ClimateGate: Addressing the ‘not a hacker’ meme
Image by p373 via Flickr
Since I published my article Friday about the concerted effort of climate change deniers to cover up the criminal origins of the leaked ‘ClimateGate’ e-mails and files, I’ve received quite a few comments that have taken the argument a step further, stating outright that it wasn’t a hacker, but an East Anglia insider who leaked the files as some sort of whistleblower.
This rebuttal has even been picked up by Chris Horner of the climate change-denying Competitive Enterprise Institute in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, showing that beyond covering up the criminal act of hacking that resulted in the release of the Climate Research Unit’s files, ‘ClimateGate’ warriors are now taking to mainstream media outlets to fight back against the idea that an act of crime is the source of their evidentiary bounty.
Of course, climate change deniers have a clear interest in portraying their source as Woodward and Bernstein’s ‘Deep Throat’ rather than Richard Nixon’s Plumbers. If their treasure trove of e-mails and files comes from a criminal action, and perhaps a criminal conspiracy, it casts a heavy, looming shadow over their efforts to pillory the climatologists implicated. More than anything, it will suggest that the climate change deniers are so desperate to make their case that they had to rely on a possible criminal conspiracy in order to prompt a thorough-going investigation of the science behind the theory of anthropogenic climate change. And that’s not how they want to be remembered.
Before I discuss the theorizing that it wasn’t a hacker, let’s first look at the evidence that it was a crime that led to the e-mails being leaked online.
First, the University of East Anglia has stated that they were hacked. In a statement published on the university’s website, Trevor Davies, the universities ‘pro-vice-chancellor for research,’ and a climatologist himself, discussed the computer security failure that resulted in the e-mails getting out:
Given the degree to which we collaborate with other organisations around the world, there is also an understandable interest in the computer security systems we have in place in CRU and UEA. Although we were confident that our systems were appropriate, experience has shown that determined and skilled people, who are prepared to engage in criminal activity, can sometimes hack into apparently secure systems. Highly-protected government organisations around the world have also learned this to their cost.
via CRU climate data already ‘over 95%’ available (28 November) – University of East Anglia (UEA).
True, not a blunt statement that “we were hacked.” But if East Anglia didn’t want it known they were hacked, they would not have mentioned it at all in their statement on the subject as subsequent proof that the release of the file came from a whistleblower would put them back on the defensive.
Furthermore, shortly after the file was widely publicized, UEA released the following statement:
A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: ‘We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites.
‘Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.
‘This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.
‘We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this inquiry.’
If a crime did not occur, East Anglia would not involve the British police. And if they hadn’t identified the work of a cyber criminal, rather than some pissed-off insider, they wouldn’t be speaking of a specific server where the files and e-mails were hosted.
Beyond the Climate Research Unit and the University of East Anglia’s statements, there is Senator Jim Inhofe who has been bellowing for an investigation of the ClimateGate files (an investigation I support, subject to some previously stated conditions). In spite of Senator Inhofe’s earlier sly praise for the timing of the hackers who stole the East Anglia files, he released the following statement about his proposed investigation:
I certainly don’t condone the manner in which these emails were released; however, now that they are in the public domain, lawmakers have an obligation to determine the extent to which the so-called ‘consensus’ of global warming, formed with billions of taxpayer dollars, was contrived in the biased minds of the world’s leading climate scientists.
It would seem even Senator Inhofe is ready to acknowledge that there’s something unseemly about the way the CRU files came to light. If there was any possibility that East Anglia leak was the work of a disconsolate whistleblower, Senator Inhofe would not be hedging his bets. Instead he would be calling for the protection of the rights of a whistleblower he believes revealed a fraud.
Moving on, a variety of bloggers have implied that there is reason to believe that someone other than a hacker was involved in securing and leaking the files.
Take Terry Hurlbut, one of the hordes of ‘citizen journalists’ in the Examiner.com network. Hurlbut offers speculation that the behavior involved in releasing the files is not the work of a hacker:
The anonymous tipster, whom many people initially assumed had “hacked” into the computers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (repeatedly called the “Hadley CRU,” by mistake), might in fact be a CRU insider who released the files for his own reasons.
The user, known only as “FOIA” (which now appears to be a reference to the British equivalent of the US Freedom of Information Act), left only one comment on The Air Vent to announce his release of his 61-MB ZIP archive. He has never been heard from since, nor has anyone stepped forward claiming to be that person since the story became widely known.
Persons knowledgeable in information security hold that this is not the behavior of a hacker. A hacker normally boasts of his act, even if he were hired or otherwise suborned to commit his act by someone else. These two reports provide illustrations of such behavior.
[...]
In all that time, the original poster of the Russian FTP link never made another comment in any forum. As discussed above, this is not typical of a hacker. A hacker would be boasting about his act, and loudly. Instead, his file sat in that anonymous FTP account for more than forty-eight hours, and the poster never made any further attempt to publicize his find. Hence the conclusion, by this Examiner and a host of other commenters, including IP security professionals, that this unknown user was one who had had access to CRU computers, in accordance with his duties at the CRU.
The attempted claim here is that the hacker hasn’t boasted about the job, and all hackers boast, so he or she does not exist. Of course, there is a clear difference here between the cases Hurlbut cites – the teenager who hacked Sarah Palin’s private e-mail account for fun, and Russian hackers who make a living off of credit card fraud – and cyber criminals who are acting like Richard Nixon’s ‘Plumbers.’ If you’re a Plumber, your client has an expectation of your discretion, so I wouldn’t be shocked if the hacker in question kept his or her mouth shut. Hurlbut is otherwise referring to ‘IP security professionals,’ but he doesn’t cite any who have commented on the East Anglia files in particular. If they are ‘IP security professionals’ who already deny the existence of global climate change, their professional opinion is certainly colored by their political viewpoint, which is of course why we need an independent investigation of this affair.
Beyond Hurlbut’s ‘no boast, no hack’ theory, he and others have suggested that the file was too well organized to have been put together by a hacker:
Other commenters have observed that the very form and organization of the archive, which expands to 168 MB of text files, word-processing documents, PDF files, raw data, and even program code, indicate that someone already having access to the system logged in through his usual channels, made the archive, and then logged out. The user’s choice of words indicate someone having a motive to disclose to the world certain activities and mindsets that the user found distasteful, at least.
Kevin Grandia, not a climate change denier, offered a similar perspective:
The folder of information contains over 3,800 separate files and it is clear that someone has taken a lot of time to pull together what they thought would be the most damaging. This is not the work of a hacker, unless that hacker is extremely well-versed in climate science, and specifically the conspiracy theories of the climate denial movement.
This package of stolen data and emails would have taken hundreds of hours to compile and someone out there knows exactly how all this went down.
What both of these statements fail to take into account is the possibility that the data and e-mails could have been hacked by one person, and sorted and compiled by another or others who knew his or her way around the debate. It’s also kind of funny that as a digital mob gets together to crowdsource their way through these files, they can’t imagine that some enterprising cabal working in concert with a hacker wouldn’t already have done the same thing.
Honestly, I don’t know, and I’m not afraid to say so. After all, if Hurlbut is relying on the word of ‘IP security professionals,’ can’t they examine the file and state unequivocally that the files were all pieced together in a manner consistent with their theory? As long as we’re in the world of speculation, it’s worth pointing out that there are credible alternative explanations to why the ‘FOI2009.zip’ file looked the way it did.
There is one last remaining theory, offered up at ‘Watts Up With That’, another blog that denies the existence of anthropogenic climate change. ‘Charles the moderator’ argues that it was neither a hacker, nor a whistleblower who released the file. Rather, someone mistakenly posted to an open server an attempt to comply with a known Freedom of Information claim filed by the Climate Audit blog:
It would take a hacker massive amounts of work to parse through decades of emails and files but stealing or acquiring a single file is a distinct possibility and does not require massive conspiracy. The same constraints of time and effort would apply to any internal whistle blower. However, an ongoing process of internally collating this information for an FOI response is entirely consistent with what we find in the file.
In the past I have worked at organizations where the computer network grew organically in a disorganized fashion over time. Security policies often fail as users take advantage of shortcuts to simplify their day to day activities. One of these shortcuts is to share files using an FTP server. Casual shortcuts in these instances may lead to gaping security holes. This is not necessarily intentional, but a consequence of human nature to take a shortcut here and there. This casual internal sharing can also lead to unintentional sharing of files with the rest of the Internet as noted in the Phil Jones, CRU mole, example above. Often the FTP server for an organization may also be the organization’s external web server as the two functions are often combined on the same CPU or hardware box. When this occurs, if the organization does not lock down their network thoroughly, the security breaches which could happen by accident are far more likely to occur.
While it’s rather substantial leap to believe that the file had been aggregated just so by East Anglia staff so they could quickly distribute a variety of self-incriminating e-mails on the world, I won’t dismiss outright that there could have been an FOI file. But, if Charles is right, and there was a hole in CRU’s information security protocols, I don’t understand why this makes it any less of a malignant act. If someone was sitting on CRU’s servers waiting for an opportunity to strike, they sound a lot like a hacker to me, even if the law wouldn’t ultimately find them to be criminals. And knowing, as we do, that someone was sending BBC reporter Paul Hudson privileged e-mails in October makes it sound like someone was inside CRU’s servers prior to the November denial of the FOI appeal.
But the theory offered up by Charles of Watts Up With That isn’t one that’s being endorsed by the climate change denial movement. They’re stuck on the idea that some brave East Anglia Deep Throat just couldn’t take it anymore, and blew the whistle. They need that, because some anonymous soul snooping on some climatologists’ servers just doesn’t sound very good.
And it’s worth keeping in mind that if UEA is housing a whistleblower, that person has a legal framework in Britain that protects them for revealing fraud, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. More than that, much as Daniel Ellsberg first went to Members of Congress with the Pentagon Papers, or Sgt. Joe Darby went to the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division in order to blow the whistle on abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib, a theoretical UEA whistleblower could have gone to university officials, Conservative MPs in England, or even to someone like Senator Jim Inhofe in the United States. Instead we know that someone anonymously seeded a file with lots of e-mails and files on the websites of both climate change believers, and climate change deniers those who debate the scientific consensus on climate change. We also know that a BBC reporter had received some of the e-mails in question in October, and hadn’t done anything with them. It sounds like someone was on a fishing expedition, and finally found a shallow pool – the Air Vent – in which to drop their bait.
I’m ready to admit that I was wrong if evidence comes out to the contrary. You will see a blog post in this space if it turns out that way. But for the moment, it’s difficult to question that some people who have a lot to gain from denying the science of anthropogenic climate change also have a lot to gain from seeing their efforts buoyed by a whistleblower rather than a hacker. And it’s a little suspicious how many of them are getting sensitive about the leak being called a hack, and not an act of conscience.
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Dear Mikie,
Please change the climate denial listing of the Air Vent as I or anyone else who has ever guest posted on my blog has ever denied climate change anthropogenic or otherwise as we all believe in it.
Besides that, the article is a bunch of hack drivel. Study the science before you report. — How useless is that statement
Jeff
jeffid
Dear Mikie,
Please change the climate denial listing of the Air Vent as I or anyone else who has ever guest posted on my blog has never denied climate change anthropogenic or otherwise as we all believe in it.
Besides that, the article is a bunch of hack drivel. Study the science before you report. — How useless is that statement
Jeff
Hi Jeff. It’s Michael, not ‘Mikie,’ and having a father named Jeff, I’ll be kind enough not to respond by calling you ‘Jeffie’ cuz I know how much he hates that.
Anyway, I’m not reporting on science – I’m reporting on an act I believe to have been criminal, and its political usage. But thanks for your civil and courteous statement that what I wrote is ‘hack drivel.’ I’m happy to see you like making a good first impression.
How would you like me to refer to your blog? A blog that questions the scientific consensus on the theory of anthropogenic climate change? A blog questioning climate science? A blog about climate science? I’d be happy to take a more specific alternative under consideration.
And while I’ve got your attention, I’d love to ask you another question: If an investigation by the US Congress or federal law enforcement were to seek the e-mail address used by the ‘FOIA’ commenter on your site, or any other data related to the comment saved on your servers, would you share it with them? Thank you.
In response to another comment. See in context »Mike, two wrongs do not make it right in justifying your matrix. As an honest person yourself, how can you justify the manipulation, fraud and erasing of all data that will be used in the transfer of the greatest amount of wealth in human history from one country to another?
If you want to understand the real reason this entire hoax has been implemented, I suggest strongly, you research Maurice Strong and watch this film on the entire events that is now unfolding right before your eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8LPNRI_6T8
In response to another comment. See in context »romaneagle, in this blog post and my previous entry on ‘ClimateGate,’ I call for an investigation. I just think that if the ‘leak’ was the result of a crime, it’s going to create trouble for all the triumphalists who think they’ve finally found evidence that this is climate change is a hoax. So I’m not saying that two wrongs make a right. If climatologists are proved to have broken the law, they should be suitably punished.
In response to another comment. See in context »An easy explanation of what ClimateGate means,
ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.
ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views, and then sat on the IPCC panels as authors judging which published studies go into the IPCC final reports. This is why they always keep shouting “peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies”. They owned the peer review process.
ClimateGate exposed that this small group has been adding positive corrections to the raw global temperature data, inflating the amount of published temperature rise over the last 50 years. Both CRU in the UK and NASA-GISS in the US add these biases. At CRU, the programmers did not even know what and why some corrections were added every month. Only since satellite monitoring for comparison have the amounts of biasing leveled off.
ClimateGate exposed the leaders of this cabal instructing each other to delete emails, data files, and data analysis programs ahead of already filed Freedom Of Information Act requests for raw data and computer codes, clearly a crime.
ClimateGate exposed the “trick” about the Hockey stick figure and other studies that performed proxy construction of past temperatures. After all, reconstruction of the last 1,000 years of climate is the first step in predicting the future with super computer programs as explained below:
Everything about all 21 super computer programs used by the IPCC to determine future global warming rely on best-determined past sensitivities to solar and volcanic effects (climate forcings) from the proxy temperature record.
1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved.
2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas effect coefficient in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.
3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.
4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.
5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.)
So shut-up or be called a denier,
live the way we tell you to live,
pay more for everything, and
just send money for my research on the effects of global climate change on horseshoe crabs (which have been around for about 440 million years through all possible temperature ranges).
I hope that this makes the ClimateGate controversy easier to understand.
My oh my, nucengineer, it looks like you need your own blog.
In response to another comment. See in context »So, just what does the uncorrupted data say?
First, there is the temperature for the last 11 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2001.5/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/offset:-0.15/plot/gistemp/from:1998/offset:-0.24/plot/uah/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998
Then, there is the sea level change over the last 14 years, which does not look like the rate is increasing (by the way, 3.1 mm/year is less than 1-foot per century):
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_global.pdf
Then, there is sea ice (Global) over the last 30 years which is huge compared to some small ice shelf:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
And by the way, once the CLOUD experiments at the CERN get going in the next months, we will learn the real coefficients for solar influences on climate (and I do not mean irradience alone):
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1180849
I have already shared the FULL HEADER info with the scientists and had emailed them asking if they wanted the IP address and all header info prior to them even asking. If you ask nice, I’ll give them to you as well.
Sorry about the grumpy comment, I’m tired of the media missing the salient points as I have clearly explained several times at my blog. Seeing tAV reported as a denialist site was a bit too much and it has become tiresome.
So your report is either another slanted leftist view of the situation or it’s simply ignorant of the facts.
What say you, leftist or realist.
Don’t know what happened. I always save comments to new blogs though so let’s try again.
I have already shared the FULL HEADER info with the scientists and had emailed them asking if they wanted the IP address and all header info prior to them even asking. If you ask nice, I’ll give them to you as well.
Sorry about the grumpy comment, I’m tired of the media missing the salient points as I have clearly explained several times at my blog. Seeing tAV reported as a denialist site was a bit too much and it has become tiresome.
So your report is either another slanted leftist view of the situation or it’s simply ignorant of the facts.
What say you, leftist or realist.
Thanks Jeff, but I’ll leave it to people who are actually investigating this subject as part of a legitimate investigation, when/if it happens. I hope it will.
I’ll call The Air Vent a website that debates the existing consensus around climate change – I try my best to be fair.
In response to another comment. See in context »BTW, believing in the fact that CO2 captures more energy -i.e. anthropogenic global warming, is not the same as believing it’s detectable, as large as the IPCC says or whether it’s disastrous. It just means that the effect is real. The other conclusions have lot’s of room for debate.
What a crybaby. If someone did the same thing to Phillip Morris leaking E mails saying how to manipulate the data to show cigarettes don’t cause cancer and how to keep scientist who disagree with them from being published you would call the hacker a hero. What a hypocrite
I addressed this on my previous blog post, and in this one. A whistleblower has protections under English law. Why not avail yourself of them if you’re the whistleblower? Probably because you’re not a whistleblower – you’re a cyber criminal.
In response to another comment. See in context »In this country, the United Kingdom, it is a very serious criminal offence to destroy data that has a pending freedom of information request.
Same as in America. The actions of all involved including Al Gore must be presented to Grand Jury’s for possible criminal intent and collusion. If cause is found, then prosecution at the world court must begin at once. Charges shall include criminal racketeering and economic crimes against humanity.
Scientist’s involve in ANY wrong doing shall also be banned for life in any scientific, research or University positions.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] ClimateGate: Addressing the ‘Not a Hacker’ Meme [...]
[...] ClimateGate: Addressing the ‘Not a Hacker’ Meme [...]
Early in my career, I worked at Congressional Quarterly, a publication that sets a high standard for objective reporting. I watched some supremely intelligent reporters struggle above their biases to remain objective. After that I worked for a congressman (who is now a senator). Then I moved on to technology work, work that often has me performing statistical investigations. So I have some first hand experience with 1) journalism, 2) politics, 3) science. When it comes to the CRU matter, I have not only read the emails, I have read some of the code, looked at some of the data, and even run some R programs to explore some of the claims. I am politically independent and I tend to make informed decisions.
I want to say this in an honest way that encourages introspection (there is no need to publish this comment and it is not meant to be mean-spirited). This is my honest reaction. I felt your stories were journalistic, political and scientific failures. It seems like you took an obvious political bias to the story and you did not overcome that bias. If you understand the scientific significance of the emails, you did a good job keeping it out of the story. The political bent requires no commentary.
Feel free to dismiss me as an ignorant crank. But also feel free to let my words haunt your sense of editorial responsibility. Because maybe, just maybe, I am an informed, intelligent, and politically independent reader . . . the type of reader a good journalist hopes to reach and inform.
Thanks for the feedback Kavustock, but I think you’re not giving me enough credit here. I *do* understand the scientific relevance of the stolen file. I think the matter should be investigated, here and in the UK, by credible, independent authorities. But I am troubled by the effort on the part of the propagators of this story to cover up the crime that resulted in their bounty. More than that, a US Senator at the center of the anti-climate science movement shouldn’t be praising the timing of whoever posted the e-mails and then saying in his next breath that he doesn’t condone the way the files came out.
Doesn’t that trouble you, too? If not, why not?
In response to another comment. See in context »The following are the qualifying disclosures protected by the U.K Public Disclosure Act 1998
A criminal offence
Failure to comply with legal obligations
A miscarriage of justice
Danger to health or safety of any individual
Any damage to the environment
An attempt to cover up information that would provide evidence that any of these five practices occurred
Uncanny isn’t it?
Uncanny, indeed alexgregor. So if this person is a ‘whistleblower,’ why try to post the file on 3 or more websites? Because they’re probably not a whistleblower.
In response to another comment. See in context »“But I am troubled by the effort on the part of the propagators of this story to cover up the crime that resulted in their bounty.”
I think there is substantial evidence that this was a whistleblower’s act. The emails were sorted according to FOIA requests of the past, header info was removed as well as emails which could not be related in some way to FOIA. This does not mean it couldn’t have been a hacker or a misplaced group of files. My little “shallow pool” blog gets about 10k visitors a day, many of them climate scientists themselves.
The investigation which you should be calling for is the collusion with government to cover up data. The collusion between scientists to game the process of peer review. The collusion between scientists to present data as continually warming in the face of evidence to the contrary.
We don’t need independent review to know what happened. It’s right in front of us, it is in context and it ain’t too good.
The problem, Jeff, is that you’re prejudging the outcome. If ‘ClimateGate’ is as serious as you’re alleging, than it rises to the kind of controversy set off by the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the recent financial crisis. And we more effectively go forward from such incidents when we have an entity like the 9/11 Commission investigating all aspects of the controversy, not just the ones that are convenient to anyone’s individual political outlook.
Unless of course you’ve already made up your mind, and don’t care for any truth-finding by independent investigators because you can’t stand the prospect that you’ll face refutations of elements of your perspective. Believing that the many of the IPCC’s findings are accurate, I welcome that kind of scrutiny.
In response to another comment. See in context »Mike, you are a intelligent person. Do you really think there will be a honest investergation in all of this? You use 9/11 as a example. Why? It was corrupt, slanted and had the fix put in before it even started. There are far to many powerful people that would be facing life in jail if the truth was ever exposed.
Here are but a few comments from the commission members themselves on how “fair and getting to the truth”, that investergation was.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02kean.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html?sub=new
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/02/9-11panel.pentagon/index.html
In response to another comment. See in context »Mike, Hacked or whistleblower, it does not matter. If this was not EXPOSED the extend of the fraud would never have been known. As far as it is a done deal about global warming. There are 31,000 scientists around the world with over 9,000 that say is not “a done deal”.
People who believe a cabal of 200 hand picked and political group making up the IPCC should be the final word in this matter is beyond belief and quite frankly outrageous.
Now we find out they have “dumped” AKA destroyed the original data in their models. Whoever leaked this data deserves the NOBLE PRIZE in saving humanity from the biggest con job in history. At least with Ponzi you did get a little return on your investments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition
http://www.petitionproject.org/
The problem Mike is that you want to pretend that reasonable people need a board of selected individuals to think. Of course I’ve decided the meaning of hide the decline, as can any reasonable person not trying to protect these guys.
In my case I already am familiar with the science discussed and I am familiar with the FOIA requests, and I am familiar with the datasets and Briffa MXD latewood density data and temperature adjustments. I’m familiar with Ben Santers paper, Steve McIntyres papers and Mann’s work. I’ve read lots of Briffa papers and Jones papers and have worked the data myself on many of these and have published at my tiny little blog.
While I agree that an investigation is required, there is little hope of unbiasedness as there is too much money at stake.
What I fail to understand is why the heck would we need someone with their own agenda to pick a group of people with their own agenda to think for us? The truth is right there in front of our eyes.
Were the emails hacked or leaked? Let’s apply Occam’s Razor to this question.
(1) The files are not a simple “data dump,” but have been selected and organized by some human.
(2) A “freedom of information” request had been filed, and the CRU was under a legal obligation to respond to it.
(3) When a FOIA is filed, somebody assembles the data that has been requested so that the lawyers can review it BEFORE they decide whether to fight the request or comply with it. Therefore, CRU should have assembled a dataset.
(4) The dataset that has been released seems to be (a) assembled by someone with time and access to a lot of different files, (b) responsive to a FOIA request, and (c) VERY damaging to CRU’s reputation.
So: CRU should have assembled a dataset much like the one that has been released before they denied the FOIA request. Occam’s Razor says there was ONE actor who gathered the files, not two.
That doesn’t tell us whether the files were released by a whistleblower or by a criminal. But it does strongly suggest that we’ve got the FOIA files, not a random hack.
That’s a fair point, and I agree that it could be true in the post. Still, I have to wonder if there was *some* cherry-picking done by whoever released the file with the e-mail half of it. A lot of those e-mails seem almost too good to be true if you’ve got it out for the climatologists who contributed to the IPCC.
This is why a formal investigation of this matter, in addition to how the e-mails relate to the science, would be a good thing. Adding onto this comment a reply to Jeff and romaneagle, it worries me that so many people are content to leave the whole case of the CRU e-mails to crowdsourcing. All it does is feed the polarization over the issue. Climate believers say “Nuh uh” when confronted with them, and climate deniers/doubters/debaters say, “Uh huh.” This is fundamentally a question about truth, and that’s why a reasonably independent fact-finding commission should investigate it.
In response to another comment. See in context »Mike it does not matter. They are using a false paradigm in all of this trying to take some of the collusion out of the matter. Look at any other “whistle blower or leaked email event”.
The main questions have always been focused on the facts of the leak. Watergate, Pentagon Papers and CIA torture just to name a few.
As far as a independent investergation. It will never happen. Look who is in charge. What a joke. You are seeing the beginning of whitewashing the entire event.
The two biggest questions that all media seem to be sidestepping (yourself included) are these. The IPCC is basing all its conclusions on data manipulation by these scientists. The orginal raw data has been “dumped or destroyed”. That in itself should be a red flag to anyone with integerty in this matter. So we now have massaged data to go on. Their massaged data with no way of reverse engineering it.
Second and more frighting is the computer code they used to falsify and plug in any varible they wanted too, to get the RESULTS they wanted. You do not find that strange?
I have included two links with a breakdown of some the code along with the programmers comments. That is where the real focus should be. Not the spin of who leaked the info.
Just to show you what frauds they really are. This is what Einstein says about science. “Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be, and beyond its realm.” These fools can not even get next weekends weather correct. Look at their hurricane predictions for this past season. LOL.
Here are the links to the corrupt code they have used in their models.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/
http://cubeantics.com/2009/12/the-proof-behind-the-cru-climategate-debacle-because-computers-do-lie-when-humans-tell-them-to/
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] ClimateGate: Addressing the ‘Not a Hacker’ Meme [...]
As I attempted to point out. I am very familiar with the majority of the science in the emails. An independent fact finding commission is a worthwhile endeavor (as stated above) but it is unlikely to reveal a reasonable result.
As to the crowdsourcing comment, again I say study the science just a little the answer becomes a heck of a lot clearer.
Figure out what is a temperature proxy, how are they verified, why would it decline? That should really be enough context to get the job done.
[...] I’m ready to admit that I was wrong if evidence comes out to the contrary. You will see a blog post in this space if it turns out that way. But for the moment, it’s difficult to question that some people who have a lot to gain from denying the science of anthropogenic climate change also have a lot to gain from seeing their efforts buoyed by a whistleblower rather than a hacker. And it’s a little suspicious how many of them are getting sensitive about the leak being called a hack, and not an act of conscience. via trueslant.com [...]
[...] Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who denies not only climate change but that a hacker broke into CRU’s systems, is readying a lawsuit against NASA for not complying with a FOIA request rapidly enough for his [...]
A CRU whistleblower would only have been trying to “out” a few ethically-challenged scientists, not dismiss AGW altogether. The original post from FOIA leaves the reader in no doubt. Their disdain is obvious. For me, that puts them squarely at the denialist end of the scale.
Everything else (false starts, missed opportunities and general lack of flair) seems, on the face of it, to point not so much to a well-organised group of professional cyber-criminals, but more to one or two individuals, unschooled in the finer arts of propaganda and quite possibly engaged in their first attempt at this sort of thing.
But don’t let that fool you. Such an amateurish approach could easily be faked, as part of a smokescreen to obscure the real power and money behind it all.
Granted, if you’re going to be that sneaky, you could just as easily have gone a step further and pretended right from the start to be a genuine braveheart whistleblower. Done convincingly enough, that could have shifted a significant chunk of support away from the AGW lobby. But they didn’t.
Another missed opportunity?
Well, no, not really. Actually just another piece of supreme double-think, and therefore further proof of the invisible hand of Big Oil.