Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria in Canada and the IPCC, says there have been two successful break-ins at his office. An old computer was stolen (National Post).
“They went through my desk drawers. It was bizarre and the only computer that wasn’t secured was stolen. It wasn’t secured because it was broken. There was nothing on it,” says Weaver (CanWest News).
A university spokeswoman also said there had been attempts to hack into climate scientists’ computers and people posing as staff to gain access to offices. The incidents come after the hacking of emails at the University of East Anglia and the subsequent ‘Climategate’ pseudo-scandal (see our past coverage).
In a twist to that story, there are now media reports that the hacking was carried out by the Russian secret service. This theory seems to be based on the fact that the emails may have been initially leaked from a server located in the Siberian city of Tomsk and hackers in Tomsk have in the past been used by the Russian secret service to attack the websites of people they disapprove of.
“It’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random. This is 13 years of data, and it’s not a job of amateurs,” says Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC (Independent, Daily Telegraph) .
There is one guy who has taken on malicious billionaires, shadowy groups bent on harming the world and the Russian Secret f*cking Service, and it isn’t James Hansen. Too bad that other guy is about as real as a rainbow-pooping unicorn.
We’re hosed.
Hunter Gathers
MI-6 is too busy covering it’s ass over the torture program.
dr. bloor
Edit–nevermind. I need to read before I respond next time.
dmsilev
I suggest interviewing all the staff of the various climate-research centers and identifying the location of the most beautiful, yet troubled, young woman available. That will be a guaranteed tell as to where 007 will appear.
(obligatory stereotype: It’s academia, so there’s bound to be only one or two candidates at most)
-dms
SpotWeld
When did the Climate Change debate turn into “The Man with One Red Show”?
SpotWeld
@SpotWeld: One Red Shoe I mean.. Shoe.
(Arrgh)
Andrew A. Gill, SLS
But James Bond is (or was) real.
PeakVT
We’re hosed.
Probably. If our country can’t solve an immediate problem (health care) then there’s no way that anything will be done about a distant (more than a Senate term) and somewhat abstract problem. And if the US doesn’t do anything, then China won’t do anything. Game over.
aimai
I think this story points in another direction–they have probably hacked lots more scientists in order to get to the ability to leak some emails that can be made to look a tiny bit damaging. Expect more leaked/hacked emails all the time. And also expect that a lot of scientists’ may have had their research compromised and pirated by such hacking.
aimai
Citizen_X
Great job, climate-change denialists. You’re really serving your country by being suckers for a disinformation campaign by the Russian secret service.
Perhaps Glenn Beck wasn’t kidding when he posed in that Soviet uniform?
gnomedad
Somebody needs to keep those reality-obsessed meddlers in line.
Rock
Climate scientists are screwed.
Monbiot can rail all he wants about how poorly East Anglia and climate scientists have handled the PR of the e-mail incident. This report just underscores how decidely uneven the resources available to climate scientists are compared to those who view them adversaries.
Climate scientists barely have money/staff/time to do research. They do not have the ability to hire a PR staff. They do not have the ability to hire a staff of counter-intelligence professionals. This is absolutely ludicrous. I’ve heard more than once that AGW is simply an attempt to wring grant money out of the government. Isn’t it clear that if you want money, denial is much more lucrative?
This is anecdotal, but I was talking to a friend of a moderately prominent climate scientist recently who said that person was looking to leave the field. They were essentially being harassed because of their work on climate (I won’t go into details since it’s hearsay).
Not only will we, as a species, not do anything substantive about climate change but we are essentially persecuting the people who have tried to provide a service to us. We are idiots.
jwb
OK, clearly I haven’t been following this closely enough. So why exactly would the Russian Secret Service care to discredit climate research? Is this Russian energy money at work? It’s interesting that that paragraph in the notice is the one without a link.
@Citizen_X: How about Glenn Beck as Russian mole?
4tehlulz
Wow. Exxon’s efforts at climate change obfuscation look totally amateur now.
jwb
@Rock: “Not only will we, as a species, not do anything substantive about climate change but we are essentially persecuting the people who have tried to provide a service to us. We are idiots.”
That’s the role of Cassandra, isn’t it?
Morbo
@Citizen_X: I believe it was East German actually. Irony’s corpse continues to be bludgeoned.
And we’re not only fucked on climate change, we’re fucked on cyber security in general. Cyber Pearl Harbor here we come.
inthewoods
The way we’re structured right now, it is just about impossible to respond to long-term issues like global climate change…..we’re a respond-only system. We do everything only when the crisis has reached maximum impact.
At some point, we’ll have a devastated food supply at some point, and someone will scream “why didn’t we do anything about this?” but at that point, of course, it will be too late. And some bullshit right-winger will be there to say that we can’t prove it was caused by GCC – and on we go.
If the increase in the size and number of fires in the state of California can’t cause people to stand up and take notice, what will?
DanF
Someone should really let the tea-baggers know that they are now taking their marching orders from the Russian KGB (yeah – I know not all tea-baggers are deniers, but I bet the Ven diagram is just about a complete circle).
Hob
So, Kim Stanley Robinson recently wrote this near-future climate-change political SF series, starting with Thirty Days and Counting. It’s weird, messy, wonky, DC-centric, big-hearted, and really pretty interesting. But one thing I almost couldn’t get past was that he just had to throw in a cloak-and-dagger subplot. Somehow, as cynical as I usually think I am, and having grown up in the Reagan years hearing about all the ghastly/petty shit the government was covertly doing… I still had trouble believing that serious spooks would step in against the scientists who were trying to save the world, just to keep business interests happy. Well, lick my head and call me an all-day sucker…
stickler
Re: Glenn Beck’s uniform — yes, that was a German style (generic post-1933). Collar tabs, color, etc. (The fact that East Germany more or less used the Nazi-era uniform designs, and even the 1944 model helmet, might lead to a moment of Deep Thought, but that’s best left for another thread.)
While I’d like to blame the Russians for this, too, and the ratfnckery is certainly up to Russian standard, I’d like to also know what’s in it for them. Does Putin think that Kolyma might be the next Palm Springs if the climate warms? Will rising sea levels finally give Russia the warm-water seaport she’s always sought?
Citizen_X
Now here’s the scariest phrase I’ve seen yet on AGW: “the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics.”
From today’s AGW editorial, to be published by 56 newspapers from 45 countries.
UlyssesUnbound
Has anyone considered what is probably the real truth behind these break ins? Liberals, who want to turn America into a socialist state, are using their socialist Russian friends to hack into these servers. Teabaggers, who of course are ever vigilant about the attempts of these pinko commie liberal tree-huggers to turn our nation into Cuba, respond to this attack on our science by Russia by supporting climate change legislation–the very thing Russia supposedly doesn’t want us to do. The clean energy economy, which is really just a rebranding of 5-year planning, is implemented in America. The teabaggers will have turned America into the USSRA. They will have become their own worst enemies.
Once you believe this is possible, it makes sense that it is possible.
ChrisS
@inthewoods:
That’s only because loggers haven’t been allowed to clear-cut forests as much as they want to.
/wingnut.
Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
jwb
@stickler: What’s in it for the Russians? Either it’s Russian energy concerns or general destabilization of global politics. I don’t really see destabilization as a particular advantage to the Russians at this time, so it would have to be the energy concerns, no?
Bubblegum Tate
Did you know “Climategate” gives us the evidence we need to throw Al Gore in jail? Uh-huh.
Michael
We’re not hosed if we send in Rick James, beeyatch!
Cerberus
@jwb:
Ooh, ooh, I can answer this one. It was brought up in one of my classes last year, because there was a bit of a notation in the Danish press that while there would be catastrophic damages to things like fishing and the global environment, there was actual noticeable benefits to the Danish growing season in global warming and that the only country that was actually happy about the prospect of global warming was Russia.
Why?
Because the melting ice in the polar ice cap is opening new shipping lanes to Canada that are a hell of a lot faster and thus more lucrative for Russians not to mention the prospect of all that land in Siberia actually becoming great farming land.
As such there are forces in the Russian government and business community who are actively cheering on global warming because it would essentially put their country back on top sort of automatically.
Yes, this is the stupidest thing ever, but it would explain why Russian secret service would be involved in trying to fuck over AGW research.
gopher2b
It makes sense. Russia is poised to benefit enormously from melting ice caps.
There is no way way to stop the release of carbon into the atmosphere. We have to figure out a way to pull it out (I have now idea if this is possible, I’m a stupid history major. I’m just saying, you will never change human behavior).
arguingwithsignposts
Totally off topic, but for the love of all that is sacred, someone get Ari Fleischer out of college football! They’re already astroturfing web sites!
gopher2b
@Cerberus:
“Because the melting ice in the polar ice cap is opening new shipping lanes to Canada that are a hell of a lot faster and thus more lucrative for Russians not to mention the prospect of all that land in Siberia actually becoming great farming land.”
And there are vast oil reserves under all that ice. And Russia has already stated it belongs to them.
Brian J
@Bubblegum Tate:
I stopped reading that nonsense halfway through the first sentence. A conspiracy to install an “unelected global government” is the reason behind global climate change talks and actions? You know, the next time my conservative relatives tell me I am brainwashed, I’m going to point them to this shit.
ChrisS
@jwb:
Well, considering that Russia is a massive exporter of oil and natural gas, and Putin is a multi-multi billionaire because he’s used the KGB before to leverage himself into the oil and gas industry:
But whatever, there are a lot more dollars going to into the argument to discredit climate science than dollars going to fund climate science.
4tehlulz
>Yes, this is the stupidest thing ever, but it would explain why Russian secret service would be involved in trying to fuck over AGW research.
Sure is a good thing that Russia isn’t bordered by a nuclear power that would be adversely affected by global warming. That would piss them off.
truculent and unreliable
@jwb: It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that a corporation/organization that benefits from climate change denialism paid someone to do this.
The Moar You Know
@Morbo: You have no idea. This is what I do for a living, and we are completely and totally unprepared for it.
jwb
@Cerberus: At least that might make sense from a Russian geopolitical viewpoint. Still, if the Russians were going to do this, why hack the emails and not the data itself?
Litlebritdifrnt
@Citizen_X:
Ditto *snork* – one good thing about this, if true, will be listening to Limbaugh and his ilk turning themselves into pretzels trying to defend the Russians hacking into the free-world’s computers. I’m making popcorn.
BlizzardOfOz
@Rock,
Goldman Sachs & others love the idea of cap and trade, since it would funnel still more transactions to them to skim off the top. So the money is not all against the climate change priesthood. Besides, this were a real science, they would be happy to release their data: instead, they’re busy cherry-picking data to match their pre-conceived apocalyptic narrative. And now they’re threatening to quit the field like the drama queens at AIG? That’s pathetic. The discourse is stacked in their favor: everywhere you look, skeptics are mocked and called all kinds of names.
4tehlulz
@jwb: They’d have to hack NOAA, NASA, and a few other places too. It’s just easier to discredit people.
gnomedad
@Hob:
I couldn’t find this title; the trilogy appears to be: Forty Signs of Rain / Fifty Degrees Below / Sixty Days and Counting.
jwb
@truculent and unreliable: Well, I would guess corporations rather than government, primarily because I think government spies would go after the basic data (seeking to alter the scientific reports) rather than emails (which only turns it into a political fight). I should think an intelligence agency would have the capacity to alter the basic data, whereas I doubt corporations would have the resources to do the same.
The Republic of Stupidity
@inthewoods:
But… it will still be the fault of the dirty stinkin’ libruls…
4tehlulz
@The Republic of Stupidity: “If only liberals didn’t politicize this, we would have prevented this.”
thomas Levenson
I’ve been trying to blog this story for weeks, and I can’t get my fingers to stop trembling with rage and frustration. I published my first book in 1989 — it was on the science of climate and how that science, transformed over the previous decades — was then providing a coherent account of serious long-term threats to human well being (not to mention the environment as a whole). Details have changed; the science has gotten more sophisticated; we have a lot more data…but no core claim in that book is wrong twenty years later.
Oh — and nothing has been done, of course. And now this — a bunch of clueless useful idiots convinced that the desire to for unlimited numbers of Americans to drive vehicles of unlimited displacement is so deeply justified by at least three of four gospels that any claim that there are consequences to an uncontrolled global experiment in the effects of changing atmospheric chemistry must be dismantled by any means necessary.
And so they resort to the tactics of mediocre high school debaters. You know — the ones who think that any random quote that contradicts a claim by their opponents is the same thing as a consequential argument. All they have to do, to paraphrase the tobacco junkies, is to produce doubt, and wait.
Tim caught this a few posts back: they’ve won, substantially. Serious, possibly irreversible (really so on human-generation time scales) anthropogenic climate change is already here. We’ll be dealing with mitigation, remediation, and an attempt to make sure that things don’t get truly horrible. But that’s the best we can hope for. We can’t get to status quo ante from here, at least not fast.
I’ll try to summon up the will to write this up with evidence and links and argument and all that, but for now, as for the last many days, I’m just a ball of depressed rage.
thomas Levenson
I’ve been trying to blog this story for weeks, and I can’t get my fingers to stop trembling with rage and frustration. I published my first book in 1989 — it was on the science of climate and how that science, transformed over the previous decades — was then providing a coherent account of serious long-term threats to human well being (not to mention the environment as a whole). Details have changed; the science has gotten more sophisticated; we have a lot more data…but no core claim in that book is wrong twenty years later.
Oh — and nothing has been done, of course. And now this — a bunch of clueless useful idiots convinced that the desire to for unlimited numbers of Americans to drive vehicles of unlimited displacement is so deeply justified by at least three of four gospels that any claim that there are consequences to an uncontrolled global experiment in the effects of changing atmospheric chemistry must be dismantled by any means necessary.
And so they resort to the tactics of mediocre high school debaters. You know — the ones who think that any random quote that contradicts a claim by their opponents is the same thing as a consequential argument. All they have to do, to paraphrase the tobacco junkies, is to produce doubt, and wait.
Tim caught this a few posts back: they’ve won, substantially. Serious, possibly irreversible (really so on human-generation time scales) anthropogenic climate change is already here. We’ll be dealing with mitigation, remediation, and an attempt to make sure that things don’t get truly horrible. But that’s the best we can hope for. We can’t get to status quo ante from here, at least not fast.
I’ll try to summon up the will to write this up with evidence and links and argument and all that, but for now, as for the last many days, I’m just a ball of depressed rage.
GregB
I think we all need to take a deep breath. Let’s get together and discuss this over some tea.
OK comrades?
-Vladimir Putin
Cerberus
@jwb:
Simple.
Hacking the data doesn’t matter. I mean, if the data is hacked, the only people who know are the scientists. It might ruin some large datasets, but many of those are shared over multiple sites and labs and are often frequently backed up. I work in a fairly computer intensive lab for my Master’s thesis and everything on our computers is backed up to at least one periphery device if not more at multiple steps. It would suck to lose the work or have to redo a few steps because of hackers, but it wouldn’t really get out and it certainly wouldn’t make it into any journal to be discredited later (peer review and all that jazz).
But hacking the emails?
Gold. You get an ignorant and story hungry press and a mobile denialist community who are right-wingers who care more about tone than fact to see the dirty, filthy, and dense way scientists communicate and a cherry-picker can sustain months of inaction and media hostility just off one good hack job. And since one only needs to stall the media and the governments, not the scientists who have been in consensus for long over a decade, it hits the real target.
And dear god are our press corps and public ignorant on the subject. If you hacked our lab’s emails, well, most are in Danish, but still, you could probably “disprove” evolution with the shit we say. The use of the word “tricks” is rife in all the sciences. Why? Because often times to get a program to work or make a dataset readable, you do have to employ a “trick” used by others in the field in order to get the computer to do what you want, get the dataset you want (as in actually looking at the parameters and areas you want it to or having the experiment work in the first place), or just make a dataset readable.
But yeah, we’re fucked as a species. The good guys have no friends and have every bond villain cliche gunning for them. It’s like seeing the poor abortion doctors trying to do right by women.
Evinfuilt
Got to agree with Hansen, a US Senate designed Cap & Trade is as likely to fix AGW as Republican designed healthcare would solve our healthcare problem.
That’s not even taking into account how much Goldman Sachs is pushing Cap & Trade, they’ve invested a lot of money to make it happen, they already know how to work the market there.
El Cid
This proves that the left are the real fascists, because only fascists would complain about people illegally breaking in and stealing computers or hacking in for data in the interests of major polluters, because, you know, HITLER.
Evinfuilt
@thomas Levenson:
But we’ve been told that nature will fix all of it own its own (invisible hand works the environment I guess.) Then if you show anyone the report from last year showing that it will take 1,000 years for nature to handle today’s excess CO2, well they’d just ignore that. Reality = liberal bias, and all that.
I feel for you, on the bright side, you did get to study and learn what you wanted, which has to mean something.
Cerberus
Further on the “tricks”:
My second internship in my Bachelor’s was with an electromagnetic microscopy lab visualizing 3D representations of various things in order to better visualize things for other labs.
We literally had a “List of Tricks” that we had to follow and was quite often updated on various ways people had come up with in tricking the microscopes and the various software we used to be able to use each others datasets or to work in such a way as to be useful later on or to correct shots in a series which were unusable because of a random blurry shot or to correct random drift and errors in each of the sets (such as bad alignment on one or multiple of the shots in a series).
We had a ton and often times we’d have to “throw out shots” as well or as the denialists would have said “tampering with data”. Science on the ground is messy and a lot of things can go wrong or just plain old fail to show anything at all.
It’s unfortunate that the rapturist set has so poisoned science knowledge in our culture that no one has the slightest clue how science works or how it should work.
The Republic of Stupidity
Hmmmm… got any proof to back up this bold claim?
Could that be because almost everytime you look into the background of a skeptic, he, or she, is either a) on the payroll of an oil company, b) someone like ‘Lord Monckton’ – a clown with NO scientific background, or c) even worse – someone who actually believes Creationism should actually be considered a science?
Cerberus
@thomas Levenson:
You have my deepest sympathies. There probably can never be a worse feeling for a scientist than to work in a public minded field like AGW research, find the evidence, provide the warnings to the necessary government officials and have them ignore them until the problem becomes unsolvable.
You did what you could and those of us who are not Rapture Ready psychotics are grateful for your efforts.
jwb
@Cerberus: I was actually thinking of hacking the raw data, or rather the data feeds from the various automated monitoring sites, before it got into the data set.
Seanly
The linked article does not do Hansen justice. He seems to be advocating not from a denial or do-nothing position, but from the position that any compromise is too little. The issue he is missing though is that if we wait until we get the perfect protocols, it might be too late.
I believe we should take the best compromise we can get, but continue to push for further reforms. And we need to develop not just alternative energy, but look at how we can transform transportation, our lifes, our homes, our cities and economies to save the earth.
Hob
@gnomedad: Yeah, I just had a major brain malfunction while typing that title – got the order of the books wrong *and* the numbers. It’s what you said.
Tom Levenson
@Cerberus: Thanks
ditto@Evinfuilt: thanks again.
Just to cheer everyone up, let me steal from Cenk Uygar’s diary over at GOS, with the transcript of an O’Reilly/Palin question and response on the virtues of intellect in public policy. Read it and you will be some distance down the road to grasping why even my hoped for mitigation of climate change awfulness is a very slender reed.
Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have I believe the values that I think are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the uhm, the ah, a kind of spineless, spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy league education and, and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.
Hob
@BlizzardOfOz: Re “why they don’t release their data” – you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but that’s an easy mistake to make these days, because the denialists have been pretty good at spreading the “hidden data” idea around. It’s simply not true that the consensus view of climate change is based on hidden data. Read the last dozen posts on realclimate.org if you’re actually interested.
jwb
@Cerberus: It just strikes me that the risks of government spying are too high and the payoff too uncertain for the Russian government to be going after emails themselves. They may be financing it, of course, just as corporations might. Then, too, if you were Russian intelligence, you wouldn’t release the leaked emails from a Russian site—unless for some reason you didn’t care if other governments knew you were behind it. If Russian intel is in fact involved, I would say that it’s likely international petroleum using their contacts with Russian petroleum to get access to certain assets run by Russian intel but without Russian intel actively running the operation (though no doubt highly amused by it all).
Seanly
err, 5 minutes is not enough edit time for a windbag like myself.
We don’t need to save the earth. We need to continue to keep the earth habitable for us and the other species. If we make the earth too warm or melt the polar caps, we only screw ourselves. Life will still continue after we’re all washed away or bake in the deserts we’ve made. A couple of thousand years after we’re gone (a flash in the billions already passed and remaining to the earth) and this planet will be back to a verdent eden.
truculent and unreliable
@jwb: Exactly. And while there are certainly people within the Russian government who would benefit from denialism, I’m not sure that the government itself is involved.
@thomas Levenson: Re: mediocre high school debaters–exactly! I’ve argued before that a lot of the people shaping our political discourse must have been failed, shitty high school debaters. “Liberal Fascism” is as squirrelly as you can get. The problem is that, you know, this is, like real life, and it affects real people.
I’m starting to be thankful that I don’t have children.
GReynoldsCT00
OT, but I just had to help keep the hate alive
chrome agnomen
rick james?
Deep Throat
Yes, but who is deep throat? Just like old slippery Dick was still in office. Oh the glory days of the GOP how I’ve missed them. Here’s a cover-up from the Bush/Cheney era. I was wondering what kind of delightful things would come crawling out from under the carpet after Dubya rode off into the sunset.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/law-school-study-finds-ev_n_382085.html
arguingwithsignposts
@Tom Levenson:
This from a woman who spent how much of her life in government jobs that she quit halfway through?
GReynoldsCT00
@chrome agnomen:
super freaky!!
Michael
@chrome: See title of post.
@all: Why Bruce Schneier isn’t our “cyber czar” is beyond me. Also, this was a fascinating panel: http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability_management/security/cybercrime/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222000386
Cerberus
@jwb:
Again, there’s greater redundancy. Most datastreams can allow the loss of one or more sites (otherwise the usual garbage like breakdowns, computer malfunctions or someone pressing the wrong button and turning off a site would end every long-term project) and most sites have multiple recordings sometimes from several projects at once.
And most of the “raw data” is being collected and backed up fairly regularly on various computers or else is really difficult to hack (land line connections or going out oneself to measure it and collect the data rather than streaming it anywhere to be hacked)
The payoff wouldn’t be great and wouldn’t really do much for the goal of pissing off and wasting the time of climate scientists.
At worst, they’d just throw out that section of data, but again, it’s unlikely it’d get that bad.
No, they stole the right thing for their aims, which is above all else spreading doubt and disinformation among the public in order to delay outcry against the types of people who’d see the whole world die just to fatten their coffers for a few more years.
Hacking the data sounds all cool and HaXXor, but it’s effect would have been meaningless to any competent science team.
Wolfdaughter
Seanly:
I absolutely agree with you. Also, one of the reasons to go with compromises is that the dire effects predicted by the denialists won’t happen. So then you push for a little more compromise. Gradually the denialists can seem to be what they are–nutcases (unfortunately, well-funded nutcases in this instance).
Someone I know through a singing group is a denialist. I sent out an email about information at RealClimate, and got back a long, rambling screed from this man, which included his biggest rationale for denialism, the supposed attempt to institute a one-world government. This guy is a civil engineer who works for Raytheon. OK, Raytheon’s employees tend to be libertarian conservatives, but Raytheon would not appear to have any skin in this game per se, one way or the other.
What do we do in the face of massive well-funded disinformation? I sure as hell don’t know. Sigh.
Cerberus
@jwb:
There is also the fact that the Russian government is kinda a joke these days. Mafia and business leaders (many times one and the same) have practically taken over the government in some districts and there are a number of former KGB and secret service who have been running around homeless and getting snatched up by mafia dons and businesses (again, often times one and the same).
Roger Moore
@stickler:
Russia is a major petroleum exporter, and the Russian government depends on oil and gas exports for both money and political power. They have even more reason than American Big Oil to want to discredit AGW. If oil and gas crater, Big Oil execs will lose their cushy jobs and have to live on their accumulated wealth. Russian leaders are worried about their heads winding up on pikes.
DBrown
@GregB: Oh, that was good. Shades of GRU?
Grumpy Code Monkey
@dmsilev:
She also has to have a name that either serves as a sexual entendre (Pussy Galore) or is otherwise ludicrous (Christmas Jones).
@BlizzardOfOz:
Then here’s a novel suggestion; take the raw data, do your own culling/scaling/integration, build your own models, and compare the results.
You want to see the raw data used by HadCRUT3 and GISTEMP? Go to RealClimate’s Data Sources page and follow the links. Go to the GISTEMP page where they show what data sets they used, how they integrated the different data sets, what points they threw out and why, etc.
Is it “cherry picking” to throw out data points that are bad due to an instrument malfunction? Is it “cherry picking” to throw out an annual mean that’s computed from only two monthly values since the rest of the months are missing?
The denier camp wants to pretend that all the data are locked in some sooper sekrit vault or something, when the truth is most of it is easily available from various sources. I’ve downloaded the GHCN v2 set for myself just to play with (I’m not qualified to do anything beyond a zeroth-level analysis).
Grumpy Code Monkey
Gah, blockquote fail and the edit function refuses to work. Obviously the “Besides, this were a real science…” belongs in the blockquote.
Also, I’m curious; how many of the commentors screaming about “real science” are real scientists?
freelancer
Does this make Andrew Breitbart Nick Nack?
Egypt Steve
I have full confidence that Austin Powers will save the day.
Joel
@BlizzardOfOz: tell me how my ass tastes
BlizzardOfOz
@republic,
I’m referring to the famous “hide the decline” removal of tree-ring data that didn’t match the warming trend.
The level of certainty people claim to have about a hypothesis spanning the entire globe and millions of years is stunning to me.
Martin
Well, I have a good/bad perspective on this.
The good: most research universities have computer security folks that are up to this kind of challenge.
The bad: most research universities are sufficiently administratively broken that the meatspace security will break down WAY, WAY, WAY before the computer stuff, and most faculty would never tolerate the kinds of security measures that would stop this kind of thing – both physical and electronic. Unfortunately, there’s a serious problem of ‘magical thinking’ when it comes to information/security systems among even technical faculty. Somehow information should be easily and perfectly secured while at the same time, nobody’s credentials ever need to be checked because that’s inconvenient and don’t-you-realize-who-I-am?
gwangung
@BlizzardOfOz:
Probably coming from the lack of knowledge about the rest of the supporting data.
You do realize the “hiding” itself is minor? And the tree ring data is only a tiny part of the supporting data?
Comrade Dread
I don’t understand the mentality of ‘conservatives’ at the moment with regards to environmental issues.
Even if you remain skeptical of Climate Change or the worst case scenarios touted around environmentalist camps, aren’t there still some practical steps and policies we could pursue that wouldn’t impact the economy that much and still make a difference?
Or is the ‘conservative’ policy now strictly one of pure consumption?
Bubblegum Tate
@Brian J:
Amazing, isn’t it? And here’s the kicker: That is the starting point of any discussion about climate change with those people. If you don’t begin with the belief that climate change is a worldwide conspiracy to install a one-world government and, I dunno, soshulize the commie Naziism, then you are clearly in on the conspiracy and not to be trusted (or talked to, naturally). It’s pretty remarkable stuff.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Comrade Dread:
There… better… no?
4tehlulz
>Or is the ‘conservative’ policy now strictly one of pure consumption?
No, that would be a principal. “Conservative” means only one thing – trolling liberals, and if it causes untold suffering and undermines national security, those are perfectly acceptable costs in return for being able to say “LOL AL GORE” to any climate change argument.
The Republic of Stupidity
@gwangung:
As I understand it, this hyperbolic claim of “FRAUD!” is based on 10 to 20 sentences deliberately taken out of context from multiple THOUSANDS of stolen emails & documents.
So, I’d hazzard that ‘No, Blizzard doesn’t realize that the “hiding” itself is minor, or care for that matter.
Aw Christianistmass… who cares about ‘data’, or ‘facts’…
The Republic of Stupidity
@BlizzardOfOz:
I notice you prudently avoided the rest of my comment…
Sooooooo… you’re comfortable w/ the opinions of people, like the aptly named Rep Shimkus, who believe God will ‘never devastate man w/ a food again’?
truculent and unreliable
@BlizzardOfOz: Not that you’re arguing in good faith, but go here to see an explanation regarding tree ring data. It’s not about “hiding the decline” because the data don’t support the Great Global Warming Conspiracy–it’s about throwing out data that aren’t accurate.
The Other Steve
Kind of a wild tale, although it’s true Russia has more to gain from climate denial then even the Republican party. Their entire economy is dependent upon oil.
That being said, the concern here is that the emails were true, that they weren’t forgeries.
If climate scientists are going to maintain credibility they’re going to have to start doing their research in a manner which is not shoddy and clumsy. I realize that is outside the norm for a University environment, but too bad.
The Other Steve
@truculent and unreliable: The critics are right though. You don’t just get to throw out measurements that don’t support your hypothesis.
Until you identify why this is happening, it is not a useful dataset.
Seanly
@Wolfdaughter:
Sigh… I’m a civil engineer. I want to bang my head on my desk each time it turns out to be a civil engineer who is leading some psuediscience charge against climate change or is drawing PJ Meyer’s ire.
I’m the only dedicated liberal I know in my field. Granted all of my engineering career has been on the East Coast, but you think there would be more liberals than just me in all the engineers I’ve known in a 20 year career.
There are plenty of socially liberal engineers, but it’s mostly a rock-ribbed conservative field with a smattering of libertarians.
The wife & I want to move to the West Coast next. I can’t imagine what it would be like to not be the odd man out policitally in my office.
The Pale Scot
I haven’t read all the comments yet so I might be repeating but from what I’ve read climate change is all win for the ruskies, they get their eternal quest, a warm water port on the Atlantic, the great swath of barely inhabited land in the middle becomes the world’s new grain belt. That grain can be transported from the new all year ports along the Arctic Circle, and those ports can also be used to transport oil, and the russians would be able to “offer” the middle asia dictatorships outlets for their oil not managed by Iran, europe or the USA. And there are large areas of Russia not yet explored. A warmer Siberia makes exploration harder since you have to slog thru the melting permafrost, but pipelines are easier to run in warm weather.
truculent and unreliable
@The Other Steve: This has been an issue in the community for at least ten years, so “hiding” the data wouldn’t be particularly effective or useful within the scientific community, especially since it’s common practice. Furthermore, tree ring evidence isn’t the only proxy evidence used to determine past temperatures, and it would have been checked up against other proxies and temperature records. If the data are consistent up until a certain point, why throw them out?
Martian Buddy
@Comrade Dread:
Apparently Gingrich has been throwing around the phrase “green conservatism” and people have been talking about changing the GOP’s stance on environmental issues, but I can’t seem to find any evidence that they mean to do anything about it–much like their numberless alternative budget, come to think of it.
pseudonymous in nc
@BlizzardOfOz: A little learning is a dang’rous thing. (And a little pretend learning even more dangerous.)
Of course it was a commissioned hack job; the question is who paid for it.
For all the whining about transparency, I’d like to see denialist flacks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute deny involvement under oath. As someone elseblog noted, not even the tobacco companies tried to shiv cancer researchers.
Let’s just say that NOAA’s security people are pretty damn shit-hot, and they’ve been doing some audits to see whether the leaked stole emails with NOAA addresses match up to what they have on file.
BlizzardOfOz
@truculent,
Okay, so the tree-ring proxy data was thrown out because it doesn’t match more direct temperature measurements. So doesn’t that mean that the tree-ring proxy can’t be used, since it’s inaccurate? Your author doesn’t want to go there, and instead suggests (without evidence) that the tree-ring proxy has “become” inaccurate, possibly “due to global warming itself”. Seems really damned sloppy…
When I think of “real science”, I think of having some understanding of the underlying processes, not just plotting points on a trend line and projecting forward. That’s what science means to Wall Street hacks, and apparently climate “scientists”.
Kelly
BlizzardOfOz,
The tree ring data is one of many lines of proxy measurements. Proxy measurements include, ice core, bore hole temps, stalagmites, pollen buried in sediments and many others. If 9 out of 10 agree for a stretch of time then sensible people go with the 9 that agree. If for a different stretch of time a different 9 out of 10 agree sensible people depend on that 9 out of 10. The arguments over the outliers are fierce and go on for years. The proxy data is a braided rope where the overlapping fibers reinforce the braid at the individual weak spots not a chain where a single failure drops the load.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@The Other Steve:
The data weren’t thrown out because they didn’t support the hypothesis; they were thrown out because they didn’t match up against the direct temperature measurements.
Until we know why the measurements diverge, why shouldn’t we trust the direct measurements over the proxy?
Little Macayla's Friend
From the story:
__
Does it require the resources of a major country’s gov.t security service to hack a university server and get just the e-mail files?
Do cyber thieves charge millions of dollars to steal e-mails?
Hob
Just to get back on topic:
Q has never actually provided James Bond with the technology to allow him to poop rainbows. This raises the frightening possibility that the terrorists will get there first, with or without unicorns – a rainbow-pooping gap.
gwangung
@BlizzardOfOz: Well, I think you may want to rethink about what constitutes evidence and support as far as science is concerned.
Yes, it can be direct linkage between data and hypothesis. It can ALSO be indirect linkage between several dozen data sets and the underlying phenomena–and it’s more often this way in the early formation of a phenomena. If one line wavers, there are several other lines that support the theory (and, of course, direct measurements should properly be given stronger weight than proxies—which is what is occurring in this case).
This is most clearly seen in the case for evolution, where there are thousand, interlocking pieces of evidence that support evolution. The fact that you’re getting usuable evidence and results, which, in turn, gives you further usuable evidence and results, is pretty good evidence that you’re on the right track.
Nutella
Speaking of theft, did you hear that Blagojevich’s lawyers’ office was burgled and computers holding evidence files stolen? Could be just a simple burglary and they’ll turn up at the local pawn shop but you’ve got to wonder what it will do to his court case.