Scientists Step Down After CRU Hack Fallout

An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the recent release of thousands of private files and emails after a server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was hacked, Prof. Phil Jones is stepping down as head of the CRU. Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, is also under inquiry by Penn State University."

Comments

Politics

[MozeeToby]

The fact that this story is posted under Politics says a lot about what's wrong with the global warming 'debate' IMO.

Re:Politics

[mveloso]

The above comment shows a complete lack of understanding of how "Science" fits into reality.

Science: eating fatty food is bad for you
Public: f*ck off

Science: oh, some fatty foods are good
Public: f*ck off

Science: oh, some fatty foods are bad, some are good, depending on you
Public: f*ck off

Re:Politics

[brian0918]

to keep it simple for those who don't get global warming, most people don't understand that icecaps melting/receeding like they have been lately is not at all a normal part of our weather patterns.

On the contrary, this is quite normal. Ice caps expand and recede all the time and have been for centuries. As MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen pointed out in WSJ today, you're discarding a well-established understanding of the history of the planet by making that claim.

Re:Politics

[gad_zuki!]

What suppression?

Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.

Keep it up deniers, Im sure your corporate masters are laughing all the way to the bank while you cry all the way to the grave.

Re:Politics

[phantomfive]

It's not about 'suppression' per se, it's about bait and switch.

Look, what's the scientific consensus that we have? Is it about ocean levels rising to cover the earth? Is it about melting glaciers and polar ice caps? Is it about increases in hurricanes? Is it about a six degree increase in temperature?

Not at all. The only consensus we have is that there has been a slight increase in temperature over the last century, and that human activity (specifically CO2) has contributed to that. That's it. There is no consensus on how much CO2 has contributed to it. There is no consensus on how much temperatures will rise in the next century. There is no consensus on what the effect of that rise would be, assuming it does rise. Basically what alarmists have been saying is "AGW is a fact" and everyone agrees. Then they go on and say, "therefore disaster is coming if we don't stop it now" but not everyone agrees with that.

Re:Politics

[Jeremy Erwin]

It is politics, though. People are interpreting emails in their preferred context. The most publicized emails are devoid of scientific content. The actors in those emails aren't discussing the latest paper in Nature, or research methodology. They're discussing the rhetorical merits of a graph, or whether responding to a flawed study in some third rate journal gives credence to that study. The emails might be of interest to a historian of science, but it's not as if the archive is a graduate seminar in dendrochronology.

Two caveats: I have not trawled the archive, and the leaked .zip is a bit small for ten years worth of stored email.

Re:Politics

[kaiser423]

You mean the 800-1300 AD warming period seen in Europe due to changes in the gulf stream/jet stream, which was not warmer anywhere else on Earth?

Yea, god forbid they take into account European data that was warmer for a certain period of time due to known weather phenomenon by adjusting it out since the rest of the world showed no such warming during that same period. Are you saying that you want climate prediction models solely centered around geographically European data? Seems like a bad idea to me.

Re:Politics

[ScentCone]

Guess where it leads

Let's see ... ah! It leads to Al Gore, and his fellow investors, who are positioned to make billions of dollars through the absurd selling and trafficking in carbon credits. Just like priests selling absolution in the dark ages. In fact, exactly like that.

As for those climatologists, who were facing the traditional career full of angst over tenure or grants? For people like that, a steady job is rolling in cash. If you can also crank out an alarmist book or two, and score some face time on BBC so that you'll be invited to travel the world and get in some rubber chicken meals at conferences on someone else's account? Frosting on the cake.

Re:Politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words for you: Al Gore. Moderately wealthy attention-seeking nobody to gazillionaire overnight, flying all over the world in his giant jet to warn everyone about the awful effects of their carbon footprints. As a government contractor, I can say with certainty that there is a huge market for "following the money" to the deepest pockets of all - governments. No climate scare == reduced funding for climate study. If you're a climatologist, there's an obvious benefit to fudging the numbers.

Re:Politics

[phantomfive]

That is not a report of consensus, it is a compilation created by a few scientists. Here is a survey that tries to establish a consensus. It is not the only one, there are others. All the surveys that show any type of consensus are very conservative in the questions they ask.

Re:Politics

[elrous0]

Did you know that Walmart pays most of its employees little more than minimum wage and doesn't provide them with healthcare? We must act now to restore all those mom-and-pop stores which paid their stock boys $60,000 a year and gave them princely health insurance policies!

Re:Politics

[oldspewey]

Greenland was never named as such because it was "green." It was named in order to lure colonists who would hear the name and think "Sounds like a nice place. When's the next boat?"

Re:Politics

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Oh, I got your point just fine, but it looks like you missed mine. I'll spell it out: humans don't live on geological timescales. The climate change debate is not about what the Earth's climate will be like millions, or tens of thousands, or even thousands of years from now. It's about what it will be like in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. And on that human timescale, things are changing very fast indeed.

Also ... dude, "Pol Pot?" Seriously? If you think any measure that will ever be taken, or even seriously proposed, to control CO2 emissions is in any way comparable to what the Khmer Rouge did, you are insane.

Re:Politics

[Obfuscant]

Maybe they will get more funding to carry out more science, but you do know that they don't get to have any of that money, right?

Sir, you are a moron. Just where do you think the salaries of the professors and graduate students and research assistants doing research into global warming comes from? Grants.

It is extremely tightly regulated and controlled by the grant providers.

Unless a grant has money included to buy lots of equipment or rent ship time, the vast majority of the money in a grant is salary. This "tightly controlled" money destined for salary GOES to salary. A certain percentage of the grant goes to "overhead" -- money skimmed right off the top, taken by the University to fund management and physical plant, etc. And to fund professors in stuff like English and History.

After you reach 100% grant funding for the principal investigator salary, new grants go to fund more students and more research assistants and post-docs. The more students and post-docs a PI has, the more prestige and the bigger his realm. The more overhead he provides to the Uni the more respect and more prestige he's given by the Uni. The more he can demand in offices and lab space.

Disclaimer: I am a researcher in a university lab.

So am I, in a college deeply invested in climate research, and 100% of my salary comes from grant money. If we don't get grants to pay me, I don't get paid. If my PI doesn't get grants to pay him, he doesn't get paid. If my PI told the funding agencies "We have solved the question we were looking at" he doesn't get any more grants to study that question. If we were doing AGW research and said "humans aren't the cause", we wouldn't get any of the grants going to find "the solution". We'd be cutting our own throats. We'd be sitting on the unemployment line reading about all the grants going to the researchers like CRU who fudge the numbers so they look like AGW is real.

About fudging numbers. I've seen what today's grad students are being taught about data processing. If their dataset is supposed to look like a smooth line they will make it look linear, even if that means they throw 90% of it away as "outliers". There is no consideration given to why those points exist, if they don't fit the assumption about what valid data should look like, out they go. There are tools to take a plot that looks ugly and simply point at the data you want to go away, and it does. Magically, their dataset matches the prediction.

I remember very well one of the emails coming from NCAR a few years ago, trumpeting the fact that they'd made a small change to the hockeystick model and the upswing in predicted temperatures got much larger. There was no physical reality to the parameter they changed. It didn't make the hindcast fit better. It just made the scare factor bigger, so the result was BETTER!

Being right has nothing to do with success, being able to create a desire for your particular kind of research does. "We're all going to die unless..." works better at the latter than "we understand the issue and it isn't serious".

Why are people so ready to claim "follow the money" when the money comes from oil companies, and then claim that money has nothing to do with it when it appears in the pockets of the people doing the research?

Re:Politics

[jtdennis]

I was always taught that this was how science worked. If your "results" can't be duplicated, then it's not proving anything.
By the same token, if you hide the data so it can't be duplicated, then the "results" should be thrown out and the work redone.

Don't turn AGW into creation "science"

[Anonymous Coward]

Your cause may be correct, but your methods damage all of science as well as your cause.

True science should not hide data or pick data to support predefined conclusions. And dissenting papers with proper methodologies should never be suppressed. This is the only way to do science right.

Re:Don't turn AGW into creation "science"

[MillionthMonkey]

With apologies to myself.

GOOFUS has a PhD.
GALLANT has a PhD in a field unrelated to his research.

GOOFUS gets little respect as a scientist outside the scientific community.
GALLANT gets little respect as a scientist inside the scientific community.

GOOFUS drives a beat-up old car.
GALLANT drives a BMW unless his chauffeur is driving.

GOOFUS wears street clothes to work, maybe a lab suit on occasion.
GALLANT wears three piece suits at all times.

GOOFUS is employed by a "university", a "hospital", or a "laboratory".
GALLANT is employed by a "Coalition", an "Institute", an "Association", a "Foundation", a "Council", or a "White House".

GOOFUS earns $30000 per year unless they cut his funding.
GALLANT earns $200000 per year but makes his real money from speaking fees.

GOOFUS lives anywhere in the country.
GALLANT lives in a wealthy area near Washington DC, but may have additional homes elsewhere.

GOOFUS may sometimes be filmed standing in front of big melting icebergs.
GALLANT may be filmed sitting in front of a bookcase or standing behind a podium at a $2000 per plate fundraiser, although there may be ice melting in his drink.

GOOFUS is a dues-paying member of several scientific grassroots organizations.
GALLANT is on the payroll of several scientific astroturf organizations.

GOOFUS gets summoned for jury duty but is never picked as a juror.
GALLANT claims "the jury is still out" on evolution or global warming, since he considers himself to be on the jury.

GOOFUS maintains the world is five billion years old.
GALLANT isn't really saying, but creationists distribute his pamphlets all the time.

GOOFUS claims the world is warming as a direct result of human activity.
GALLANT either claims that climate change doesn't exist, or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it.

GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it.
GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.

GOOFUS writes scientific papers and grant proposals.
GALLANT writes the nation's environmental legislation and a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

GOOFUS draws scientific conclusions from the data he collects that usually come out in agreement with the scientific consensus.
GALLANT paints the scientific consensus as being entirely political in nature and enjoys comparing himself to Galileo.

GOOFUS is heavily trained to be a skeptic and to treat information from all sources with a skeptical mind.
GALLANT is heavily marketed as a skeptic but reserves his skepticism for GOOFUS.

GOOFUS isn't paid much attention by the press since his opinions are commonplace among scientists.
GALLANT holds maverick opinions for a scientist which keeps him busy running from one balanced talk show to the next.

GOOFUS has no PR skills.
GALLANT leverages his PR experience all the time, although he has access to paid PR staff.

GOOFUS claims the sky is falling and we have to take painful steps to reduce CO2 emissions now.
GALLANT claims the free market will take care of it and recommends solving the problem by conning Zimbabwe out of their pollution credits.

GOOFUS advises his kids not to go into science.
GALLANT advises the president.

Re:Don't turn AGW into creation "science"

[Wildclaw]

A big problem is that most people have grave misconceptions about what science is. Even those who think they understand it, often fail to remember the truth behind the scientific method. Science is not the search for truth. In fact, it is pretty much the opposite. Science is the search for what isn't true.

The truth is invisible, so we do the next best thing. We look at everything else, and notice what isn't there as possibly being the truth. Einstein's real feat of progress wasn't that he came up with the theory of relativity. What really advanced science was that he pinpointed a weakness in the previously accepted theory of gravity.

The problem is that most people don't like to find out that what they know is wrong. And that is a prerequisite to conducting science. Which is why it is so difficult to conduct. You have to suppress your natural instincts of control and try to let your instincts of curiosity guide you instead.

Hockey guy?

[Spy Handler]

Prof. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist is also under inquiry by Penn State University

Mann? Is he the same guy who said global temperature will go up exponentially like a hockey stick unless we cap and trade right now?

Re:Hockey guy?

[makomk]

1. They manipulated the peer-review process and controlled it to the point of changing what peer-review meant, freezing out contrary authors, reviewing each others' work, getting editors fired, etc. There's a lot of that kind of manipulation revealed.

The "changing what peer review meant" was a joke - as demonstrated by the fact they did reference the two papers in the IGCC report that they were talking about what "changing what peer review meant" in order to exclude.

2. They colluded to avoid the FOIA and deleted emails and threatened to delete data before they would release it under FOIA. This is illegal.

As far as I can tell, they weren't serious about that, though most of the scientists do seem to be seriously fed up with dubious FOIA requests for data they can't release by people who'll just end up misinterpreting it anyway...

3. They admitted to manipulating data to 'hide the decline' or 'get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.' I don't have a problem with 'trick' being used. No big deal, but 'hide the decline'? Not good.

Firstly, not one e-mail talked about getting rid of the Medieval Warm Period. There were e-mails talking about a bogus statement attributed to one scientist in which he said that, but that's it. (Oh, and e-mails about containing the Medieval Warm Period - as in, obtaining temperature data far back enough to cover it in its entirety...)

Secondly, they did a really good job of "hiding the decline". Publishing about it in the very high-profile journal Nature a decade ago proved a very effective way of keeping it secret. Not. (The "decline" in question is a decline in indirect temperature measurements obtained from the density of tree cores in the high-latitude Northern hemisphere. It's a headache for reasearchers because they know based on other measurements that temperatures haven't actually declined - real cooling would be a different matter entirely...)

4. They would manipulate the data by simply not adding it, closing a run on an increase, when the subsequent data showed a decline.

Nope. The issue is not that the subsequent data shows a decline, but that it doesn't match up with other measurements.

They seem dismayed that the last ten years shows an overall redction in temperature, at one point calling it a travesty and suggesting the data must be wrong.

Hmmmm? The only thing I've seen called a travesty was the current scientific level of understanding of certain large-scale weather systems. One of the scientists was complaining that it was the coldest year on record where he was and they didn't know why.

5. Because there were no thermometers 2000 years ago, they use 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice core samples, etc. However, tree ring growth can be caused by wetness and other issues, not just temperature. In ine case they 'proved; warming based on 12 trees in Siberia. When hey went back and measured many more trees, the increase disappeared.

Yeah, that's a pain for researchers

But the more damning evidence is in the programs themselves, including REM statements where 'hide the decline' is found numerous times

All related to Briffa's work on the problem with certain tree rings as temperature measurements since 1960, from what I can tell. Yes, all of them, really. Take a look at the file names.

data is manually manipulated, and the programs would throw an error and keep on running.

Sounds about right for scientific code.

There's one 'Harry Read me' text file where poor Harry is trying to make sense of the code, over several years, and points out many of the flaws.

Yep. Some ancient legacy code base for an generating an obscure and equally legacy temperature dataset, apparently. (One that's underfunded, I suspect - it's not

Re:Hockey guy?

[raddan]

"invented global warming"? I hate to break it to you, guy, but the Greenhouse Effect was discovered in the 1850's, with people like Callendar pointing to anthropogenic sources in the 1930's. Nearly ALL of the early global warming researchers believed that this phenomena would be a net positive, so their research was far from a scare tactic. The effect was noticeable enough by the 1960's that researchers from separate disciplines (i.e., not climate scientists) began to notice the trend independently.

There is a huge amount of data that supports the claim that the planet is warming. The data is unequivocal. The cause of this warming, and whether is is anthropogenic or not, has been a major research focus for more than 40 years. Your claim that there's this cabal of scientists conspiring to brainwash the general public into believing in a theory of anthropogenic warming is ludicrous. Do you know how many people you're talking about?

Science

[b1t r0t]

Science is not done by consensus. Science is done by showing your work so that others can see it and confirm that your data and methods make sense... sort of like the Open Source process. Only instead of a few million Windows computers getting botted, our very economy is at stake from the "warmers" and their political machinations.

Re:Science

[wizardforce]

You act as if the deniers have nothing to gain from ignoring the science. No matter what the science says, everyone that has a stake in industries that produce large amounts of CO2 will tend to fight tooth and nail against anyone claiming that CO2 does any harm. Simple selfish interest.

Re:Ha! That'll show them hippies!

[MozeeToby]

I know there are lots of whackjobs who are conviced that GW is a worthless topic, or that the scientists are all on someone's payroll, or that GW science is some kind of master plan to give a certain political party power (and that power will just evaporate if they lose the next election? I've never understood those kinds of consiracy theories). That being said, the issue that I have is more along the lines of scientists trying to "do what's right" to protect the planet (meaning it's not about science anymore for some of them, it's about protecting the planet).

At best, that attitude leads to behaviors like celebrating the death of someone who disagrees with you; at worst it leads to falsifying data to ensure that world sees things the same way you do. We know, for a fact, that the former has happened; the question to me is, how far towards the latter end of the spectrum is their behaviour? Release the raw data and let everyone take a look at it, until then I'll always have my doubts as to what is really going on.

Great, just great

[JoshuaZ]

So now we have hard working scientists who have their lives disrupted over this idiocy. This whole matter has been completely overblown. So people ranted and sent intemperate emails on a private mailing list? Wow. Newsflash: Scientists are not vulcans. The only thing that's even more shocking is the email where using a standard statistical technique is referred to as a "trick." If this is the grand conspiracy, it has to be the most pathetic grand conspiracy I've ever seen. A private mailing list of a few scientists that was mostly used productively and with an occasional whiny email or rant simply isn't that big a deal. People backbiting and such is really common. Welcome to academia.

Re:Great, just great

[JoshuaZ]

Mostly out of context. Have you never said anything nasty about someone and then asked someoen to delete it? Right. And claims that garbage data was added is simply false. Discussion about "suppressing" journals never occurred either. What was discussed was a single person suggesting that maybe not send papers to certain journals and not citing papers from those journals. Again, you are going to need to do a lot better than that. Capitalizing things doesn't make an argument any more valid. But nice try.

Re:Great, just great

[luzr]

Deleting 30 years of inconvinient data and replacing it with something else is now considered the "standard statistical technique"?

See, nobody disputes that instrumental records for past 30 years are more accurate than data obtained by proxy. Anyway, if there is such a divergence of proxy data and instrumental record (proxy data pointing downwards), it casts serious doubts about validity of proxy data of the past.

Also, it means that to show the hockey stick, you in fact do not need care about proxy data too much. Instrumental record will make the right shape even if you feed anything before with noise.

I guess that the most important issue in Mann's and Briffa reconstruction is that MWP was downplayed and current warming thus became "unprecedented". Which is exactly what you get if you choose noisy unreliable proxy data, and 'stick' real temperature records where it fits...

If you see any flaws in this analysis of "trick to hide the decline", I would be glad to hear your objections.

TEMPORARILY

[jfengel]

Even the WSJ article they linked to included the key word "temporarily". They relegated it to the subtitle, but it was there. (The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News, can be assumed to to take the climate-denialist position on everything.)

Temporarily stepping down is very different from an admission of guilt. It can be a way of allowing work to go on while investigations are under way, when a controversial figure attracts so much attention as to detract from the real work.

Maybe there are some real failures here, for which the guy does deserve to be removed from his job, but so much of what I've read about the hacked emails is hyped and deliberately misinterpreted that I'm unimpressed by this incident.

Re:TEMPORARILY

[phantomfive]

The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also owner of Fox News, can be assumed to to take the climate-denialist position on everything.

See, this is the attitude I can't stand. Why do you feel the need to divide everything into believers and denialists? It isn't 'us' against 'them.' That's not scientific in any way.

What I've seen from the Wall Street Journal seems to be more of a skeptical viewpoint.....they want to see the evidence before they choose one side or the other. As a financial periodical, the WSJ lives and dies by the quality of the information it provides, information that is often immediately testable (if I read that there is an oil embargo in some country, and based on that information invest in oil, only to find out later the information was wrong, I'm not going to be very happy). Is it really unreasonable to demand from scientists that their results also be testable and verifiable? That is how science should be done.

Re:Ha! That'll show them hippies!

[morgan_greywolf]

We know, for a fact, that the former has happened; the question to me is, how far towards the latter end of the spectrum is their behaviour? Release the raw data and let everyone take a look at it, until then I'll always have my doubts as to what is really going on.

Sadly, they don't have the raw data. They threw it away. Worse, they probably have threw it away much more recently than they originally stated.

We'll never see it because they've deliberately destroyed it.

Based on my reading of the e-mails, which are available on Wikileaks for your own inspection, combined with this more recent information about the destruction of the raw data, I'd have to say they are very far towards that latter end of the spectrum.

Feynman put it pretty well

[Sycraft-fu]

In a commencement speech at Caltech he said:

It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now
and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity,
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other
experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can
tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then
you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well
as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.
When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate
theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that
those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another.

Unfortunately, many scientists in many disciplines do not follow this. They seek to prove their theories right, and ignore that which might cast doubt on it.

Re:A dark day for science...

[BobMcD]

Right alongside the other fools that believe the opposite things without using an ounce of reason to come to their conclusions.

Despite your world view, being ignorant is not limited to only those people with whom you disagree.

"Pol Pot?" Come the frak on. That's ridiculous.

[jbeach]

Suggesting it might be better, based on scientific evidence, if industries didn't pollute in certain ways is NOT going "Pol Pot".

Let me refresh your memory:

Climate scientists suggest that if we reduce the amount of sulfates, we'll have less acid rain. Sulfates reduced; the amount of acid rain shrinks.

Climate scientists suggest that aerosols are hurting the ozone layer, and point to an actual growing hole in the ozone layer. We reduce aerosols, the hole in the ozone layer shrinks.

I'm not at all suggesting climate scientists are infallible - they should be questioned like anyone else.

But to suggest that reasonable restrictions on companies that produce pollution is "going Pol Pot?" FFS.

Maybe you're right, in a way - Midwesterners may tend not to believe pollution can damage the environment, if they live somewhere that's untouched by industrial waste. If that's the case, they should go live in New Jersey for a while.