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."
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.
"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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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
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
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.
>>>>>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"
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.
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?
"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.
"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.
Now that would bump up the Olympic viewership... competitive team fucking, Who wants to be a judge?
"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]
'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.
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.
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
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.
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.