

CRU Admits to Dumping Raw Climate Data - mnemonicsloth
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

======
electromagnetic
So to put it another way, these 'scientists' purposely made their data
unverifiable and thus non-scientific. IMO any adjusted or modified data is
unscientific without the original data set and how and why the data was
modified the way it was.

If you adjust data to normalise it due to the differing global climatic
effects of El Nino or La Nina then that's perfectly reasonable, if someone can
corroborate what you did and if you did it right. However with no original
data set, and apparently no mention of how or why the data was modified the
way it was leaves it completely unverifiable and might as well be entirely
fabricated.

~~~
thras
No, no. I agree with you that we need to hold them over the fire on this. But
_"purposely"_ is going too far.

The best explanation, until proven otherwise, is that somebody goofed.

~~~
randallsquared
Yeah, "goofed" by sending emails that talk about a plan to delete data rather
than turn it over. ;)

~~~
Anechoic
Were there emails that actually talked about deleting _data_? I've seen the
emails that talked about deleting emails, but not raw data.

~~~
patio11
1107454306.txt

Professor Jones: _Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he
documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on
ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [Patrick notes:
he is referring to McIntyre and McKitrick] 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._

~~~
Tichy
Why did they not want to give away the data?

~~~
protomyth
Well, if a group has your original source data, they can try to reproduce your
results and/or challenge your process. I gather that the results are not
likely to stand up to scrutiny.

~~~
Tichy
That seems kind of weird - if they don't show the data, they might as well not
bother with collecting data at all. They could just make it all up.

Why then, would they bother to mail it around, as they did in the quoted
email?

I suspect there are some other reasons.

~~~
randallsquared
It would be harder for the scientists to justify making it up to themselves. I
assume none of them set out to do bad science when they started investigating
climate.

~~~
Tichy
Sorry I don't think this makes sense. Personally I'll just wait to see how the
story unfolds.

This makes me glad again that there is some kind of legal system in most
civilized countries. So many people seem to be ready to form a lynch mob at
short notice.

~~~
CamperBob
Judging from the sheer volume of replies you've made to every HN thread on the
subject, one has to wonder if you have a dog in the fight.

~~~
Tichy
Just a case of <http://xkcd.com/386/> , Mr Holmes

I don't know any of the people involved, but I really despise lynch mobs.
Still, I know I shouldn't bother with this.

------
ars
"Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a
threat to humanity."

So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence based
on unreleased data is worthless.

If I can't reproduce your work, you are a crackpot (isn't that the definition
of junk science?) I can't reproduce their work, so they are crackpots. (Or
deliberate frauds.)

Did they even record their methodology on how they adjusted the numbers? Maybe
we can undo that methodology?

If they didn't record even that, then they are incompetent. And I see no
reason to pay attention to incompetents.

What if someone made a simple arithmetic error? Without the raw data, and the
methodology of adjustment how could we ever know?

Their conclusions are worthless, and unless there are others (are there?),
then there is no evidence the earth is warming.

~~~
chez17
"So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence
based on unreleased data is worthless."

Unfortunately this is true. As someone who has never doubted that global
warming was man made (yes, those last leaked emails were private conversations
and held no smoking gun whatsoever. People were reading into one term used ten
years ago to sex up a graph), this is embarrassing. This, more than any other
thing has made me reconsider my views.

The problem is that glaciers and polar ice are melting at unprecedented rates,
this is unarguable. The earth is getting warming in those areas and it is
effecting the sea levels and biodiversity of the planet. How do we tell if
it's man made? What can we do to stop it? Remember this doesn't prove that
global warming isn't real.

~~~
timr
No, it's not even remotely close to true.

What happened here? They threw away their copy of the _raw_ data. That data
still exists (they gathered it from public repositories), and the methods of
the paper describe what they did. You could reconstruct the results.

Essentially, the "skeptics" are getting worked up over what amounts to
throwing away the lab notebooks for a paper published two decades ago. Even if
you assume malfeasance on the part of these authors (an assumption that does
not appear to be justified), you'd have to disregard the results of thousands
of other papers to leap to the (wild) conclusion that "there is no evidence
the earth is warming."

~~~
krschultz
But between the raw data and the set of data is a correction. Without being
able to show what that correction is, all the models based off the second set
of values is not valid science.

So you have to go back and recollect the info from all these sources (not an
insignificant undertaking, though mostly do-able), actually give a reason for
the "corrections", and then create models that fit that data, and then issue
new predictions.

Without starting over from raw data and following all the way to the
conclusions reached about man made global warming _there is no scientific
proof that man causes global warming_. None of it is valid until you can show
how that "correction" was made. And the loss of this data means they will
never 100% be able to show that.

------
mnemonicsloth
See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843517>

Which is a strange read. "Looks like the National Review was way out front on
this one," is not something I expected to say to myself today.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is turning into the biggest science story of the year, and for weeks most
of the MSM refused to cover it.

I'm not trying to allege bias, just making the observation that stories that
don't fit into pre-existing media narratives take a lot of push to get out
there. Usually it's the fringe media that keeps kicking and kicking until
somebody finally picks it up. If I remember correctly, the National Enquirer
was running stories of John Edwards' love child for months before anybody else
would pick it up. (And love or hate Edwards, it was a real story that deserved
national attention)

I wonder if blogging has changed any of this? Sure would be great to read a
study on how this type of anti-narrative story breaks today versus 20 years
ago.

~~~
spamizbad
There are several reasons why the media is reluctant to cover it.

1) The emails were acquired through an illegal hack, which makes them a highly
tainted source for journalists who aren't pushing an agenda. Naturally
journalists who are pushing the opposite agenda will ignore it, as those who
who are skeptics will readily jump on them.

2) This leak was initially trumpeted as a the end of AGW theory, and has since
turned out to be nothing more than scientists being douchey and unprofessional
wrt their critics. Smoke, but no fire. There's an important lesson in
marketing here: Make sure you set appropriate consumer expectations.

3) (US only) It's technically foreign news, and the American media generally
doesn't do foreign news unless it pertains to our various wars or some 3rd
world dictator says something bad about America.

Long story short, this would be covered in the MSM if: 1) The emails were
acquired through a whistleblower with legal protection 2) it wasn't over-sold
in the blogosphere the moment it broke 3) US Media actually gave a crap about
what happens outside of America's borders that doesn't involve a military
escapade.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
_The emails were acquired through an illegal hack..._

Yes, a crime was committed, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
There's precedent, too. From Wikipedia: _The Pentagon Papers... were a top-
secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States'
involvement in Vietnam... [They] first surfaced on the front page of the New
York Times in 1971._

...

 _This leak was initially trumpeted as the end of AGW theory, and has since
turned out to be scientists being douchey and unprofessional wrt their
critics..._

But the facts remain: The data are gone. The wingnuts knew it. The media
didn't report on it, in large part because the only people talking about it
were wingnuts. Doesn't that make you feel a little uneasy?

~~~
cwan
I agree - even if the emails were illegally obtained, one need only look back
at all those national security leaks over the past few years to see the
glaring double standard.

That being said, I think there's a questionable assumption being made that
these in fact are hacked illegally obtained emails. From CBS:
[http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/ent...](http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/entry5761180.shtml)
\- "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.)"

------
motters
I guess that's one way to deal with outliers.

------
danbmil99
finally, a reasonable discussion of this issue. For over two years I've heard
rumblings from my sience-y friends that GW was being overhyped. I don't know
if anyone had any specific data, but there is some sort of pattern-recognition
thing where you just smell that something is fishy.

None of this means that human-caused GW isn't a fact -- what it means is that
proving it and quantifying it are turning out to be very difficult. What the
email scam shows is that people on the 'right' side of the debate (ie
proponents of human-caused change) at some point went over a bit to the dark
side, and decided that "failure is not an option" -- ends justify means, etc.

This saddens me because I don't want 'my' side (liberal, rational, forward-
thinking) to be guilty of the same anti-science bullshit that GWB and crew
were. If science becomes completely politicized, it will cease to be science.
Where will be then?

------
protomyth
It would actually be very interesting to get a graph of all the papers that
are based on the altered data. I get the feeling it would be a significant
percentage, and not having the raw data would make things painful.

humm..... citeseer with evidence / result tracking....

------
jellicle
I think there's a forum somewhere on theglaciersarenotmelting.com that needs
these sort of posts a lot more than this forum does.

~~~
thras
I like reading what the HN crowd thinks about this. And I like the articles
posted so far on it...but yeah, you're probably right.

------
Tichy
So all the weather stations in the world sent their data to CRU, which then
deleted it. Because the data dates 100s of years back, it was not in digital
form, so they never copied it. All the little field researchers just trusted
the big momma CRU to keep their data for them, and now it is all lost. Climate
science is dead, anti-warming campaigners have won.

Boo-Hoo!

------
crocowhile
This article is mere bullshit. CRU never dumped their own data. They just
dumped their own copy of the data they got from other sources, because anyway
they could not give those around. The original are safe where they belong.
Also, this is hardly news related to the hack considered that this information
was put online on August 11 2009.

See [http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-
cr...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-
context/comment-page-14/#comment-144845)

