Slashdot Mirror
New Batch of Leaked Climate Emails
New submitter kenboldt writes "Someone going by the alias 'foia' has dropped a link to a zip file containing thousands more emails similar to those released in 2009. There are apparently many more which are locked behind a password, presumably waiting to be released at some time in the future."
The University of East Anglia has released a brief statement indicating that the emails were probably obtained during the 2009 breach and held back until now as "a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy."
The previous leaked e-mails had two results:
Sham news reporting like Fox News cherry-picked out-of-context blurbs that made it sound like the scientists couldn't agree on anything.
Real news reporting actually read all the conversations and saw the conclusion was that the scientists were unanimous in agreeing that climate change is real.
That they'd do a second leak proves that the leakers are morons who think this offensive sound-bites Fox reports will have some kind of impact, whereas the actual content of the e-mail will reaffirm what everybody already knows. Climate change is real and these upcoming leaked emails won't change anything.
Also I love that Fox sympathizers have to commit a crime (hacking into an institution) just to get ammo which they mistakenly think will bolster their "cause". If they had the brains to actually read the emails themselves, they'd see it hurts them.
If they are so infuriated about the timing they could publish the emails themselves in less sensible times, thus evading some of the shitstorm and gaining back a bit of reliability.
Right, because last time around, it turned out that there was a big conspiracy and lots of people got fired and no one believes in global warming any more.
oh, wait, that's exactly what didn't happen.
Are we forgetting that the Koch brothers funded a separate study that pretty much confirmed the results? Crazies will be crazies, but I don't expect reasonable persons to be swayed by this.
Following some bullet-pointed quotes such as "Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day" and, "Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels," the message states:
"Today's decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline. This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets. The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase. We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics."
Listen, I'm all for the publication of the data and methods these scientists are using. But what exactly is releasing internal e-mails supposed to accomplish? Acting all righteous about "hiding the decline" and then you turn around and censor what you release?! That's pretty funny to me. Who do you think climate change is going to hurt the most anyway? My fat American ass shoving honey coated whole wheat pretzels into my gaping maw while surfing the internet? Or the truly poor people? You know that subsistence farmer in Africa or China where a drought, famine or conflict could wipe him out at the drop of a hat? When times get tough, I'll have to give up my XBox Live Gold Account ... what the hell is someone living on less than $2 a day going to do?
It'll probably turn out like the UN anyway where the US pays $362 million and China pays $29 million so that's some pretty flimsy motivation there when the wealthiest nations will most likely be footing the bill.
My work here is dung.
Climate scientists are providing context to the leaked emails here: http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=9931
Americans' Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
And every time there is evidence that it is just a political con game
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/13830/
As the hockey stick was, as the emails demonstrating knowledge of the fraud that was ongoing did you just get the greens closing ranks and hoping if they keep a united front up, the ludites hatred of all things tech, and the political class's willingness to profit from crisis will carry their position forward.
That's a nice article you linked there. Richard Muller? Maybe you bothered to follow up with what he actually found? The rest of Slashdot did and I think you might be interested in it.
My work here is dung.
No, it's just more confirmation that these guys don't know why things are but are far more concerned that the number deliver the right message.
Mister Limbaugh, could you please restate that in English?
The issue is that a set of emails can not counter all the other evidence and research. If I falsify tests on gravity and write some emails about it, does this mean that gravity is not a universal constant? The mentality of people who pounce on these emails as proof that "global warming" isn't real are the same ones that used snow storms as proof. They totally miss the overall picture.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Unreal how some think "deniers" believe that climate change doesn't exist. The earth's climate has been constantly evolving over billions of years.
Problem is we've been able to accurately measure the minuscule changes in climate for about 50 of 14 billion years. Second problem is we have absolutely no idea what climate changes the earth can sustain and which ones the earth cannot sustain.
Still no definite answers here. Some of this junk research "confirming" that climate change exists adds confusion to those not smart enough to understand this.
The saddest part about the whole climate debate is that neither side behaves rationally anymore. The debate has become so politically polarized that I feel it is difficult to trust nearly any evidence presented by either side, although the recent Koch-funded study looked like good science. Add in the fact that climate is so vastly complex it is impossible, without intensely studying it, for even the generally scientifically inclined to make judgments given the facts, and you have an issue that it becomes nearly pointless to even talk about anymore. Every time it comes up on Slashdot it inevitably comes down to a flamewar. And that flame comes from both sides.
And you aren't helping.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
What we get is every 10 years a new set of predictions and models explaining why the last 20 years models and predictions weren't correct but we are still doomed anyway
In the words of Issac Asimov
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
I stole this Sig
Look moron, there's no grant money for disproving gravity yet there's plenty enough for the other way around. And you gravity believers try to equate us to nazi sympathizers by calling us gravity deniers. We're gravity skeptics, and we're just waiting for conclusive proof to make a decision. Most gravitymongering hype is bullshit and it's all just being pushed by media profiting off fear and politicians profiting off pro-gravity legislation. So until we hear from neutral sources unanimously coming to a consensus, we will rationally remain in doubt.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Believe models that have never predicted anything correctly.
You mean like the models that predict ocean currents, pacific oscillation, jet stream, gulf stream, and whose decadal temperature predictions are, if anything, a bit on the conservative side?
Trust data that is manually manipulated, incomplete, inaccurate, disparate, and only goes back a blink of the eye in terms of the planet's history.
Yes, every data set has been manipulated. Weird that no one seems to come up with a data set that is clean, or without statistical error. I mean, they'd get their names into the annales of science pretty much immediately. I'm sure Exxon has a few billion lying around with which to sponsor such a study. Weird that they don't... they must know something we don't. Wait, they just know something you don't. And how much data do you need? Are you going to be happy when climate data goes back to when the earth was a loose amalgam of space dust?
Trust politicians whose only concerns are money and power, and whose only "solutions" involve shifting money and power, and not reducing consumption or pollution, or building things that are actually green, like nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.
Al Gore might be a convenient whipping boy, but no climate scientist is quoting Al Gore. Not to mention that you'd crucify him if he weren't putting his money where his mouth is. Nice straw man, but no win.
Believe that man is the cause of the current trend, and that man can do something to stop it.
There's no need to believe when you have a physical model for how man influences the current trend, data that supports the existence of the physical model and data that disproves the assumption that CO2 emitted by man does not influence the global temperature.
Believe that the Earth will be doomed if temperatures rise closer to points in Earth's past, despite the fact that throughout all of Earth's history, higher temperatures are when life flourished.
One straw man, one lie through omission and one lie through commission in one sentence. Nice going.
1) No one is arguing that the earth is doomed, outside of people like you. Climate scientists are arguing that life is going to get mighty uncomfortable for a large swath of humanity, costing everyone on earth a nice chunk of change to adapt to.
2) Humans weren't around when temperatures and CO2 concentrations were much higher than now.
3) Mass extinctions are tied to high temperatures and high CO2 contents. Look up PETM extinction event.
Man, whatever it takes to continue living your own life, and screw whoever comes after you, right? Nice going. The last guy who made this his official motto caused massive international bloodshed.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Stop muddling this argument with verifiable facts. Global Warming activists hate it when you show them facts.
Global warming is a done discussion. Governments and corporations are already moving to adapt -- except for a few parasites like the Koch brothers (who are funding much of the anti-science "research" that you are lapping up so eagerly), who simply need to be pried off our nation's neck and burned like the blood-ticks that they are.
Except the Koch brothers latest efforts were less than fruitful: http://www.berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_Averaging_Process
There's just as much, if not more, grant money for people who prove climate change ISN'T man made. You don't think the oil companies aren't at the head of a VERY long line of corporations that would pay handsomely to any scientific group that could actually prove that?
There's no need to falsify info proving global warming if it would be easier to produce evidence DISproving it. Certainly not for financial reasons.
-B-
True. I really like what was said in the comment section here: "The correct response to bad science, if that is what you are alleging, is more science, not stolen emails."
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
And you just proved his point.
Your source proving the fraud accusation?
Last I checked, Mann had been cleared by not one, not two, at least t-h-r-e-e different boards of inquiry.
Don't bother throwing actual facts at these people. As fond as they are of claiming that "deniers" ignore the "facts", in fact they have a marked tendency to deny and ignore facts, themselves.
Their hypocrisy would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.
I'm sorry, but #1, you had about 20 years to educate yourself on this issue. #2, there are plenty of rational discussions around this that are polite, fact-based and available online. IPCC reports are one. The NOAA studies are another. Those are just two samples out of a good dozen. There's a huge host of information available if you want to learn.
If you are still complaining that you don't understand the topic at at least a basic level, it's because you haven't been trying. And quite frankly, I'm tired of lazy people complaining that they don't know what's going on, and then voting based on sound bites they heard on CBS. You don't know what's going on? STFU and look it up.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I won't pretend that his language or his attitude are appropriate or helpful to situation but I can understand the frustration. How long can most of us talk about evolution with a creationist before we start to show how exasperating the whole argument is? How long can we talk about vaccines and autism without losing our cool a little bit? Or about the moon landings being a hoax? Or that electric fans can cause deaths in enclosed spaces.
On the one side there is a body of evidence supporting the theory that doubles every time you look at it, on the other there is... what exactly? Either the doubters chose to believe that tens of thousands of scientists are grossly incompetent or that tens of thousands of scientists are conspiring against the rest of the world.
So yeah, his language is inappropriate, but his message is spot on.
IPCC reports are fact-based? Really?
Like the way lots of movie dramas are "based on actual events", probably.
Believe models that have never predicted anything correctly.
Never say never.
Trust data that is manually manipulated ...
As opposed to what? Automatically manipulated? Do you think that baseball stats just magically turn from huge sets of numbers into RBIs and Hall of Fame records?
Trust politicians whose only concerns are money and power, and whose only "solutions" involve shifting money and power, and not reducing consumption or pollution, or building things that are actually green, like nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.
Actually I'm just asking you to trust scientists and admit that it's happening ... I don't think any of these peer reviewed journals conclude with "Now let's talk solution and my stock portfolio!" They're just telling you what's happening, man.
Believe that man is the cause of the current trend, and that man can do something to stop it.
I'm confused, are you acknowledging that there's a current trend upward? Downward? You just totally ripped all that data to shreds, what exactly are you saying when you say "current trend."
Believe that the Earth will be doomed if temperatures rise closer to points in Earth's past, despite the fact that throughout all of Earth's history, higher temperatures are when life flourished.
The fear isn't that the temperature is going to get 'hotter than anything in history of the Earth.' The fear is that the rate of change accelerates to a point where a lot of the food chain starts to falter and entire species go extinct that we depend on for functions known or unknown. If you think I'm worried about life, I'm not. I'm worried about humans. You and me. And how much unnecessary death will result from this. This Earth has seen some hard times and life's still around. I just want to be sure that in thousands of years man is still around because the dinosaurs are completely gone. I'm not worried that we're going to magically ruin Earth so that no life can exist on it. I am a little worried that we knock evolution back down to something stupid like prokaryotes and cockroaches, though.
My work here is dung.
The amount of incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation is approximately in balance at all times. In the absence of a greenhouse effect, the Earth would need to be about 255K to produce enough outgoing longwave radiation to remain in balance. Due to the greenhouse effect, not all of the outgoing radiation makes it to space. To maintain the balance, the Earth must be warmer than 255K so that enough outgoing longwave radiation makes it through the atmosphere and into space. That's why average temperature on Earth is actually around 288K. All other things equal, if the greenhouse effect is increased, the Earth must warm to reach a new balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation. This is as close to fact as science can get, and isn't really up for debate.
The only legitimate argument against warming caused by increased greenhouse gases is that negative feedbacks will decrease the incoming solar radiation. That can primarily be accomplished by clouds and aerosols, neither of which are well understood or predicted by models. However, even with the uncertainty about negative feedbacks, it is very likely that increasing greenhouse gases is resulting in a warming of the Earth.
Just because there is poor agreement on the regional impacts of a warmer Earth does not mean the Earth isn't warming. The increase in greenhouse gas concentrations is largely due to human activities. It's a fact that the model human lifestyle produces large amounts of carbon dioxide. The increase in greenhouse gases is very highly correlated to industrialization.
This is an environmental issue. The preponderance of evidence is very strongly favors that humans are mostly responsible for the warming of the Earth that has already occurred in the past decades and that the Earth will warm at a faster pace in the future if current trends continue.
We should be very concerned. The regional climate changes will likely place greater strain in some areas on the availability of essential resources to support the human population. It is not out of the question that the overall impacts of such a warming could place enough strain on resources that the Earth would be unable to support a human population of seven billion people and growing. Nobody really knows what the impacts would be, but those concerns are hardly unfounded.
When I go back there now, it is totally fucking unambiguous to me that on a global scale the temperature is rising. Look up from your feet at some previously snow-capped mountains -- it's not that damn hard.
I would, but a) I don't live near any mountains, and b) it's way to cold to go outside right now.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"Having doubts is scientifically valid"
Except that this is not the content of the emails. The emails show gross unprofessional conduct. They should adults, acting, consistently and frequently, like out of control children. The show people whom we entrust; thinking uncritically and aggressively shouting down anyone who has the temerity to stray from the party line. They show that the institution is fundamentally and hopelessly broken and the rhetoric, including your own, has strayed significantly away from what any objective observer would characterise as sound scientific inquiry.
Your post, with its aggressive and unnecessary invective and school-yard tone is at least consistent with the tone of language revealed in the emails and around this discussion in general. But keep on carrying on like delinquent know-it-all child if you must. It only serves to reinforce doubts that the institutions that we as a civilization have commissioned to explore the CAGW hypothesis are actually up to the task.
That you are trying to disparage their work by highlighting their character makes me thing it their science is good. Otherwise we'd all be arguing the merit of their science and public discussion of their character on /. would amount to secondary gossip. Email etiquette is not something nerds get riled up over.
Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
How many thousands of years have whole forests burned due to natural causes? My guess would be enough to release way more greenhouse gas than our burning of fossil fuels.
Your guess would be wrong. The difference being that the carbon is forests is carbon that is already in the carbon cycle. If forests don't burn they eventually decay and release the carbon back into the atmosphere anyway. The carbon from fossil fuels is carbon that has been sequestered from the carbon cycle for in most cases 100's of millions of years or more. So it is carbon that was not in the carbon cycle until we added it back in. The proof of the fact that your guess is wrong is that the CO2 level in the atmosphere has never been above around 300 ppmv for millions of years but since the advent of human burning of fossil fuels it has risen to 390 ppmv in a bit over 200 years. That is unprecedented in the existence of the genus homo.
Really? You're calling a model from 1988 a failure where the only major deviations are the 1998 outlier and 2008-2009? Where the median estimate has gotten the overall trend and magnitude right? For a model that is 23 years old, I'd call that pretty damn good.
As for the IPCC prediction, the 1.5 and 4.5 degree of climate sensitivity are the generally accepted boundaries for climate sensitivity to CO2 forcing. The data collected so far seems to run in and out of those boundaries, with major differences traceable to exceptional events that are outside the climate model.
This is the best you have? That one of the very first global climate models isn't 100% accurate, and that a somewhat more recent model doesn't account properly for events that are outside its modeling parameters? Seems that these people might know what they're doing after all.
By the way, where's your model that calculates future temperatures more accurately?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The proof that the 30% increased in CO2 concentrations is from burning FF's is found in the ratio of C12 to C13 isotopes in the CO2.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Climate scientists don't make much money.
Lying climate change deniers like the Koch brothers and many thousands of their other petrofuel and polluter cronies do make millions.
You are a lying fool.
--
make install -not war
I'm doing A but fantasizing about B because I'm tired of the enviro-extremists telling me that the science is settled and denying, or even questioning, their (sometimes) ridiculous assertions is tantamount to being a Nazi.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Not all scientists have the integrity of the BEST researchers
I agree.
Continued global warming "skepticism" is a proper and a necessary part of the scientific process. The Wall St. Journal Op-Ed by one of us (Muller) seemed to take the opposite view with its title and subtitle: "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism -- There were good reasons for doubt, until now." But those words were not written by Muller. The title and the subtitle of the submitted Op-Ed were "Cooling the Warming Debate - Are you a global warming skeptic? If not, perhaps you should be. Let me explain why." The title and subtitle were changed by the editors without consulting or seeking permission from the author. Readers are encouraged to ignore the title and read the content of the Op-Ed.
http://berkeleyearth.org/FAQ.php#disagreement
Berkeley Earth has not addressed issues of the tree ring and proxy data, climate model accuracy, or human attribution.
http://berkeleyearth.org/FAQ.php#skepticism
it's in my head
Pretty much everything you said is either factually incorrect or misleading (and recognizable as silly right-wing memes). I don't think you really care though, you just want to badmouth "Der Libruls".
/. and let the adults talk until you can be bothered to look up any iota of information on the subject that doesn't come from the members section of Rush Limbaugh's website. You are literally the equivalent of someone trying to disprove the theory of gravity by noting you can jump up several inches away from Earth, so those science eggheads must have it all wrong. That's the level of ignorance we're dealing with. Go away.
Hint: Climate scientists are aware of past environmental changes. This is not new information. You are not unusually well-informed. You are not the lone voice of sanity in the wilderness, you are just a loudmouth idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, repeating nonsense spewed by other, more cynical loudmouth idiots. Your post shows such fundamental misunderstandings of the data and issues involved that it would be best to leave
ExxonMobil continuing to fund climate sceptic groups, records show "ExxonMobil gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to lobby groups that have published 'misleading and inaccurate information' about climate change."
And that article is just the tip of the iceberg. There's also Exxon's funding of the infamous Heartland Institute, a "libertarian" anti-science denial shop. Heartland used to deny smoking caused cancer but unsurprisingly switched to denying global warming when their sponsorship changed. Exxon used to fund Heartland directly, but now funds them indirectly through conservative groups like the Scaife and Olin foundations.
It's hard for me to imagine how an educated person in 2011 could have ever been ignorant of how oil companies fund global warming denialism, but now there's no excuse.
Coal and limestone are a part of the overall carbon cycle but they are not particularly active in it on human time scales. The active parts of the carbon cycle are the atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. The active part of the carbon cycle has been in relative balance for over a million years, cycling between around 190 ppmv and 300 ppmv. The last time CO2 was as high as it is now (390 ppmv) was over 15 million years ago.
Crustaceans don't use carbon dioxide directly to build their shells. They do use it indirectly though by eating other organism's that got it directly. CO2 dissolved in water becomes carbonic acid which is detrimental to shell forming organisms so it doesn't help.
The colonization of the land occurred around 550 million years ago, once atmospheric oxygen levels got high enough for the ozone layer to form and block ultraviolet light from the Sun.
Deserts are there because they lack of water. It has nothing to do with low CO2. I doubt there is any condition the Earth has been in since life colonized the land where there weren't deserts (or at least areas of low precipitation) on the planet. It's built into the physics of the atmosphere.
I don't get this assumption that increasing CO2 automatically means more plant growth. Do you have any science behind that? I know excess CO2 helps some plants to grow but not others. CO2 is not the only thing that affects plant growth. Water, nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus as well as a number of others are all necessary. The current plant life has evolved under the current CO2 levels and I don't think you can definitively say that increased levels means an explosion in plant growth.
In some ways carbon is priceless (and I'm not talking about diamonds). It is the basis of all life as we know it. Without carbon we wouldn't be here. But it needs to be in its place.
Where?
Are your really that naive? The oil industry has acted so brazenly in its disinformation campaign, and funding of astroturf and denialist "research". The paper trail is there for everyone to see. "Merchants of Doubt" is a recent history book the chronicles just how perfectly the wool has been pulled over your eyes -- in plain sight!
There's something interesting about the human condition there -- and you are being played by people who understand you better then you know yourself. Of course, this just makes you mad, and you want to say that *I* am the one who doesn't understand. This is called projection.
There is something interesting about the human condition there.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right