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Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked
huckamania was one of many readers to write with the news that the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Unit was hacked, and internal documents released. Some discussion and analysis of the leaked items can be found at Watts Up With That. The CRU has confirmed that a breach occurred, but not that all 61 MB of released material is genuine. Some of the emails would seem to raise concerns about the science as practiced — or at least beg an explanation. From the Watts Up link: "[The CRU] is widely recognized as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. Consisting of a staff of around thirty research scientists and students, the Unit has developed a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system, as well as statistical software packages and climate models. An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server. Here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today: 'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.' The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files. It contained data, code, and emails apparently from the CRU. If proved legitimate, these bombshells could spell trouble for the AGW crowd." Reader brandaman supplied the link to the archive of pilfered data. Reader aretae characterized the emails as revealing "...lots of intrigue, data manipulation, attempting to shut out opposing points of view out of scientific journals. Almost makes you think it's a religion. Anyone surprised?" And reader bugnuts adds, for context: "These emails are certainly taken out of context, whether they are legitimate or fraudulent, which adds to the confusion."
The CRU has confirmed that a breach occurred, but not that all 61 MB of released material is genuine.
Rarely do I have enough time to generate 61 MB (let alone 61 compressed MB) of data, code and e-mails that serves my political/religious purposes. So if this is tampered data or correspondence, there would almost certainly be conflicting items inside such a large repository. I'm not saying it isn't possible, it just decreases the odds that this is a hoax.
'We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents'
Why? Why a random sampling? If you're going to serve up 61 MB zipped, it might as well be 61 GB zipped. Why not release both sets ("the good stuff.tar.gz" and "everything including the inane 'what's for lunch today?' e-mails.tar.gz")?
It's borderline hilarious that the claim is made that this is 'too important to be kept under wraps' followed immediately by the 'we'll decide what you see' cloaked by the equally hilarious word "random." Random? Really? You want me to believe that you printed everything out and put it on a big spinning wheel, blindfolded yourself and then threw darts at it? I mean, come on. Nothing in the political world is random. You would have done yourself much more justice saying you've released what you feel is relevant.
Being one, I know first hand that hackers are highly disorganized. But come on, why not torrent the whole set or wikileaks it or something? I mean, I'm almost waiting for a high quality Ford Fusion ad in PDF to surface right in the middle of the compressed file saying, "Doesn't this worry you enough to go green?"
My work here is dung.
Since some of the emails are sent from them, it's worth reading.
Link
For the specifics read the whole article. For a general summary, this excerpt will do:
"Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen has long made these claims about global warming researchers, as he discusses in a talk from a few weeks ago: "Cooler Heads". It looks like he's slowly being vindicated in his views of both the researchers and the conclusions.
Anyone else reveling in the irony of the hackers cherry-picking data to support their pre-conceived premises? :)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Email isn't science but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting. If the email says "Hey Bob, your algorithm didn't produce the level of warming we were expecting, we need you to rework it so it is in line with our expectations" that would say a lot about how the 'science' is being done. Furthermore, random chunks of data isn't science, but it does have the possibility of revealing any number of things, anything from numbers not matching what is published to problems with software to inconsistent data.
I'm not saying that is what the leaked information says, nor am I saying that the leak is real; there isn't enough information to know that yet. But your instant dismissal of this because it isn't every piece of data ever collected is a little disconcerting in my opinion.
Part of the problem is that the global warming proponents whose e-mails were hacked have REFUSED to release the data upon which they rely. In fact, the e-mails discovered are chock-full of references to their efforts to fight against any disclosure of much of their data. Other e-mails routinely discuss efforts to manipulate and massage the data to account for various political difficulties the data are causing them. For example, one e-mail discusses using a particular modifier to minimize a warming "blip" in the 1940s, without making the "blip" go away entirely, because it appears in both the sea temp and the land temp data. So you're right, e-mail isn't data. But that cuts both ways, and in this case particularly hard against the global warming fear-mongerers.
I'm sure Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre are just about to release their own personal e-mail histories as well.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Let's see ALL the data, and let's not see the E-mail at all -- E-mail isn't data.
You do realize that some of the emails are about hiding data from public view, obstructing freedom of information requests, and campaign to discredit a peer reviewed journal that published something that disagreed with their public stance, right?
If there is one thing I know for sure, its that at least one of the skeptics is entirely open about the data and methodology (with source code, only free tools, etc..) he uses, and he even seeks input from anyone willing to help via his blog. That man is Steve McIntyre.
Publicly funded scientists should be forced to open up their data and methodology, with prison terms for them if they don't. Its time they stopped using public money to boost their own careers while playing fast and loose in their good ol' boy club of like-minded conspirators.
"His name was James Damore."
Yup, Earth's climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to do so. What Earth hasn't been doing for billions of years is supporting a single species who's civilization utterly depends on stable crop yields, stable weather patterns, and a stable climate. If humans go ahead and alter atmospheric chemistry enough to reduce rainfall and crop yields by 20% across several major agricultural regions, the Earth will be just fine with that. The atmosphere and climate have been changing for millenia. You know who won't be fine with it though?
Us.
As a species humans already appropriate well over half the productive ecological capacity on this planet (estimates I've seen range to as high as 90%), so anything we do to appreciably diminish that ecological capacity will hit one species particularly hard.
Us.
Earth, however, will soldier on, whether with a human population of around 10 billion, a dramatically reduced human population, or no human population at all.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
The primary issue is that most climate science has not truly been scrutinize and reviewed. I've been reading the files and it's very damming. It's almost as bad as cold fusion. For example. In note 1075403821.txt Timo Hmeranta states.
One other thing about the CC paper - just found another email - is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.
So they are going to hide behind Intelectual Property Rights to keep their data from being reviewed!. Holy Fucking Shit! How can science do that and still remain respectable?
It all starts at 0
[...header information omitted...]
Subject: Re: ATTENTION. Invitation to influence Kyoto.
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 11:52:09 -0700 (MST)
Dear Eleven,
I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get
others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of
this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the
IPCC "view" when you say that "the latest IPCC assessment makes a
convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions." In contrast
to the one-sided opinion expressed in your letter, IPCC WGIII SAR and TP3
review the literature and the issues in a balanced way presenting
arguments in support of both "immediate control" and the spectrum of more
cost-effective options. It is not IPCC's role to make "convincing cases"
for any particular policy option; nor does it. However, most IPCC readers
would draw the conclusion that the balance of economic evidence favors the
emissions trajectories given in the WRE paper. This is contrary to your
statement.
This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a
dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is
apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed,
balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not
be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In
issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their
personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others
when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their
scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.
[...]
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Is Richard S. Lindzen of the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT an idiot media personality?
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3771
Also: "The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend. More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale. "
- SPPI Monthly CO2 Report: July 2009
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/co2_report_july_09.pdf
There was a documentary about climate change hoax on Finnish YLE channel (it's like BBC of Finland) couple of weeks ago. It basically told that the climate data collected from Finland was turned upside down so that it would show warming instead of cooling etc. People who understand Finnish can check it out from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gmJiZfyDPE People who don't understand Finnish can just check these few seconds where they show how they flipped Finnish data: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suySkDny-zk#t=7m00s
They go as far as telling others to delete information that (I reckon) could be incriminating.
"
> 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!!"
CA is the principal "climate sceptic" website.
Of course, much effort is also dedicated to avoiding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
"PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data.
Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !"
And so on.
Of course, they also find time to gloat of the death of "sceptics", etc. etc. All classy stuff.
"Science" indeed.
Let's see ALL the data, and let's not see the E-mail at all -- E-mail isn't data.
You do realize that some of the emails are about hiding data from public view, obstructing freedom of information requests, and campaign to discredit a peer reviewed journal that published something that disagreed with their public stance, right?
It seems to me that this would be the point of raising the objection. Its a classic double standard. On the one hand we can freely draw conclusions about the nature of the Earth's changes in temperature using a relatively limited set of data. On the other hand we are forbidden to draw conclusions about the content of these emails because we do not have the complete, unmodified, set of data.
They are smart enough to correctly draw conclusions, but no one else may do so.
Classic stuff, there.
Well, I think the big thing that this data-dump shows is that it's actually a small group of tightly knit e-mail connected individuals that are driving a whole lot of the AGW effort.
Someone else wrote that this is all Exxon Astroturfing going on to make us knock out Copenhagen. In other words, arguing that a global conspiracy of oil-company funded individuals, like a meterologist in California and a retired statistician are all on payroll along with hackers in Russia, and new posters on SlashDot, are all working to convince us of a global conspiracy to promote AGW... These people are somehow secretly communicating behind the scenes, transferring billions of dollars of off-the-books money to individuals, all without anyone being able to point to a money trail.
On the other side, we have three groups, CRU, Mann/RealClimate and GISS, who have been clearly communicating and using their supposedly "neutral" Web Site (RealClimate) to promote one-sided views of the science, and apparently "fudge" the data until it matches their theory. These people openly receive grants of hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and have access to governments, prime ministers, and corporations, all of whose funding depends on perpetuating and establishing AGW as *the* science.
So, you'd have to believe it was all a big plan to release data on a minor Russian FTP site, found by accident on a blog almost no one reads, and then forwarded to a blog that *is* read often, in an un-threaded discussion while the site owner is on a trip overseas. This well coordinated group then uses these actual emails (admitted as valid and real by Phil Jones, head of CRU) to somehow concoct a story that a small group of climate scientists are colluding to support a theory by ignoring the facts, by using their own words to that effect.
On the one hand, you have individuals scanning through, admittedly, purloined emails and saying, "Whoa! What's going on here." Opposite that, you have the post on RealClimate today saying, "Move along, nothing to see here!" Some of those emails involve apparent schemes to transfer US funds overseas to avoid taxation. That alone is "something to see," despite what RealClimate is saying. And that's ignoring whether the science was done according to any standards of ethics.
We're talking millions of dollars in budgets from publicly funded programs. If there's even a hint of malfeasance in these documents, then a serious investigation should be started. I don't care which side is the global conspiracy. Only one side is spending *my money* to perpetrate it. The oil companies can spend however many trillion dollars they want without it coming out of *my* pocket.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
I feel really bad for these researchers.
I have published only a few papers and would be mortified if my emails got released to the public. I am constantly joking around with other lab denizens about fudging stuff, and removing data that doesn't fit the expectations. The opportunity for out of context quotations is scary to contemplate. Not to mention all of the politically incorrect jokes about such-and-such a graph's sexual orientation.
If one of these guys said anything like that over the years of emails in this dump, they are in some deep shit for nothing. Image someone going through all of the comments for all of the code you have ever written just looking for any tiny detail to prove you're a hack.
"just added one to this variable now it works" = screwed.
"need to go back and fix this" = screwed.
"not sure why this works but it does" = screwed.
"Bob is an idiot, I am just going to comment out his code" = screwed.
Like Cardinal Richelieu said:
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
Right or wrong, these guys are gonna get the shaft.