So they cooked the science....

[Axle]

Hacked global warming e-mails ? what?s new?
By Judy Lowe | 11.24.09
(Note: We?re keeping this story updated as new developments unfold.)

When the news broke that ?more than 169 megabytes worth of global-warming emails and related files were either hacked and/or leaked from computers at the University of East Anglia?s Climatic Research Center in Britain and released to the world via the Internet,? as the Monitor?s Pete Spotts wrote, some reactions were to be expected:

Skeptics of global warming were jubilant because they say the e-mails prove that human-caused global warming is false, a fraud perpetrated by scientists.

Supporters countered that statements from the e-mails were taken out of context.
But several days later, the story is still unfolding in several ways. ClimateWire?s Lauren Morello has an update of the whole issue, which includes a number of interviews.

Also in the news:
? ?Congressional Republicans have started investigating climate scientists whose hacked emails suggest they tried to squelch dissenting views about global warming,? reports The Wall Street Journal.

? Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) announced that he would probe whether the UN?s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ?cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.?

? In Britain, former chancellor Lord Lawson, a global warming skeptic, called for an inquiry into data ?manipulation? about global warming, as a result of the e-mails.

? Climate scientist geochemist Thomas Crowley, a professor of geosciences and director of the Scottish Alliance for Geosciences and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, criticizes skeptics and the press in an e-mail interview with The Washington Post?s Andrew Freedman.

? Professor Phil Jones Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, says that charges of conspiracy over climate change are ?rubbish,? reports the Guardian.

? Security experts say the hack could lead to future attacks, reports ChannelWeb, which adds that there could be ?? more malicious attacks down the road, as hackers use cybercrime to further political agenda.? Also, the individuals whose e-mails were exposed now have some of their private information in the public domain and could be subject to phishing or worse.

? The University of East Anglia. which had been criticized for its tepid response to the extensive e-mail theft, announced that plans to launch a review of the incident.

? In an analysis of the impact the e-mails might have on the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and on a possible US climate bill, Reuters says they aren?t the game-changer that skeptics hope.

? But many think that the credibility of climate scientists and climate science have been damaged.
In any case, the issue doesn?t seem likely to disappear quickly. And we?ll keep following it.

Editor?s note: For articles about the environment, see the Monitor?s main environment page, which offers information on many topics. Also, check out our Bright Green blog archive and our RSS feed

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/11/24/hacked-global-warming-e-mails-–-whats-new/

 

[DOGS THAT BARK]

more interesting is lack of coverage from mainstream media--

NYT finally came out with this--but they have had no prob leaking miltary data in past --

The New York Times argues: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won?t be posted here." -- :SIB

--and looks like CBS finally out after about a week--

November 24, 2009 11:40 AM
Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails


Posted by Declan McCullagh <!-- sphereit start -->

(AP)​

A few days after leaked e-mail messages appeared on the Internet, the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change.

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not," according to a transcript of a radio interview posted on his Web site. Aides for Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, are also looking into the disclosure.

The leaked documents (see our previous coverage) come from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in eastern England. In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: it claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report. That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Last week's leaked e-mails range from innocuous to embarrassing and, critics believe, scandalous. They show that some of the field's most prominent scientists were so wedded to theories of man-made global warming that they ridiculed dissenters who asked for copies of their data ("have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots"), cheered the deaths of skeptical journalists, and plotted how to keep researchers who reached different conclusions from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

One e-mail message, apparently from CRU director Phil Jones, references the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act when asking another researcher to delete correspondence that might be disclosed in response to public records law: "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise." Another, also apparently from Jones: global warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone." (Jones was a contributing author to the chapter of the U.N.'s IPCC report titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.")


In addition to e-mail messages, the roughly 3,600 leaked documents posted on sites including Wikileaks.org and EastAngliaEmails.com include computer code and a description of how an unfortunate programmer named "Harry" -- possibly the CRU's Ian "Harry" Harris -- was tasked with resuscitating and updating a key temperature database that proved to be problematic. Some excerpts from what appear to be his notes, emphasis added:

I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.​

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!​

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up ? but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!​

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.​

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...​

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU's code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU's climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: "I feel for this guy. He's obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources."

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"

It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

For its part, the University of East Anglia has posted a statement calling the disclosure "mischievous" and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.

The statement also quotes Jones, CRU's director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Jones said that the word trick was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do" and that it "is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward."

Also unclear is the ultimate impact of the leak, which came before next month's Copenhagen summit and Democratic plans for cap and trade legislation.

On one hand, over at RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, a modeler for the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been downplaying the leak. Schmidt wrote: "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research ... no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."

On the other, groups like the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, the target of repeated derision in the leaked e-mails, have said: "We have argued for many years that much of the scientific case for global warming alarmism was weak and some of it was phony. It now looks like a lot of it may be phony."

ScienceMag.org published an article noting that deleting e-mail messages to hide them from a FOI request is a crime in the United Kingdom. George Monbiot, a U.K. activist and journalist who previously called for dramatic action to deal with global warming, wrote: "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging."

Complicating matters for congressional Republicans who'd like to hold hearings is that East Anglia, of course, is a U.K. university. The GOP may intend to press the Obama administration for details on how the EPA came to rely on the CRU's predictions, and whether the recent disclosure will change the agency's position. Another approach lies in e-mail messages discussing grants from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to East Anglia; one says: "We need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious."

The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way.

 

[ferdville]

There were far too many credible scientists debunking global warming for reasonable doubt. Most of you were probably not around buyt in 1975 TIME magazine ran a front page story about the next climate change - an Ice Age! Don't want to rehas old arguments, but this is an interesting development. Personally, I'm not a big fan of computer projections in the distant future. Weatherman aren't accurate predicting tomorrow's weather. But admittedly a layman in the area. I'm sure both sides of the coin have reasonable arguments.

 

[Chadman]

I've never really felt global warming was a dependable kind of problem, but I do think man-made problems are a problem for our planet, and our environment. And the U.S. is a prime offender. To dismiss the effects of man based on the global warming issue misses the point, I think.

Although for those that argue only for global warming, you get what you get, I guess.

I wonder how many of these senators and groups would be concerned if their own computer systems had been hacked, and their own personal e-mails and info had been released? Do you think they'd be more concerned about the issues or their personal info being hacked?

And Dick Cheney? He'd be concerned enough to lose the entire computer system... :mj07:

 

[gardenweasel]

i know we`re all willing to sacrifice for the greater good....we all want to bow at the feet of gaia...

SO EVERYBODY TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTERS NOW!!!!!...

lol

politics trumps everything...it`s very sad that we can no longer even trust our scientists...

even if agw was real(or even half as bad as it`s proponents claim),i`m pretty sure it doesn`t stop at the border.....g.l. getting emerging economies like china and india(and russia) on board with this boondoggle....they aren`t ready to cut their own throats..

there are so many other issues that are so much more important,that it`s ludicrous to even consider hampering an economy already on life support with laws,regulations and limitations......

 

[DOGS THAT BARK]

Not so sure it was hacker now--many think it was whistle blower. It will get interesting before its over--

This video cracks me up


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk&feature=player_embedded