Hackers & Global Warming

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Why should I be talking about hackers in lingering sighs (politics)?

Because what hackers dug out is being used to make claims about Global Warming in the political sphere.

Here is a related article (though probably not the best one).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...esearch-centre-massaged-temperature-data.html

The claim that scientists manipulated data or the message that data implied for the rest of society is being used to supposedly debunk the idea Global Warming is occurring.

There have been a number of people running around claiming Global Warming is a hoax and if they are political figures in the US they usually get large donations from oil and/or coal related industries. So I take their claims with a grain of salt.

That said what do you think about this?

Was this a case of a group of scientists being too arrogant-thinking that only *their* comments about Global Warming were important enough to be heard? (That Global Warming is real and happening and that these people are trying to dominate an important discussion that we should be having with or without them).

Are these scientists actually correct but too thin skinned to go through a proper process of rigorous questioning?

Is this the smoking gun for right-wing claims Global Warming isn't real?

How far does what this group of scientists say manipulate other scientists or fail to?

Is there something else going on?


As I've seen right wing talk radio people jump on this I think it is fair to bring up what would normally be a discussion about science in a politically related discussion.

 

There's no way to know. The data posted by the hackers is no longer available online, since stealing and re-posting private correspondence breaks pretty much every law in the book. The data may have been tampered with, but there's no way to verify one way or the other since the server it was posted on was taken offline. Even if the data wasn't tampered with, it's now impossible to even verify what the auspiciously incriminating comments were. It's the word of a group of people who already admitted to illegally hacking a secure network against the word of a University that cannot confirm the validity of the material due to its volume and rightly removed the server in question from operation.

While I would love to see confirmation one way or the other, it just isn't going to happen, and without some corroboration I'm not terribly inclined to believe a criminal.

 

Check wikileaks, it's still there and will probably remain there since wikileaks is renowned for hosting this kind of information. (It's a little naive of you that you think that just because something is illegal(which is very subjective in this case,) it cannot be found on the Internet??)
Edit:
The email can be searched through at eastangliaemails.com. Which opens with the quote:

I just downloaded it (from wikileaks) and it's about 170mb of data, it consists of not only emails, but also code (in IDL, which is a programming language used for data analysis.) Eric Raymond, a renowned hacker, comments on the IDL code for the hidden decline here. There are many people looking through the data and when they find something big it's will probably end up here. At least, I expect that, since I saw the news on the climate data hack come up there 9 days ago, way ahead of the mainstream news.

Yes, well that is at least the impression that I had when looking through the highlights. There is actual, uncensored talk of tweaking and removing data and until it would fit the message that they want to show: That the earth is warming up at a huge pace. For
example, in some emails there is talk of ignoring sensors that do not support their view and that is their only reason. No time to stop and wonder if it really is malfunctioning. Some scientists

It seems to me that since these people are so sure of global warming, that they have become very selective when when it comes to accepting data. There are basically the left-wing creationists

A lot of people will probably jump the gun, but there are other climate research centers, who are probably more honest about their data.

 

The main news article took statements out of context (and added their own). I've read a few of the mail threads with the hot quotes and they were pretty boring, except for when the scientists were mocking each other.

Forget about it, this was just a low demagogic punch.

 

Uh, sure, except that most of the punching is not just on the email, but also now on the datasets (you know, the 161mb of the 170mb ) by other climate scientists. Check wattsupwiththat and Climate audit

 

Well with the latest revelation. it is doubtful anyone will be able to recreate the results.

If it wasn't so criminal it would be hilarous. The consensus is in, global warming is global threat and we must do everything we can to cripple our economies to stop it. However, since the data doesn't really support the consensus let's tweak it a little and then "dispose" of the raw data. You trust us don't you?

It also appears that there is a Climategate2 scandal starting to brew in New Zealand

By worldwide, I'm assuming they mean the internet as I haven't seen much coverage of this on the major networks or newspapers (at least not yet, I give it a few more weeks as scientists look at the data)

 

... that and the NASA data (which was the foundation of global warming research) was inaccurate. When the problem was discovered the scientists simply revised their theories to explain the corrected data. However, had the data been presented correctly to begin with, there would have been much less fervor about global warming.

I'm not necessarily against the climate control debate -- I just don't agree with the way the issue has been handled. I think there is a lot of good research that is being ignored and some very questionable research being glorified.

 

Science is done through articles, not through irreviewable web postings and flamewars. The only good thing that can come out of this hype-nation is more research, probably with new data, since most of those datasets were already available and were probably used a number of times already, while new data keeps getting measured.

Luckily, CRU is not the only meteo service ...

 

I'll caveat a few things before I begin:

A: I believe that global warming is occuring.

B: I believe that humans are contributing to it on a large scale.

That said, I believe that the conclusions drawn by the doomsayers are crap, and ignore reality in favor of an unquestionable orthodoxy that would make the Inquisitorial Catholics envious. Anyone who questions these holy facts is tarred with the label of "planet hater" or "soulless capitalist" or whatever. Hopefully this will slow the doomsayers down, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Speaking as a Canadian, I hesitate to make all sorts of drastic changes when I realize that if every Canadian died, right now, and all of our cars and factories and methane-farting cows and every other polluting thing in the country went with us, it wouldn't make an effing bit of difference to world pollution levels. So I'll make the changes that are convenient to me, and I'll try not to tell people to live by my religious tenets if they will do the same for me and not try to tell me to live by their own green tenets. Because the math is clear.

 

As if articles are reviewable? Snook already pointed this out, but doesn't the CRU make it a standard procedure to toss away raw data?

 

This is from a UK Columnist.

Spoiler

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

 

if you want to have it published in a respectable magazine, then it should be (per the definition of the scientific method).

The data loss is misfortunate, but I doubt there is any conspiracy behind it. Is the standardisation process documented somewhere?

 

I think this guy is a little too strident, but I agree with him that these silly accords are not the way to address the problem. But his one line entertained me, and I want to share it with you:

 

From my link:

This was posted, according to the author, on the website of CRU, which is now down:

To which the author of the blogpost remarks:

Edit:
Whoops, my error, I read "hold" in "do not hold" as active instead of passive.

 

This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. I mean, seriously . . . .

People misrepresenting scientific data for political ends? Oh No! What a huge sin, one that has never before been committed! And I thought that all of the people warning us about climate change were pure of heart angels sent from God Almighty himself to altruistically warn us with the truth and the truth was going to set us free! The underpinning of my life has been totally destroyed! I'm never leaving my room again!

I'm sure that people on the other side (ie: my side) have misrepresented data before. If so, they should be punished severely. But that wouldn't make me seriously re-evaluate my position on the matter for reasons I have already mentioned, just as I am sure that the doomsayers would not seriously re-evaluate their positions based on something as relatively minor as this.

 

Now, this is my problem with the whole climate-science field. No, not the "we're lying and manipulating the data to get what we want" part, primarily because I don't know how widespread that may be. The people who did it were certainly central and key, but may also have acted "alone, together". My problem is that they became central and key in this field of "science" without publishing their original data! Now, I don't expect the journals to publish 200 pages of raw data, but the data should be preserved somewhere, should be available to anyone who asks for it, and should be regularly provided to anyone really looking at their research! Without the original data, and every detail of what they did with that data to get it where they did, as well as every detail of how they collected that data, the researcher is just asking you to push the "I believe!" button. Unfortunately, that's what's happened in the climate debate.

To put it shortly, in any other field of science, these researchers would never have even gotten published, much less become key and central figures. Climate Science has taken real scientific methods and procedures and watered them down. And worse, this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened and been made public, and yet people still pay attention to these guys!

 

This is true. I have published research in scientific journals, but you won't find my entire 150 page Master's thesis in any journal. You'll get the Cliff Notes version. However, since I've signed the rights of my thesis over to the university, they are allowed to provide it to whomever asks for it. Now, I don't think there are more than about six people in the world that have any interest in deuterium-laced biacetyl, but hey, if you are, there's a great source document for you!

 

deuterium-laced biacetyl? That's a load of bull Aldeth -- There is no such stuff. I know for a fact that you made that stuff up while watching Star Trek. You're probably a garbageman!

This message of redneck ignorance has been brought to you by Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel!

In case anyone is new to the boards and also completely ignorant of The Simpsons, that was a joke -- I love Aldeth like a brother, and not in the redneck way

 

Aldeth, exactly! And while you're probably right that deuterium laced biacetyl isn't on the Best Sellers list at your local university, global warming stuff may well be.

Just out of curiosity, I googled biacetyl. I just had to know, you know. Aldeth, do you mean this stuff?

Spoiler

Chemical Formula: C4H6O2
Other names: 2,3-Butanedione

Layman's explanation: The study of 2,3-butanedione began with Pasteur s work in the 1870 s. The compound is found naturally in all beers during their fermentation process, as it is produced by yeast. Under normal circumstances the compound will be metabolized into chemicals with no flavor impact on beer. In 1939, 2,3-butandione was linked to the taste and smell of butter. Now, synthetic 2,3-butanedione is added to margarine as a butter flavor.

Keywords: butter, fermentation

So, you did a thesis on watered down beer? I knew you were a frat boy!

 

You are correct - there is no such stuff. Biacetyl is an organic compound that only occurs naturally in the non-deuterated state. In fact, I DID HAVE TO MAKE IT in a lab.

Biacetyl is naturally produced by the body in very small quantities when you perspire. It's main commercial use is that it gives microwave popcorn it's "buttered" scent. It has a very pungent odor, but is completely tasteless. While I cannot state with absolute certainty that it is not found in beer, that is not it's primary function in industry.