Slashdot Mirror
Police Close Climategate Investigation
ananyo writes "The Norfolk Constabulary has closed its investigation into the November 2009 release of private emails between researchers at the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich after failing to identify those responsible. Despite not being able to prosecute any offenders, the police have confirmed that the data breach 'was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU's data files, carried out remotely via the internet.' The investigation has also cleared anyone working at or associated with UEA from involvement in the crime. The hacking resulted in the release of more than 1,000 emails and shook the public's trust in climate science, though independent investigations after the breach cleared the scientists of wrongdoing."
Do they really have reason to insult our Internet, or do they just not know how it was done?
And those "independent investigations" were not independent, not investigations, and in some cases neither.
"They says theys 'ad some he-mails stolen of this hare com-pooter, what d'yer make o' thaht then?"
pause
"Dunno."
Investigation closed.
It's not an ad hominem to search for a suspect who commits a crime. The complete invalidity of the claims arising from the crime notwithstanding, it is illegal to break into a private network and steal data.
Ad hominem isn't irrelevant when it's to the point. If you disagree with a scientific finding, disclosure/discussion of what seems to be deceptive manipulation of data is reasonable. Assuming people you agree with are completely honest is childish, otoh, and will probably burn you one day.
They didn't 'falsify' anything.
What they did do, was use blatantly unreliable data in the form of tree-ring width as a proxy for temperature because it matched 'expected' values for the historical periods they had blanks in, even though it didn't match the 'expected' values for the periods after they have an accurate record (and they had to 'hide' it).
That's not falsifying. That's worse. They were lying to themselves, too.
"The perpetrator used Tor so our investigation is fucked"
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Maybe read those articles so you know what you're talking about instead of just name-dropping debate keywords. Or just stop posting because you're terrible. Just write "First!" next time.
The manufactured Climategate scandal was not an ad hominem.
Yeah, you two internet trolls know so much more than the several committees and investigators who looked into this and found that there was no falsification of data and that the data and methods used were reliable and robust.
That's a principal that applies to conviction and punishment, not investigation.
What's wrong with you? That's a serious question, please answer it.
The manufactured Climategate scandal was not an ad hominem.
attacking the scientists because they can't attack AGW? That's exactly what an Ad hominem is for.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_the_point
The story is about the search for the people breaking into the network, not about the garbage witch hunt of climate scientists. A crime *was* committed, there is evidence of that. They were no suspects, so presumption of innocence doesn't even apply yet.
Really? This got modded up? Guys, if you're going to bash these scientist, you really should read more than the two or three sentences endlessly re-quoted out of these thousands of messages by the usual right-wing suspects. That's what the actual investigations did, and why they ultimately cleared them of wrongdoing. (If it makes you feel better, they did say they were big meanies.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
One AC posting 8 times, pretending to be multiple people, and having a conversation with himself? When did /. become 4chan?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Oh no, that scientist's sampling of tree rings in a single geographic area did not correlate precisely with the larger data set, so he asked if there were any techniques with which it would correlate more closely.
You really blew the lid off this one. Are you Woodward or are you Bernstein?
Actually, I get it now, you were suggesting the break in was an ad hominem attack on the scientists, not the investigation being an ad hominem undermining of the break in. Forgive my confusion.
And let the flame wars begin . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Do you mean the investigators from Penn State that investigated Michael Mann? The Same Penn State that investigated Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky and didn't find any problems?
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
Oh I'm sure Paterno and Sandusky are just upstanding guys. Nothing wrong there, I mean it's not like they didn't lie, diddle kids and boys in the locker room, or anything else nafarious. Now move along. And Mann? Move along, NOTHING TO SEE HERE ON ANY OF IT!.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yeah he was "cleared" by investigations of the National Science Foundation. That's like BP after the oil spill asking the American Petroleum Institute "Did we do anything wrong" and the API saying, "Nope." Investigations don't work when both sides are on the same team.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
If you look at the BBC article, it specifically states:
"Police say the theft was "sophisticated and orchestrated", and that no-one at the university is implicated."
Or, if you read the police report;
"“However, as a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct enquiries. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.”
So, no, actually, it was not an "inside job." Quoting the BBC article further: "Prof Edward Acton, the university's vice-chancellor, said he was disappointed that the perpetrators had not been caught. 'The misinformation and conspiracy theories circulating following the publication of the stolen emails - including the theory that the hacker was a disgruntled UEA employee - did real harm...'"
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If this had happened this year, it would have been named Climateleaks.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Same team - science? Not sure where you're going there, but you should probably add more tinfoil.
It always has been, Mr. Two Million Plus UID.
Oh and I see the other group that cleared Mann was Penn State University..... same people who cleared Sandusky of any wrongdoing. We can really trust their word too.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Of course it can be invalidated. It hasn't been, but to say it couldn't be is really classifying it as pseudoscience.
Any of the following would be pretty substantial invalidations(and these are off the top of my head):
1. Evidence that the absorption spectra of carbon dioxide are narrower in the near infrared than the nitrogen-oxygen mix our atmosphere currently has.
2. A substantial deviation of multiyear temperature deviation aggregates from the proposed theory(preferably actually negative)
3. A well demonstrated model that maps the past temperatures accurately while incorporating feedback mechanisms that limit temperature increase.(well, this wouldn't be a true invalidation, but it would be a valid competing theory. Funny that we haven't gotten any)
4. Evidence if substantial human induced errors in measurement that could account for the differences of the past few years(a picture of an air conditioner unit doesn't count)
None of the "counter evidence" I've ever heard even begins to address anything like this.
Give them a break. They totally googled around for a while until they found something somewhere that justified their bizarre beliefs. That can be taxing.
Yeah because Penn State has such a stellar reputation of investigating alleged wrongdoing.
Gotten out of fourth grade yet?
There is no evidence that someone working at the university is responsible, but there is no evidence to implicate anyone on the planet right now. Whoever did this covered their tracks and probably committed the attack from a public location to hide their identity. Maybe it was someone from the university, or someone from the lab, or someone secretly working for Fox news -- we really have no way to tell.
My first guess (before reading the excerpts from the police report) was that someone bought a cheap netbook and just walked into the university one night. Judging by what I have seen, university offices are not terribly well protected, and computers at universities are not terribly hard to gain access to. If they have reason to believe the attacker used the Internet, fine -- but how does that rule out someone from the school?
Palm trees and 8
Not that I like the way that this went down, but we rely on those scientists to provide the facts that make AGW more or less unassailable. If you can show that the scientists are possibly playing fast and loose with the data, AGW might still be a problem, but it is entirely valid to question their motives and try to discover what the real story is.
As I recall, the emails did have relevance to the AGW research, they weren't just unrelated smear attacks on the scientists. These researchers could well be good at research, but if they had been lying to get more funding for themselves, they're bad researchers overall and should not be trusted to give us an unbiased viewpoint to a very contentious debate.
As it stands, this was a tempest in a teapot, but I don't blame anyone for taking it seriously enough to investigate it. If anything, academic integrity can be just as important as any other.
You could have said that in a non-trolling/flamebait way.
My personal view is that it is a bit hypocritical to be in favor of diplomatic cable leaks, but against the Hadley CRU leaks.
That's something I regularly see on slashdot, for example it was a good thing that the guantanamo bay documents were leaked, but it's a bad thing that the Hadley CRU emails were leaked. I figure you'd if you want secrets to be open, that should apply to both the things you like and the things you don't like.
I found it to be a bit interesting that a top scientist mentioned he would go so far as to alter the meaning of peer review in his favor. But would he really do it? Probably not. It's already known that this is a hugely debated issue, so naturally some people would have said some dumb things. Hell, I've heard politicians say worse things and still get re-elected. Worthy of a leak? Probably not. It's mostly just a petty partisan squabble.
The GTMO documents pretty much only revealed what we already knew: people were waterboarded, and some were believed to be innocent. However it also could have put people's lives at risk. Worthy of a leak? I'd say no, though most people who wanted the leak were eagerly looking for something to hang Dubya over. Yet again, just another petty partisan squabble.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
All the quotes in various media releases come from already constructed quotes in the Norfolk Constabulary's press release. http://www.norfolk.police.uk/newsevents/newsstories/2012/july/ueadatabreachinvestigation.aspx Is there no substantial publicly available report behind this? “However, as a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct enquiries." This suggests there is some evidence of "methods common". But no information as to what this evidence is. “There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.” And can we infer there is also no evidence to to suggest anyone not working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved either? Either the police know more than they are letting on, or they know pretty much nothing at all.
It appears the 90s and 2000s-era Penn State administration covered-up anything that would have a negative impact on their university's reputation. Sandusky diddling boys? Cover it up. Sports players caught raping girls off campus? Cover it up. Students jumping from windows? Cover it up and just call it "an accident". On-campus shooting..... well they couldn't hide that, but they don't talk about it anymore. The 10th anniversary came and went with nary a mention. Mann falsifying data? Cover it up.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Yeah he was "cleared" by investigations of the National Science Foundation. That's like BP after the oil spill asking the American Petroleum Institute "Did we do anything wrong" and the API saying, "Nope." Investigations don't work when both sides are on the same team.
I would be happy if I could come here for just a day and not see you waving your rightwing boner around trying to smack everyone on the head with it.
it is illegal to break into a private network and steal data
Unless discussing on /. and the target of the attack is fashionably disliked. It is *always* OK to steal data from: The US Government, Google/Microsoft/Apple, RIAA, Big Business, Republicans, Democrats, Rich People, Law Enforcement, stupid people, and, well, that means pretty much anybody.
Years and years of trying to undermine AGW, and this is ALL they came up with ??? --> STILL no proof of NOT-AGW, while there's a 1000 times more money at stake for the oil-industry than for the scientists ... You can bet the scientists have less budget to 'prove' AGW than the oil industry has been using to delay any CO2-mitigating policies one way or the other. You can bet they tried to blow this story out of proportion.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
So, the entirety of "science" is in on this massive conspiracy?
They knew all about the diddling. They just sort of let it drop because it would be embarrassing, and Jerry was such a good upstanding guy that they didn't want to cause trouble.
Don't attribute to incompetence what can be more readily attributed to a potentially embarrassing public admission.
I like in the center.
And I get sick of the defense of leftwing viewpoints. As if we deserve to be nudebody Xrayed at airports, forced to buy a product we don't want, or assuming that scientists never ever do anything wrong (unless they are christian (in which case their research should be outlawed from being published in journals or on the web)).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I will bash the scientists involved. I have read all the e-mails and was appalled at what I saw.
Blatant attempts to hide data/loose FOAI requests. This in and of it self is a major red flag in my book.
A suggestion that they could stack the deck of pier reviewed journals in an attempt to stop publication of dissenting opinions and findings.
A suggestion that they could identify who was reviewing there paper for a journal and influence the outcome.
Suggestions of using bad data to fill in holes in the existing data.
Suggestions that findings which are contradictory to the established belief be "fudged" to be more inline with other papers.
The use of questionable mathematics to smooth temperature graphs.
There may have been no questionable wrongdoing, but from the e-mails it really looks like there could have been.
As to them being "ultimately cleared them of wrongdoing" Sorry, an internal investigation is worthless. That is like a scientist doing the pier review on his own paper and approving it, or his lab assistant doing the review and approving it. There is a reason it is sent out to others to review and a reason the reviewers are kept secret. There suggested attempt to circumvent this methodology not with standing.
You're rambling. It wasn't a valid point against global warming or climate change, but it wasn't an ad hominem either.
it wasn't an ad hominem either.
that's BS, and you know it. The story made the front page of many newspapers, one of few science-related stories a year.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
This wouldn't have been a scandal if they had just made everything available to those who funded the research in the first place (i.e. the public)
It making the news does not have any bearing on whether or not they were personal attacks on the scientists or attacks on the credibility of their data/interpretations.
Yes, they were attacks. They were not, however, ad hominems. I hope you understand this some day.
I hope you understand one day how capitalism works.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Well, except it's pretty clear that, despite the accusations, the scientists involved did not "falsify data." Again quoting the BBC article:
"Some of the e-mails released appeared to show scientists at CRU and their collaborators in other institutes deviating from accepted academic standards in an attempt to paint an alarmist picture of climate change. However, examination of the broader context by three separate investigations resulted in the scientists being cleared of malpractice."
Most notably, take a look at the graph in the article. The light blue is the Hadley Climate Research Unit data on temperature. The two other graphs show NASA data and NOAA data for the same period, independently generated from different data sets. The dark blue is the Berkeley data-- this was a project funded by some of the climate skeptics specifically to do an unbiased re-examination. They all show pretty much the same temperature trend
In science, ability to replicate results is important. The climate results has it.
So, when you are claiming that they "blatantly falsified data," here is the conspiracy theory that you're supporting:
1. The Hadley CRU is falsifying data to make a point which (if you're right) know will be shown to be false.
2. Three separate investigations in the UK independently conspired to hide the falsification. Yet another investigation, this one in the US, also conspires to hide the falsification.
3. Two US agencies-- on a different continent-- come up with pretty much the same temperature graphs, working on different data sets.
4. An independent analysis put together specifically to avoid the putative bias the other measurements also comes up with the same result, and
5. By an amazing coincidence, the result happens to pretty well fit the predictions of sixteen different climate models made by universities and research institutes on four different continents, many of which are open source (meaning that anybody can search through the code and look for the putative fudge factors), dating back to Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 model, which, as it turns out, agrees quite well with the results.
Or, alternatively: maybe the science is actually right, the scientist actually are not stupid, fraudulent, or deluded (or all of the above), and the climate is warming at pretty much the rate predicted, for the reasons that are well explained by well-known, not-at-all-controversial physics.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I can't say that's a perspective I've ever endorsed.
The latest report with all the emails between Paterno, the head of sports Curley, the vice-president of security, and the university president shows the top men *actively* chose to cover it up. Twice. 1998 and again in 2001.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
You do realize your first two complaints there are rightwing in origin, yes? If not, please delete your slashdot account, go back to Fox News, and cry me a river.
I would just like to back up what everyone else is saying. They weren't ad hominem, as per the fact that, in theory, the postings addressed an argument. They did so in a factually incorrect way, but that's irrelevant.
And it is even from FoxNews.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The scientists losing funding also does not make it an ad hominem.
Read your own Wikipedia links. It isn't a matter of "ad hominems are bad" and "the attacks are bad" therefore "the attacks were ad hominems."
I know it's exciting to discover Wikipedia's "logical fallacy" page for the first time, but learn to distinguish them correctly.
It's not an ad hominem to search for a suspect who commits a crime. The complete invalidity of the claims arising from the crime notwithstanding, it is illegal to break into a private network and steal data.
I'm actually having a bit of trouble getting worked up over it, since the differences between this and Wikileaks is kind of subtle.
Should we cheer leaks and revile hit jobs, when both are illegal and the net effect of both is getting information out to the public? It seems to me that this lies in a sort of moral grey area.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/the-network-of-global-corporate-control/
"Within this there is a large ‘core’, containing 1347 corporations each of whom owns directly and/or indirectly shares in every other member of the core."
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Yet they almost certainly must have the same lack of certainty of their own beliefs (except for those I'm underestimating the mental simplicity of).
I think either they're really susceptible to perceiving false equivalencies or they think it's virtuous to support their side for religion or as a competition.
same people who cleared Sandusky of any wrongdoing.
I don't know what you are getting at here. He was cleared in a court of law, was he not? Did he get off on a technicality, or are you simply upset because you "know" he is guilty? How many people here "know" that you are guilty of being a troll? Are you saying that you support our right to publicly lynch you based on what everyone "knows" about you?
And before you counter with "so you'd let Sandusky watch your kids?", the man is a stranger to me. Would you let a stranger watch your kids?
Investigations don't work when both sides are on the same team.
It's science, not a team sport you useless fuckwit. There AREN'T FUCKING TEAMS.
You do realize his third point directly relates to the current thread, and it's the one you chose not to address?
Why go to the trouble of illegally obtaining emails and then alter/falsify them? Just read the emails and tell us you don't see anything wrong.
when there are currently a record number of scientific journals being retracted for doing exactly the same thing.
Pray tell, what percentage of articles (not "journals") supportive of global warming have been retracted?
(And if you plot the rate vs. time, do you get a hockeystick?)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Really? So some highly motivated skeptic managed to find a zip file on an illegally accessed remote server, took the time to recognize the contents as being what he/she needed, and further immediately publish the most damning of the contents? They did all this without being noticed? This conclusion and the timeline of how information was revealed suggests there's literally someone out there who is not only capable of such a job (likely wouldn't have been trivial to accomplish), but intimately familiar with Jones', Mann's, Wahls, McIntyre's and other's correspondence and motivations, and clearly paid to spend the time doing this. It suggests some "vast conspiracy" which doesn't very well jive with occams razor.
The likely situation is it was an inside job. Someone who knows Phil Jones knew he was refusing properly formatted FOIA requests, and likely had motivation to out the correspondence and data/algorithms inside an already created ZIP file that Phil made in case he was forced to respond to the FOIA request.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Dude, ad hominems are attacks on a person within the confines of a debate, not all attacks at all on a person.
If your funding gets cut, you get punched in the face, or anything of the sort it isn't an ad hominem.
Researcher criticized, making research look bad > ad hominem
Research criticized, making researcher look bad > not ad hominem
It is this simple. I wasn't saying it didn't hurt public acceptance of climate change. I was saying to knock off arguing that it's specifically an ad hominem just because you didn't quite grasp the Wikipedia pages you linked.
Yes, we are all in on it. It's a Saganic worship cult where we get together and chant "billions and billions and billions" in unison while solving partial differential equations.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
..whinge whinge whinge... I'm so put-upon that I must come back here every day ...whinge whinge whinge...
...forced to buy a product we don't want...
...whinge whinge whinge OMG SKY JEEBUS WE ARE SO OPPRESSED
Care to put that objection in writing? I, for one, would be happy to set aside my "leftwing viewpoints" long enough to LET YOU DIE when you show up at the hospital sick and/or injured without enough cash to pay for treatment.
If you're not willing to do that, then you're not really objecting to buying health insurance - you're objecting to having to BE RESPONSIBLE for your own care.
Definition of an epistemic bubble: criminals hack a computer to troll through personal emails to find a supposed conspiracy in order to disrupt high level diplomatic dialogue on climate change. Despite widespread professional investigations showing nothing untoward in the emails, those in the epistemic bubble continue to believe that there was something nefarious going on, other then the criminal computer hacking, death threats and blatant intimidation of academics.
Meanwhile, those in the epistemic bubble continue to believe that the world is about to start cooling, and/or that there has been no warming in the last 10 years -- a claim tenuously supported by the most blatant cherry-picking of the start and end of trends, and all the while, the natural signs of climate change continue, in accordance with the scientific consensus which emerged officially in a 1979 NAS report.
At what stage to ideologues ever accept new information into their epistemic bubble?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
What amuses me is how the "skeptics" jumped all over the recent tree ring report from Northern Scandinavia that said the area was probably warmer during the MWP than previously suspected and immediately extrapolate that to cover the whole globe. If it supports them a scientific study is all good, if not then it's venal scientists looking out only for there personal gain.
Guys, reading scientists' emails won't be of any use unless you actually have a clue about science. You can break into a library and steal all the books in the name of transparency, but it won't cure your illiteracy.
The manufactured Climategate scandal was not an ad hominem.
You know, sometimes, in rare circumstances, an ad hominem attack is actually perfectly warranted. But "climategate" was a blatant act of academic intimidation, and personal attacks on the integrity of scientists. The science itself was left untouched.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The same way you like the night sky, I assume, as something to look at from a distance ?
Because when Wikileaks publishes data, they actually publish data rather than rambling about reptilian shapeshifters hypnotizing Nixon into faking the moon landing. That's why they get taken seriously while whackos do not.
But, but HIDE TEH DECLINE! Anthony Watts showed it to me and his intentions are pure of heart(land institute)!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yep. Bunch of shady fucks in the Science cabal all giving each other pats on the back. Science has become much too powerful and must be stopped!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
for high sticking.
>>>>>same people who cleared Sandusky of any wrongdoing.
>>
>>I don't know what you are getting at here. He was cleared in a court of law, was he not?
Wow where have you been hiding? Sandusky was cleared by Penn State University of all wrongdoing, but twelve years later the court of law convicted him of ~40 counts of child molestation. He's in jail for the rest of his life.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
People on the left don't assume that scientists never do anything wrong. We just believe that peer review (sorry, you're a rightwinger so I will provide you with a link so you can find out what it is) is an effective form of weeding out bad science. This is similar to how you believe the free market is effective at weeding out inefficient business. Once those "christian scientists" go through the peer review process (or actually learn what the scientific method is - see null hypothesis), then intelligent people might actually start listening to them.
As a scientist why wouldnt we welcome criticism? Not really following the 'its decided' crowd. Hell even Einsteins relativity is still a 'theory' and all signs point to it being mostly right with a few tweaks... Yet thousands of people try to debunk it every year (even Einstein labored for years to debunk his own theory). And out of those 'deniers' some really cool science has come out of it.
If your theory cant hold up to criticism, is it a very good theory? Or are you worried about getting your feelings hurt? If so perhaps putting your work out for public display is not such a good idea.
Or do you hold with the 'Im right your wrong and shut the hell up about it' crowd? Someone who does that is not a very good scientist and not very imaginative (which helps creating new science).
But from my plebeian non climate scientist view I can see getting the fluid dynamics of the huge body of air/dust/rock/water/volcanic/co2/methane/cosmic rays/sunlight/cloud cover/etc... right might be a tricky problem... Or put this in perspective. My wife likes rain. Where I live they have predicted rain for every day for nearly 4 straight months (I know because she shows me every day then gets mad when it is wrong). It has rained *maybe* 2 weeks out of that. I'm might be a little out of wack here saying maybe they dont have it quite figured out yet and the science is *FAR* from settled or understood.
I am not saying it is 'wrong', I am saying it needs a *LOT* of work.
Researcher criticized, making research look bad > ad hominem
Research criticized, making researcher look bad > not ad hominem
widely displaying a single story about problems in 1 AGW research trying to deface global AGW research --> ad hominem.
think twice when you see the words 'independent' and 'news organisation' in 1 sentence.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I totally agree that we need to watch "Everyone" to make certain that folks are being honest and forthright, don't have axes to grind, or powerful vested interests that might render their conversations... well, let's just say less than reliable and honest. Of course you have to put everything in context. The vast majority of researchers are just accumulating data, while the CEO of Exxon-Mobil just publicly acknowledged that "Yes, fossil fuel is causing the world to warm up...", of course he immediately added that "We understand the problem and can mitigate the worst effects." All while the American west is burning down, a whole new class of heat wave never seen before fries the eastern seaboard, and America experiences the worst/largest drought since the 30s and 50s, in some of the very same places that were under 10 feet of water last year... precisely what the climate scientists predicted.
The government officials in Australia responsible for the great barrier reef said last week, the end of reefs on the planet is in sight. This is particularly bad news considering the number of people who's primary food supply is the fish that live in those quickly dying reefs. So perhaps when the CEO of Exxon-Mobil spoke about mitigating the worst of the impacts of global warming he was speaking of the economic impacts on Exxon-Mobil and I'm certain his legal staff has excellent ideas on how to mitigate those circumstances.
Do I have to be the one that says physical reality trumps your belief system, not just today, but everyday. Faith is lovely, but please limit faith to the unanswerable questions. When you bring faith to the party on things we do have answers to, unless your faith is aligned with physical reality, it just looks goofy. Like enough believing would suspend gravity or something. Technology is a powerful amplifier. It makes it easier and easier for smaller groups (right down to individuals) to create problems that impact us all. Its time to be responsible. I know you hate putting your toys away and cleaning up your mess. I know you hate bathing before bed time. I understand you want to stay up late and play... but you know how cranky you get the next day. So let's all grow up just a little bit, lets not crap where we eat. Lets not piss on one another. Lets not turn Eden into a toilet. Let's respect life, starting with our own and one another's and stop putting hubris and self service ahead of a future worth living in. I know this "Greater Good" thing just pisses some folks off no end, but I really am talking about personal responsibility, including fiscal, environmental, social and educational. Wake up. That smell of coffee burning is the cup in your hand... the place is on fire and you just gotta stop fanning the flames.
Researcher criticized, making research look bad > ad hominem
Research criticized, making researcher look bad > not ad hominem
widely displaying a single story about problems in 1 AGW research trying to deface global AGW research --> ad hominem.
*facepalm* You seriously do not actually understand what an ad hominem is.
Whenever you're going to use "ad hominem" just use "attack." You'll actually say what you mean to say and won't embarrass yourself.
>>>..whinge whinge whinge... I'm so put-upon that I must come back here every day ...whinge whinge whinge...forced to buy a product we don't want...whinge whinge whinge OMG SKY JEEBUS WE ARE SO OPPRESSED
You talk funny.
Of course I will die someday. We all will even if healthcare was completely free. We all die. It's just a matter of time.
I have enough money to pay my bills when I visit the doctor or hospital. I don't need insurance except in the extreme cases (like if I get cancer and the cost goes over $100,000).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
If you can show that the scientists are possibly playing fast and loose with the data
Big IF. The worst thing these emails show is someone asking what function would best fit his data. That's totally SOP in every branch of the sciences. There is not even the slightest appearance of impropriety to anyone who practices science.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Maybe I am not completely rightly by equating 'Guilt by association' under 'ad hominem', but my point remains: this story is used as an attack on global AGW research. Shoot the messenger !
The closed the investigation because if they went any further they will be stepping on the feet of the group that does their budget...
Lets go conspiracy nuts!
1. It was the climate scientists after all, because they wanted to improve their grants. They actually just did a good job at hacking their own systems.
2. It was a conspiracy from the Right Wing, to help discredit Climate Change, they alter data to make it seem like #1
3. It was a conspiracy from the Left Wing, the real data is far more moderate then they can report, so they make up data and populate it to keep it a big issue, and to make the Right Wing look like hicks.
4. Aliens had control of the whole thing, because they are Aliens and their motives are well umm alien to us.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As you pointed out with your other comment to me, funny huh? How odd the /. crowd will happily blast oh say religious groups for the same thing. But if it has anything with the hallowed halls of academia...nay, nay. They are hallowed! Thou shalt not speak of it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Here's another subtle issue... the definition of a leak? There are the kind of leaks that occur when a vessel is rotten and full of holes. This is distinct from me taking an ice pick to your otherwise functional gas tank. One happens because it lacks structural integrity, the other is a deliberate act of sabotage (and almost certainly involving felonious intent... I know, sounds like a rapper) What Assange does can't be compared to what happened at EAU. One provides a clearing house for whistle blowers, the other is corporate espionage designed to fabricate evidence to dispute scientific claims. One is a nonprofit supported by public contribution, the other is bunch of criminals hired by fossil fuel companies (or sympathizers... they exist), perpetrating what is, after close examination a hoax.
Some information is better than others. Always look to see if someone is getting paid (and that goes for scientists too.) Look who's wallet is open. Look at the general behavior of the source, and I do mean beyond the character assassinations. Of course, we hear and see what fits only in our world views. Its why arguing politics and religion is such a fool's errand.
Muller has never been a "skeptic" or proponent of AGW. He's a real scientist and properly excorated Mann for the fakeness of the hockey stick. Whereas the IPCC just quitely swept it under the rug.
OH Me, Me, choose me! So, let's see... ummm, I say number two, because the guys that released the stolen information used it to discredit the researchers. Do I win anything?
Yeah he was "cleared" by investigations of the National Science Foundation.
That's like BP after the oil spill asking the American Petroleum Institute "Did we do anything wrong" and the API saying, "Nope."
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
They only absolved themselves of knowing about it. They should be in jail too.
I don't know what you're going on about, but was pondering the mindset of climate change deniers and the reasons why they vehemently defend their views despite disregarding reason and scientific rigor on the matter.
Actually I hadn't heard that his trial had finished. And given that a univeristy kind of lacks the ability to clear someone of criminal wrongdoing, how else was I to take your post?
But hey, thanks for being a bit of an asshole about correcting my misconceptions.
Wow. I'd swear just saw a slashdotter correct an earlier post and apologize for a misunderstanding, like a normal person. Also, I think pigs just flew past my office! ;)
"That's something I regularly see on slashdot, for example it was a good thing that the guantanamo bay documents were leaked, but it's a bad thing that the Hadley CRU emails were leaked. I figure you'd if you want secrets to be open, that should apply to both the things you like and the things you don't like."
Perhaps its because in the one case there was something wrong, and in the other there wasn't. And then you just know the trolls of the world would start with their ill-informed nonsense
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Good for you. How do you like that extra 10 or 20% tacked on to your hospital bill to cover the cost of people showing up at the Emergency Room to get treatment that they can't otherwise pay for? One way or another you're paying whether you like it or not.
Its time for a little simple math. Take, I dunno, 50,000 doctors. Remember, in the United States there are a fair site more than 50,000, but this is our sample population. Okay how many of them are criminals? How many couldn't find their way out of their own underware with instructions? How many lied, cheated and stole to get through medical school. Okay out of 50,000, let's be real generous, you have what 4 or 5 dozen real rotten doctors. A discredit to doctors everywhere. Do they in any way discredit medicine? Does anything they say or do, diminish the body of work done by the 49,940 doctors, in the least? So no matter how vile, or corrupt these few clowns are, medicine as a whole is untouched.
Okay, there are over a 100,000 professionals, from all over the world, in hundreds of different fields and disciplines, contributing vastly different kinds of data, the consolidation of which is painting an indisputable global picture. From ocean and atmospheric chemistry, to biology and changing populations in the ocean, to profound changes going on in our weather as we speak. All of these people, from so many fields, are coming to indisputable consensus. Even if the scientists who've been accused of falsifying are the lowest, worst, most atrocious scum that ever drew breath. It wouldn't change an atom of the work begin done by the tens of thousands of other scientist around the world.
Now, if you're claiming that every single biologist, meteorologist, chemist, archeologist and geologist involved in research is conspiring to mislead you, I would have to suggest an immediate search for a professional in the area of psychotherapy. The fact that FOX news beats the drum like there are only 7 guys on the planet working on climate not withstanding. This is a non-issue. The science remains intact, and unchanged. We are in the midst of an extinction event caused by the mismanagement of global resources by human beings. We depend on a working ecosystem to perform vital tasks from cleaning air and water, to maintaining climatic equilibrium. The species at risk is us, and we best get it together while we have time to deal, because the time to fix things grows perilously close, and a crashing ecosystem simply won't care about the DOW Jones industrial. Wake up.
Right, because the guys that gave you gravity and cell phones are such lying bastards and the guys burning down the planet and painting the gulf black with spilled oil have such a spotless record of honesty, responsibility and personal integrity. Scuse me, but me thinks you should address the tin foil you're sporting, before pointing at the stuff on other people's heads.
Yes, but criticizing the research by claiming the scientist is part of some commie conspiracy is still an ad hominem. It is an argument that the data should be ignored, discredited, or is false because the person presenting it is objectionable. Really, it's an association fallacy used in the context of an ad hominem attack. Flipping shit around and burying the fallacy under another layer of crap does not change the fact that it is there.
"The worst thing these emails show is someone asking what function would best fit his data."
That's simply not true. I had (might still have, I should look) a copy of the leaked emails, and they did show worse things than that.
For example, they proved that the researchers:
(A) were engaged in a united attempt to keep other people's papers out of the peer-reviewed journals (maybe not illegal but certainly not ethical),
(B) agreed to avoid giving information to certain people they viewed to be on "the other side", even if it meant they had to break the law to do so, and
(C) attempted to illegally refuse perfectly legitimate FOI requests.
Not to mention some of their other behavior which, while again not criminal, was hardly very professional.
Except that the NSF has a stake in him being actually right. I'm thinking you are in deep with the funding malice? "We have to make up global warming to get more funding!" Yes?
If some Joe Scientist off the street can prove him wrong, why wouldn't it happen? I don't know what stories you follow, but I'd refer you to the 'new form of life that thrives on arsenic' story. The scientific community fell on that poor lady scientist (who wrote the paper) like starving wolves. The NSF could not possibly fund all the research being done. A non-NSF climatologist would have come forward, desperate to make a name for emself. And then it would have gotten messy, with investigations and questions about NSF's oversight and budget.
On the other hand, the API has a vested interest in absolving blame for the petroleum industry, seeing as how the petroleum industry cuts their checks and they are not accountable to anyone but the petroleum industry. They are not a government agency, no matter how many Congresscritters they buy.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
"Perhaps its because in the one case there was something wrong, and in the other there wasn't. And then you just know the trolls of the world would start with their ill-informed nonsense"
There were plenty of things "wrong" here. The fact that they were trying to keep secrets that were legally public information (resisting FOI requests) is definitely very, very wrong. And that wasn't the only wrong thing, but it was probably among the worst.
I broke my right ankle in a car accident in 2002. It went over $100,000. I don't know what country you live in, but a ride in an ambulance can set you back $4000 and a day in the hospital can cost up around $25,000. You don't need much more than an infected blister today to smoke a $100,000 so fast it'll give you whiplash (the cost of which to medicate, they'll add to your bill.) A frigging TUMS, antacid tablet will cost you $10 if your butt is in a semiprivate bed. A ten hour wait, get's you a 1 minute visit with an emergency room doctor, and you get a $400 bill for the privilege. Please tell the system isn't full on broken. What the heck do call an extreme case? Nosebleeds? My friend, you need to come back down onto this planet. Wherever you're living doesn't seem to be getting cable from reality.
That's a much better analysis, but all it concludes is that either a hacker got administrative privilege on a server ("So given the assumptions listed above, the hacker would have to have access to the gateway mail server and/or the Administration file server where the emails were archived. This machine would most likely be an Administrative file server. It would not be optimal for an Administrator to clutter up a production server open to the Internet with sensitive archives.") or else some administrator had compiled the emails in order to respond to a FOI request, and a hacker-- internal or external-- stole that file, possibly because it wasn't secured in the first place ("the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it."
And even this conclusion is pretty speculative, and I'm not sure I credit the analysis as the only way the emails could be stolen. It's interesting to see all the wrong conclusions that have been lined out. (However, kudos to him for keeping these visible. It's nice to see the dead ends as well as the conclusions).
This is still an analysis that doesn't have any access to the actual machines, or knowledge of what is stored where; it is reverse-engineering file configurations from the emails themselves. An analysis that actually does know what is on what machine-- which the police computer crimes division would have-- would not need to make such guesses.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Fair enough. The lack of openness is bad, but not as bad as actual data manipulation. But since there was no data manipulation, the lack of openness is the worst thing that's actually shown by these emails. It would have been more correct for me to say "the worst allegation to emerge from these emails...".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"... found that there was no falsification of data and that the data and methods used were reliable and robust."
Ummm... not quite. Every investigation so far has questioned certain aspects of their data and methods. They found no wrongdoing, but they did NOT endorse the results as "reliable and robust". On the contrary, as I mentioned, their data and or methods were found to be questionable by all 5 investigations that have been completed so far.
I'm not sure that's all of them. When this first popped up, the UK government said they were going to do a separate investigation of precisely those data and methods, and expected that it would take about 3 years to complete. I don't think those 3 years have passed yet.
Don't bother... your not talking to someone who even understands why science is superior to superstition. Why "Faith Based" by definition is living on fantasy island. Which isn't to say there are a whole lot of questions science ain't ever gonna answer, and for those eternal questions, Faith is absolutely the right tool. I'm just saying FAITH vs Carbon 14 is a stupid place to go. Y'all have a verse... "None are so blind..." heed it.
Now that would bump up the Olympic viewership... competitive team fucking, Who wants to be a judge?
(And if you plot the rate vs. time, do you get a hockeystick?)
LOL
"I will bash the scientists involved. I have read all the e-mails and was appalled at what I saw."
Yes, I had them too. I don't claim to have read ALL of them, but I did read a significant portion and all of your allegations are true.
"As to them being "ultimately cleared them of wrongdoing"..."
It rather disgusts me when people say that. It is a gross distortion of the truth. Every one of the 5 completed investigations I am aware of questioned their methods or data, in one way or another. I count the House of Commons, which stated the scientists
"did not violate accepted practices, but those practices have to change."
[emphasis mine]
Scientists (including climate scientists) welcome criticism as long as it's constructive and scientific in nature. That's how science improves. Too much "criticism" of climate science comes from people who have little scientific knowledge and tries to use long debunked arguments or is political (scientist are in league with the communists/socialists). It wastes scientists time to try and respond to that sort of drivel.
The Old "You're Too Stupid To Understand What I Wrote Or Anything Else So Just Do What I Say Because I'm Smarter" argument.
Well you were doing reallllllly good, until you got to the whole thing on Fox, and how they're all out to get you. And your dog, maybe your cat. Don't forget about the children, you do believe in children still right?
Let's not forget that this guy(mann), has been regularly been disproven on a myrid of his research by others. At other universities, who were unable to duplicate his research but he refuses to back down. He's been called, repeatedly on cherry picking his data, but refused to back down, and when confronted, he simply bullies his way through, or destroys anything then claims it was "an accident" in an attempt to stonewall. Very ethical.
!! When are your meetings, I want to join!
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
The difference between the release of the GTMO documents and CRU email's is that the GTMO documents were published in full with no editing. The CRU emails were selectively edited to alter the content of the email.
'Mike's nature trick', is arguably a case of data manipulation through omission and obscurity. By cutting data off at an inconvenient point and substituting data obtained from an entirely different methodology to visually obscure on a chart how key data diverges and fails to correspond to what they claim it corresponds to . An honest broker would admit that the data may not necessary represent what they hope it represents. Instead the say the data is perfectly fine up until the point where it was not fine but it is a-okay to hand wave the problem away and make up some untested, unverified excuse why that bit can be ignored.
Professional conduct that certainly falls short of what R.Feynman advocated: " 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"
Now you could argue this is nit picking and I guess it is. But this is not some inconsequentual field of science. It has global political ramifications as folk are trying to radically deconstruct and reconstruct our global society in order to dodge the CAGW bogeyman. Personally, I would prefer if there were more people of R.Feynman's calibre involved in the discovery and analysis process. The climategate emails reveal that there are not.
Gitmo had wrong things going on whether or not there was a request for information in addition to keeping it hush hush.
I'm going to get modded down, but I frankly don't give a damn.
It's watermelons all the way down.
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
All the proposed "solutions" to AGW basically boil down to "You 1st-world Western Capitalist nations are to blame for all the pollution, give us your wealth and cripple your industries and economies!", all the while completely ignoring most of the world's most populous and polluting nations and regions like China, India, etc, meaning that any reductions in the West will come to exactly diddly in actually having any meaningful effect on climate.
It doesn't really even matter whether AGW theories are correct or not. Until India, China, et al play ball (which they currently have no intentions whatsoever of doing), anything done in the West is simply a foot-gun contest.
Redistributing wealth won't reduce any claimed "warming". It just furthers anti-Western, anti-Capitalist ideologies and agendas.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
"Hide the decline" was an attempt to assisinate the characters of Jones, Mann, the UAE, Nature Journal, and others by implying/claiming they conspired to decive the public for political/financial gain. It's interesting to note that in the subsequent formal investigation(s) the usual suspects such as Peabody Coal took it apon themselves to turn up and "help".
But aside from that if you don't believe personal attacks were used against them in the MSM, then go and read Andrew Bolt's column/blog from the Herald-Sun in Australia, If the "most read columnist in Australia" isn't enough then there are equivalents in the UK and US I can point you to such as the Daily Mail or the slavering ideologues that Fox seems to think are interseting enough to warrant their own show. Claiming Jones was Mann were not personally attacked can mean only one of two things, either you wern't paying attention or you took part in the attacks in your own small way.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Uh, no? You can read the emails yourself in full if you want.
http://foia2011.org/
Technically, he won't be sentenced until September, but given the fact that he's 68 and was found guilty on 45 felonies involving sexual abuse of boys that were between the ages of 10 and 12, he certainly will be in jail for the rest of his life.
I give him 4 months, tops.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
>>>I broke my right ankle in a car accident in 2002. It went over $100,000.
That's why I have car insurance. Cars are freakin' dangerous. As for the hospital cost, I saw my dad's bill when he was treated, and the room rent was about $500 a day.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
>>>How do you like that extra 10 or 20% tacked on to your hospital bill to cover the cost of people showing up at the Emergency Room to get treatment that they can't otherwise pay for?
Better than introducing a 3rd party (government or insurance) which will add an extra 50% to the hospital bill to pay for the politicians & bureaucrats. When I visit my doctor or dentist they actually give me a 10% *discount* for paying immediately & without the bureacratic mess (paperwork). Paying cash saves THEM money, and it saves me money.
Also it is a mistake to think the customers pay all the cost of those "free" ER patients. The cost gets spread out. Yes some of it comes from the customers' wallet, but some of it comes from internal cuts on employees and managers' wages. That is preferable because then I'm only paying some of the burden, while the evil corporation pays the rest of the burden out of its profits. It's a shared load.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Which part did you disagree with
The part where you said "they revealed themselves as lousy scientists."
"Good scientists welcome opposition, they love it when someone tries to poke holes in their theory"
Yes, good scientists welcome opposition... when it's from people who have a clue, know something about what you've done, and understand the field and make comments with the genuine intent to understand. It's easy to be patient with people who want to learn. It's harder to be patient with people who come saying "you're a fraud, also you're evil, corrupt and stupid, and I'm going to harrass you and make your life as miserable as I can until I can prove it." They just get a little tired by constant harrassment from people who have already made it extremely clear that they don't have the slightest interest in the science, but have a political agenda that they are going to push regardless.
, or asks "how do you know?"
The scientists in question had written tens of thousands of articles, reports, scientific papers and review articles explaining in great detail how they did their work. They had already spent thousands of hours trying to answer that question for the general public. Unfortunately, in responding to people who didn't have the slightest interest in actually listening, turns out that tens of thousands of articles is not enough, because no amount is going to be enough.
Here's something you need to understand. After the first, say, hundred attacks from people who don't have any interest in actually learning what you're doing because they have already made up their minds on political grounds, you just get tired. It gets a little hard to answer the hundred and first attack, or the hundred and tenth, quite as patiently as you did the first ten or twenty. So, maybe the five hundred and twentieth attack actually was a serious criticism from somebody with an open mind who actually had a serious question and actually wanted to learn. It's just hard to take that one seriously when the previous five hundred and nineteen were simply attacks.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You are looking for a refutation that the climate isn't changing... well, the climate has never been all that stable except for maybe the last 300-400 years or so.
OK, let's say it is human induced. What is needed now is general acceptance that one of two things is likely:
IF either one of these is true anyone that believes this needs to band together with fellow believers and start destroying CO2 emitting infrastructure. One power plant, one airliner, heck one truck at a time. We are talking about a fairly fragile infrastructure that is well within the capabilities of the average person to sabotage in very effective ways. Also, there is the indirect method - cut a rail line and no more coal can be delivered to the power plant, therefore it shuts down. Or, knock down a bridge and no more trucks can pass that way - if the detour is impractical maybe no more truck service through that area, period.
Sure, if you are caught using a carbide saw on a railroad track you will probably go to jail for a while. So? If there are 20 people that commit to never allowing a single coal delivery to their neighborhood power plant it is possible to shut the plant down, forever. If a few people start a bonfire at a substation (roast transformers, anyone?) it is going to have a similar effect. There are lots of other ways as well to stamp out the CO2 infrastructure and I'm not going to list them all here.
Look, the economic impact of trying to pass along carbon taxes will pretty much wipe out what is left of the US GDP. If electricity was $1 per KWh instead of $0.11 the impact would be huge. So huge that it will be fought at every level from the homeless person to Senators. What would Google do if their electricity cost 10x as much? They would not be building new data centers, that is for sure. Would the average homeowner run their air conditioning 24x7 or would they sit in the 100 degree heat - and turn off the PC because it crapped out due to high temperatures?
The impact is so huge that no government will ever force this issue. So the only options are for people that are really serious about this to take direct action themselves. Just the fact that nobody has yet is telling. It says to me there is a serious lack of conviction. People are willing to blow themselves up in the name of disrupting things for political and religious gains - but nobody is willing to go to jail in the face of climate instability?
That's simply not true. I had (might still have, I should look) a copy of the leaked emails, and they did show worse things than that.
For example, they proved that the researchers:
(A) were engaged in a united attempt to keep other people's papers out of the peer-reviewed journals (maybe not illegal but certainly not ethical),
You seem to have some difficulty understanding what "peer review" is about. Peer review serves multiple purposes. One is to improve papers before publication by getting their authors to revise them based on feedback. Another is to exclude from publication those papers which are not worthy of being published. It is both normal and ethical to discuss ways of keeping junk science out of journals.
It's entirely possible that history may harshly judge any given era's notion of what constitutes unpublishable junk, of course. If you believe this will be so, it's up to you and your compatriots to refute contemporary climate science so thoroughly that objective observers will have no choice but to put the current scientific consensus into the "wrongheaded idiocy" category.
Oddly enough, none of you "skeptics" seem to be able to mount effective attacks on climate science, even after Climategate was supposed to have blown the lid off faulty science. Instead you're stuck just sniping at personalities, not the science.
(B) agreed to avoid giving information to certain people they viewed to be on "the other side", even if it meant they had to break the law to do so, and
(C) attempted to illegally refuse perfectly legitimate FOI requests.
It was mostly one guy (Phil Jones) who did these things you are complaining about, and of course you've deliberately avoided mentioning the context so you can make it sound extra bad. Yes, he was wrong to do such things, but to put it mildly, he was being provoked.
Guess what happens when conservative radio hosts and bloggers spend years pumping anti-GW propaganda into their mindless minions? Said minions decide that scientists are evil, and collude to harass climate scientists with frivolous, redundant, and neverending FOI requests in a volume intended consume an absurd amount of time and budget (because it's good to waste their time, them being evil environmentalists and all). Those weren't perfectly legitimate FOI requests, and I suspect you know it. Oh, and let's not forget about the neverending stream of violent threats from the same crowd.
Guess what happens when real people are being harassed and threatened? Sometimes they lose their shit and do the wrong thing. Climate scientists have been enduring a siege for a long time now. That some people crack under the strain is regrettable, but understandable.
An ad hominem where you discredit the research to discredit the researcher to discredit the research.
Just use the right words, people. Cripes.
Oh and I see the other group that cleared Mann was Penn State University..... same people who cleared Sandusky of any wrongdoing. We can really trust their word too.
As usual, cpu6502 is full of shit. News at 11.
PSU never "cleared" Sandusky of anything. Instead, a handful of high ranking PSU executives made sure it never got that far. They knew what was going on, avoided proper investigation, covered up for him, and tried to tell themselves they'd done enough to stop his pedophilia. (Even though they gave him keep-quiet bribes which made it easy for him to trade on his association with PSU football to gain access to more victims.)
It is extremely doubtful that the officials responsible for the Sandusky coverup were involved in investigations of possible scientific misconduct by Michael Mann. Wrong department, and if you know anything about academia in the US, you are no doubt aware that there is no love lost between academics and administrators in schools which have become slaves to big sports money.
Finally, the investigations resulting from Climategate were conducted in public. You can directly critique PSU's investigation of Mann based on the evidence, methodology, and reasoning presented in their report. Instead, you chose to rely on an ad hominem circumstantial fallacy.
no, i believe that sentence could be chopped in thirds and the first kept.
i wouldn't pretend to understand the stuff they talk about either, and i consider myself an enlightened man of reason.
if science were easy to communicate to the general public, there wouldn't be so many people on both sides either yelling that the sky is falling or that nothing is happening and it's all a conspiracy to get more funding (yeah, cause if you wanna get rich, academic research is totally the best way. climate modellers could make a fortune on the stock market and their models wouldn't need to be peer reviewed).
but where's the hominem there? (anthropogenesis aside...)
the whole thing played out more like a straw man - construct a false, weakened version of "what AGW science looks like", relying on the fact that people are not likely to read the emails in question, and that once someone does the story would be long gone and the backfire effect will be in play, and use this derpy AGW strawman to make the entire field look just as derpy.
ad hominem is saying wikileaks is all bullshit because julian assange is a womanising narcissist - it's only half true, and no matter how true the latter half, it cannot make the first half true
No big surprise...I highly doubt this WAS a "break-in". I think it was one of the folks on staff who just couldn't stomach the lies and deception any more.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
How can you attack something that isn't falsifiable? If the temperature drops it stops being called global warming and is called climate change instead. If someone shows the extrapolation function used on the data to predict future temperature (which shows temperatures increasing in the future) would generate the same result using random noise it doesn't matter. Then there is the cherry picking of temperature data values and massaging of data to give the results you want while not allowing 3rd parties to access the data because it would show that you have messed with the measured data which was supposed to have been input. Not to mention that all the data is based on indirect measurements like tree ring data (which can change not only due to temperature differences, but carbon dioxide levels, rainfall, solar exposure, etc).
I would mod you up if I could.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No, "Mike's nature trick" refers to a mathematical technique used to plot instrument data along with reconstructed data. It's a trick of the trade. It is explained in Mann's paper. Nothing omitted or obscured.
None!
The public at large is more knowledgable of rudimentary physics that escapes the the 'Geniuses' of the CRU i.e. not even one at CRU is a Genus.
And all at CRU are far below that mark.
Unfortunate for CRU.
Fortunate for Earth and Human Kind.
LoL
What is omitted is that the Biffra reconstruction post 1960 diverages from the instrumental record and other displayed proxies. This uncomfortable fact is swept under the carpet by truncating Biffra data and not revealing that this was done. And when challenged on this, the excuse proffered is that the awesome power of global warming is the cause of the divergance (without ever bothering to verify that this justification has any scientific support).
As for plotting instrumental data on same chart as proxy data. I personally would hope that most professional scientists would caution against such practice as proxy data does not have same frequency response characteristics as instrumental data. Palming them off as equivalent by plotting them on the same chart is poor work. Further bolstering accusations that advocacy, not discovery where principally on the scientists minds when putting this graph together.
"while there's a 1000 times more money at stake for the oil-industry than for the scientists"
Unless the nuclear industry was doing a bit of funding too. You might want to follow the money in that direction.
Need Mercedes parts ?
You have it backwards. It's not that there's CO2, it's that we're killing all the things that eat co2. Go into google maps right now and look at Borneo. 3rd largest island in the world, 95% unexplored, and look what's there now instead of the trees. Where'd the trees in Europe go? How many old growth forests are there left?
"Jul 14, 2011 PARIS — Forests play a larger role in Earth's climate system than previously suspected"
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2BAdNIG5Q2FJlEdac1l-KXiTSCA?docId=CNG.dfe97e07f144a2d29eb615412e0c12be.a81
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/08/new_model_doubled_co2_sub_2_degrees_warming/
"8th December 2010 13:24 GMT - A group of top NASA and NOAA scientists say that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise."
Now watch these two:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrI03ts--9I
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/poles/
I dunno about you, but these gave me a different perspective.
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The CRU emails were selectively edited to alter the content of the email.
No, what was done was that selected emails were published in full. The CRU and affected researchers had plenty of time and means to show falsification or selective quoting of portions of email. That hasn't been done.
Yawn the same old libertarian claptrap and lies eh Strat, how about something new?
5.It was just some people who wanted to hack it, just for fun and post it on the internet. They didn't find anything so they edited the info to score more hits.
Also :
1b. It was the climate scientists after all, and they tried to discredit themselves, because bad publicity is better than no publicity.
"We depend on a working ecosystem to perform vital tasks from cleaning air and water"
That's right, and if you want to accelerate that, add CO2. Ask anbody that actually knows about this stuff.
This guy says in a recent paper, if we don't make more CO2 we won't be able to feed the planet soon. And given they left the parts where accelerated plant growth has a cooling effect in their model, there's some speculation we haven't arrived exactly at the truth yet and calling it settled science is vastly premature.
http://www.liebertpub.com/MContent/Files/Kleinman_ch19_p379-398.pdf
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It's all explained in the published papers. Nothing nefarious about it.
To quote Skeptical Science:
Does the divergence problem mean we cannot rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature in the past? Briffa 1998 shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends.
This is a general trend with the divergence problem - trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. Before the 1960s, the northern and southern trees tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. This suggests the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and restricted to recent decades.
Well, now most if not all of the information the FOI requests were after are available and it doesn't change a thing.
I'd rather call it "poisoning the well":
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
"Saganic worship cult". Mate, you owe me a new keyboard. Still cleaning out the coffee I snorted all over the place. We need a logo - something like Sagan in a Pentangle surroundend by "billions and billions and billions". ;)
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I think you just came up with a whole new line of porn films. Maybe you should copyright the idea.
Arg! s/there/their/
Their sudden love for tree ring reconstructions is certainly amusing. Less amusing is to continue their tendency to quote mine papers to make them look like they say something they actually don't. Well, not news - the liars are lying, who would have thunk.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
How can you attack something that isn't falsifiable? If the temperature drops it stops being called global warming and is called climate change instead.
Nope, "climate change" was a spin introduced by Frank Luntz (a Republican "political consultant"), to make global warming sound nicer.
Firstly, Cook was published 5 years after the email 'Mike's nature trick'. So they were shooting from the hip assuming the divergance problem can be ignored.
Secondly, Cook in no way is the final word over the controversy as to whether or not tree rings make good thermometers. It doesn't explain the cause of the modern divergance problem. It does not provide anything to bolster (or diminish) trust that tree rings are a good temp proxy. All it does is provide a pretext to disregard modern, inconvenient, data.
Steve McIntyre critiques the Cook paper on a number of levels. Namely that the breakdown Cook uses separates out trees that are well understood to respond to Co2 fertilization. If you consider only trees that do not respond to fertilization, the divergance problem actually persists. Implying that Cook rationalisation is actually a red herring. http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/14/cook-et-al2004-more-cargo-cult/. His post though is quite unstructured, incomplete and difficult to parse.
"You seem to have some difficulty understanding what "peer review" is about. Peer review serves multiple purposes. One is to improve papers before publication by getting their authors to revise them based on feedback. Another is to exclude from publication those papers which are not worthy of being published. It is both normal and ethical to discuss ways of keeping junk science out of journals."
You could at least find out what you're talking about before trying to refute somebody.
The emails showed that they conspired to prevent papers from ever being peer reviewed, or to rig that peer review.
I know full well what peer review is about, and that has nothing to do with the subject I was talking about.
"Oddly enough, none of you "skeptics" seem to be able to mount effective attacks on climate science, even after Climategate was supposed to have blown the lid off faulty science. Instead you're stuck just sniping at personalities, not the science."
Jesus Christ, man, read the thread! We were discussing whether there were BAD THINGS IN THE EMAILS, not the science!
That is completely off-topic from the point I was making, which was that their behavior was unethical and possibly even illegal.
Sure that analogy would work great if only wikileaks campaign involved wikileaks engaging in a huge campaign of personal harrassment, death threats, break-ins, smear-campaigns and corporate funded legal skullfuckery directed at the government.
But since none of that happened, and the CRU was a bunch of hard working, honest scientists who had their lives turned upside down in a deeply hostile way to try and discredit their hard work, the analogy is actually fucking terrible.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The emails showed that they conspired to prevent papers from ever being peer reviewed, or to rig that peer review.
All the claims made about the scientists where disproven in multiple investigations. The only thing that was shown was that one of them was not following the rules regarding FOI requests, although the investigations also found that the person making the requests was doing so out of harrassment. Finally the data that was denied was unFOIable anyway since it involved commercially owned data-sets that would have been a breach of copyright to FOI.
A bunch of pissed off scientists badmouthing a crank who had been harrassing them and submitting pseudoscience to to journals does not constitute a conspiracy to silence people. To do that you actually need to talk to the publishers of the journals, not somee generic scientist guys at some generic university research lab.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
After reading the Norfolk police statement and the Nature blog, it is interesting to compare and contrast. The police have no idea who did it, and found no evidence to suggest UEA employees or associates did it, but that is a tad different to Nature which claims UEA staff/associates were "ruled out." If you have no idea whodunnit how can you rule out UEA staff/associates? Ironic that the current Nature cover next to the article has the title "Go it a spin." PS> Yes, I am THAT Bulldust ... hence the interest in the articles.
The smartest saying related to things like this I ever heard was "Trust science, not scientists."
http://www.virology.ws/2011/09/27/trust-science-not-scientists/
"All the claims made about the scientists where disproven in multiple investigations."
Absolute nonsense. What the "multiple investigations" found (5 of them so far by my count), was that they were not guilty of actionable wrongdoing. That is a far, far different thing than being proven innocent of "all the claims".
They very clearly, and by their own admission, engaged in conduct that most people would probably call unethical.
Technically -- and only technically -- they didn't quite break the rules. But that they did conspire to keep certain other parties they perceived to be "enemies" out of the peer-reviewed journals is not in doubt.
From Keith Briffa to Edward Cook, June 4, 2003:
"I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review -- Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting -- to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please
Keith"
Cook back to Briffa, June 4, 2003:
If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically...
The paper they were discussing was very likely this one. (pdf)
Phil Jones to Michael Mann on March 31, 2004:
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Phil Jones (I don't know the recipient right now, I'd have to look it up) Jul. 8, 2004:
"The other paper by MM is just garbage -- as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well â" frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
However, as we know, although they tried Jones and Kevin Trenberth were not able to keep the Michaels & McKitrick (M&M) papers completely out after the first draft round.
Email from Phil Jones to several people, Jan. 29 2009:
"With free wifi in my room, I've just seen that M+M have submitted a paper to IJC on your H2 statistic -- using more years, up to 2007. They have also found your PCMDI data -- laughing at the directory name -- FOIA? ... Anyway you'll likely get this for review, or poor Francis will. Best if both Francis and Myles did this. If I get an email from Glenn I'll suggest this."
Those are by no means all of the emails on the subject. No need to fill the whole page.
Clearly you didn't read any of the dishonest, unethical, plain nasty emails to and from the CRU people about people they didn't like.
It is fun to watch, though.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Erm...no.... scientists didn't give you gravity, they just found it...lying about the place and spent a lot of time working out its properties.
Before you rant, I am a physicist.
Nothing omitted or obscured.
Sounds like tree ring data after 1960 was omitted.
If I try to submit a paper claiming that global warming is being caused by the hot breath of Galactus as he eats a planetary burrito is there anything wrong with refusing to allow it to be peer reviewed. Part of the peer review process is to keep stupid ideas from wasting the time of scientist.
Yawn the same old libertarian claptrap and lies eh Strat, how about something new?
How's that "hopey-changey" thing workin' out for ya with all those Goldman-Sachs guys Obama's got running things in the WH that he was demonizing before to get your stupid ass to vote for him?
Soros & Goldman-Sachs: The "Halliburtons" of Progressive Democrats.
LOL!
The hacking resulted in the release of more than 1,000 emails and shook the public's trust in climate science,
No it didn't. It provided an excuse for a few oil company shills and paranoid "libertarians" on web sites like slashdot to rant about the evil liberal-scientific worldwide conspiracy to impose green communism on the god-fearing US.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Don't know about (A) but the fact is that for (B) and (C) those who wanted to discredit the whole idea of AGW were mis-using the FOIA and other requests for information to bombard scientists with so much admin it interfered with their actual work.
It's a form of barratry which the scientists were entitled to combat.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
corporation pays the rest of the burden out of its profits
BWAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!! Oh man, Troll64, you crack me up sometimes. Seriously, I think that is the funniest thing I've seen you post. The corporation would pay out of its own profits... as if!
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to pick up some new monitors.
In other words, I don't care about the physics or the chemistry or the meteorology. CO2 can't possibly cause global warming because it would interfere with someone's profit margin.
The fact that they were trying to keep secrets that were legally public information (resisting FOI requests) is definitely very, very wrong.
The FOIA is a vast waste of time and money when it is exploited by extreme right wing stooges of the energy industry simply to harass working scientists.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That is completely off-topic from the point I was making, which was that their behavior was unethical and possibly even illegal.
No, it shows that the "FOIA" requests were just a pretext for harassment, rather than a genuine request for information.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
it is illegal to break into a private network and steal data
Unless discussing on /. and the target of the attack is fashionably disliked. It is *always* OK to steal data from: The US Government, Google/Microsoft/Apple, RIAA, Big Business, Republicans, Democrats, Rich People, Law Enforcement, stupid people, and, well, that means pretty much anybody.
I thought on slashdot we'd agreed that you could only copy-without-authorisation and not "steal" data anyway, since the information was still there available for the owner to use just the same as before?
I'm not sure we ever entirely cleared up the status of credit card information though.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"Until India, China, et al play ball (which they currently have no intentions whatsoever of doing)"
Bollocks
Renewable energy in the People's Republic of China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
Renewable energy in India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_India
Of course, we hear and see what fits only in our world views. Its why arguing politics and religion is such a fool's errand.
That's nonsense, anything can be argued about rationally, even religion. Otherwise we might as well give up with civilisation and go back to being nomadic hunter-gatherers grunting at the sky when it rains.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So are you arguing that, if AGW were true, there would be a mass campaign of sabotage and terrorism; and that therefore, because there isn't, it's not ttue?
You don't think people might say to themselves "going to prison for ten years for blowing up a couple of trucks wouldn'tt actually achieve anything other than making those who accept AGW look like idiots"?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
In other words, I don't care about the physics or the chemistry or the meteorology. CO2 can't possibly cause global warming because it would interfere with someone's profit margin.
Nice straw-man you built there. Did you have adult help?
No, I said that *regardless* of whether AGW is actually serious and a problem or not, unless the largest, most populous parts of the world that produce, or soon will be, the majority of CO2 are willing to even consider participating, any efforts on our part alone is worse than simply useless in making any meaningful change to the global climate, it actually harms our economy and punishes our people with lower standards of life to no good end and weakens the US as a power.
Whenever the US has shown economic/military/political weakness, wars have historically and will be started by those hostile to the US and the West.
Think on a larger global scale and base it on what has happened again and again, the patterns that repeat through centuries of history.
Of course, there's the old canard, eh? "The one thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history."
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
r.e. your sig: I think they're smarter, too.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
All the proposed "solutions" to AGW basically boil down to "You 1st-world Western Capitalist nations are to blame for all the pollution, give us your wealth and cripple your industries and economies!"
Nice straw-man you built there. Did you have adult help?
My webcomic
"The government officials in Australia responsible for the great barrier reef said last week, the end of reefs on the planet is in sight."
There's no data to support this.
They said this about the crown of thorns starfish (Acanthaster plancii) in the 60s too. In theory by 2000, there'd be nothing left of the great barrier reef. They were obviously wrong about that too.
Coral hasn't survived since the beginning of life on this planet (it was one of the very first multicell animals) by being delicate and has survived 7000ppm CO2, heat, glaciation, meteor strike and all the extinction events. Give nature some credit.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"No, it shows that the "FOIA" requests were just a pretext for harassment, rather than a genuine request for information."
It shows nothing of the sort. People like McKitrick, for example, had tried EVERY other avenue to get the information FIRST, before resorting to FOI (not FOIA) requests. They tried being polite, they tried being polite and persistent, they tried to get the University to release the information, etc. None of it worked.
And -- as it turned out later -- people like Michaels and McKitrick had EVERY legitimate scientific reason to want that data.
They had been deliberately (as clearly reflected in the emails) denied the information for YEARS. And... as the House of Commons clearly put in their report, it SHOULD HAVE BEEN public information anyway!
Get a copy of the damned emails and read them yourself, if you don't believe me. That's what I did.
So... trees in southern latitudes agree with their conclusion while northern trees disagree with it.
Don't you think this is a fairly important observation ?
Talk about an "inconvenient truth"...
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FOI systems have to be designed to handle this; it happened in Canada in the 90s and is not an insoluable problem.
You can't just have researchers saying "no, don't wanna" to legitimate FOI requests, they aren't the ones to decide who sees government funded data!
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Both can be true, they're not mutually exclusive.
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Even when the ice is gone and the methane hydrate is about do release millions of years worth of methane into the atmosphere they will be making excuses as to why it's not really warming.
Since the divergence only started in the 1960's and before that they track fairly well back to Medieval times it points to something besides temperature causing the divergence.
That's the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority.
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How bout simply comparing the Hockey Stick graph to the Scandanavian data (after the X and Y axes are normalized.
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/fraud/climategate/.images/00-both2.png
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I may have to incorporate that into my sig.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.