptics.

Because the opposition here is not grounded in any robust scientific theory...but a hysterical reaction to the possibly of what? One-world government? The return of communism?

...those working in the fossil fuel extraction and/or burning business.

There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy...launched by the fossil fuel industry

...same flaks and hacks who brought you "smoking isn't dangerous."

In the paragraphs that were not ad-hominem attacks, there was one grounding paragraph (mentioning hacked emails), and another paragraph which (falsely) claims the most damaging email is a complaint about funding. Only one paragraph provides a few links to climate-related science, and that paragraph is more or less tangential to the main article.

The main opinion expressed here: climate skeptics are right wing conspiracy theorists working for the oil and tobacco companies.

Not sure why this is hacker news, or even relevant to the issue.

Daniel_Newby• 17 years ago

They have been doing this for a least three decades. This is just the first time you have noticed them doing it to something you have first hand knowledge of (thanks to the Internet piping primary data into your home).

In the early 1980s, Scientific American did exactly the same sorts of things to "prove" that the Soviet technology program was unstoppable, and therefore that we could either retreat or commit planetary suicide. They had a consensus or prominent scientists and engineers showing, with hard numbers and slick charts, that it was provably impossible to do anything about ballistic missiles. Learned professors lectured us on the untenable accuracy limits of missile interceptors; rocket scientists lectured on the ease with which missiles could be spun to keep lasers from burning through. They had a social science consensus that saying "no" provokes aggression.

One business cycle later the Soviet technology program went bankrupt and took the political system with it.

Edit: And let us not forget the "nuclear winter" scenarios. Doesn't AGW simply reduce to a previously solved problem? ;-)

billswift• 17 years ago

That's why I cancelled my subscription and almost entirely quit reading it in the 80s.

Daemmerung• 17 years ago

Scientific American has been declining ever since Flanagan left its masthead, twenty-five years ago. Try American Scientist (http://www.americanscientist.org/) instead-- it reminds me so much of what SA used to be.

(And don't get me started about the Judean People's Front....)

mhartl• 17 years ago

As physicist and climate historian Spencer Weart told The Washington Post: "...[W]e've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance..."

There are two hypotheses that might explain this behavior. The first is unprecedented boldness of the enemies of science. The second is one I suspect Dr. Weart is not yet ready to face.

alan-crowe2• 17 years ago

The important criticism of climate science is very different from the criticism that Spencer Weart choses to respond to.

Compare the financial crisis and the climate crisis. The origin of the financial crisis lies in people believing. Believing that house prices never fall, believing that structured financial products reduce risk. Critics do not impugn the motives of the believers. Helping minorities to buy houses, moving financial risk to those who can shoulder it, these are noble aims. Critics complain that those in charge should have been intellectually rigorous but were merely well meaning and enthusiastic and that this was sufficient to cause disaster.

Contrast this with the climate crisis. Climate science is excused its bumbling amateurism on the grounds that ad hoc adjustments to the data are not sinister. The excuse for losing the raw data and the calibration scripts is that, far from attempting a fraud, the researchers are well meaning and enthusiastic.

We want to know whether the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is true. The allegation against against climate scientists is that they should have been intellectually rigorous but that they stand revealed as, at best, merely well meaning and enthusiastic. This works no better in science than it does in finance.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

By "apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information" don't they mean deliberate deletion of data and an illegal campaign to deny specific people a handful of requests for data? And most of those requests were just follow-ups after initial denials.

Spin spin spin Scientific American, at least we know what your true colors are.

mellis• 17 years ago

As far as I can tell, for example by reading the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Clime Change) report (summary: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm...), the overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus is that global warming is real and man-made. I've yet to see anyone critical of this view make a case (much less a convincing one) that anything in these emails provides any reason to doubt the overall scientific conclusions and policy implications. Until someone does, I'm planning to ignore this "controversy" and use any time I spend on climate change to better educate myself on the general scientific consensus and the implications for policy. If we're interested in doing something about global warming, we shouldn't be nitpicking about whether some few lines of code were commented out or not. We should be making the case for cap-and-trade legislation and doing what we can to get it passed here in the U.S.

gritzko3• 17 years ago

You speak like a true believer. The mails have shown, precisely, that IPCC process is manipulated. That is the problem. Does warming exists? Most likely. Is it human-made? Who knows.

P.S. Yes, I am paid by Royal Dutch/Shell to post deceptive comments on HackerNew.

rimantas2• 17 years ago

In Poland the global consensus is that God exists. The problem is "overwhelming scientific evidence" — turns out it is not that overhelming. If you try to dig deeper you will get "there is some evidence" and "our models show". I don't deny GW or even AGW, but it is sad to see how in this case science is somewhere in the background and all is mostly polictics and beliefs.

gritzko3• 17 years ago

"While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information"

Ja, ja... sure...

akamaka• 17 years ago

There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy. It just happens to be one launched by the fossil fuel industry to obscure the truth about climate change and delay any action. And this release of emails right before the Copenhagen conference is just another salvo—and a highly effective one—in that public relations battle, redolent with the scent of the same flaks and hacks who brought you "smoking isn't dangerous."

Citations please!

fbailey4• 17 years ago

I'm quite disappointed about so many "sceptics" on Hacker News . The term "sceptic" alone gives someone credibility, it sounds like someone is actively engaging in a scientific debate, but no "sceptic" is.

The basic scientific fact on which every other argument rests is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect greenhouse effect. This alone should end the argument for any sane person.You can replicate the effect in every lab with the same results. The calculation that we are having an effect is simple. The co2 measurements are absolutely clear, co2 is rising and is now on its highest level ever.

I don't understand what your argument is? That correlation doesn't equal causation? You can prove the causation in every lab, just replicate John Tyndalls experiment from the 1850s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall.

I don't care if two models work or don't work, or if some scientist has doctored three numbers, it doesn't change the basic fact. The argument they are having is about the current speed of warming and I don't care about that, because it doesn't matter. It might well be that the planet is warming much slower because of some natural effect, now if this is the case we should all be happy...and start reducing greenhouse gases immediately. All we got is a chance to react, the basic scientific fact didn't go away.

rimantas2• 17 years ago

If the Greenhouse effect was the only effect affecting climate, you'd have a point.

nazgulnarsil2• 17 years ago

why is this being voted down? simplistic models of complex systems are obviously a bad idea when the results involve spending billions of dollars that could otherwise directly save lives today.

jasonkolb• 17 years ago

You sound like a Denier.

Climate change cover-up? You better believe it

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