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."
Police finish climagegate whitewash operation.
There fixed that for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
A Climate Guy was feeling guilty about the scam and did it.
Because a scientist blatantly falsifying data to prove their research valid and important cannot possibly be called "wrongdoing" when there are currently a record number of scientific journals being retracted for doing exactly the same thing.
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.
"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.
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?
And still, that's not what they were doing. They weren't attacking characteristics of *the scientists*, they were attacking the validity of the *research*.
If doing that is an ad hominem, so it this post for making you look dumb by cutting down your argument.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Nothing will sway the small minds of Climate Change Deniers, for whom uncertainty is the same as doubt.
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 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.
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?
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.
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
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
for high sticking.
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.
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 !
Yea, you are absolutely right with "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 or seo in Ukraine 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."
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.
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.
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!
'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.
"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.
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
So end the investigation and let the climate hysterics off Scot free. The damage has been done. They will never influence world politics again.
an ill wind that blows no good
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.
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 ?
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.
I'd rather call it "poisoning the well":
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!
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.
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.
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
"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 ?
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"...
Need Mercedes parts ?
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!
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.