

Leaked emails won't harm UN climate body, says chairman - envitar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/29/ipcc-climate-change-leaked-emails

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dpatru
> Some commentators, including the former chancellor Nigel Lawson and the
> environmental campaigner and Guardian writer George Monbiot, have called on
> Jones to resign but Pachauri [chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on
> Climate Change] said he did not agree. He said an independent inquiry into
> the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal
> investigation into how the emails came to light.

The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri, does
not inspire trust in the scientific results. Rather than focusing on the
misdeeds of the scientists, he's pushing for those who exposed the misdeeds to
be punished. Mr. Pachauri's reactions are more consistent with a fake who is
afraid of being found out than with an honest scientist who is just interested
in exposing truth.

~~~
electromagnetic
He's a politician, of course he isn't interested in the truth. He's interested
in getting the biggest dollar value into his pocket, that's all politics is
and ever has been.

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patio11
The chairman is not very concerned that his scientists are behaving badly, but
is very concerned that they were caught.

 _I really think people should be discreet … in this day and age anything you
write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing
is, to say the least, indiscreet … It is another matter to talk about this to
your friends on the telephone or person to person but to put it down in
writing was indiscreet. If someone was to say something like this in an IPCC
authors' meeting then there are others who would chew him up."_

That last sentence almost makes me want to ask the obvious follow-up: do you
keep records of what people say in IPCC meetings? Where are they?

~~~
jrockway
_very concerned that they were caught_

I don't think this is it. There is a system for exposing confidential
correspondence to the public; it's called a trial. If there is reasonable
suspicion that fraud is going on (and lying about your data to get more
research money _is_ fraud), then charges can be filed, and the internal emails
can be legally obtained. (Or, a condition of receiving research money can be
that all your emails must be made public.) Some Random Hackers breaking into
private computer systems, though, is not acceptable, no matter how noble the
goal. Some judicial oversight is necessary to protect the researchers. (Even
criminals deserve privacy.)

~~~
patio11
I would very much have preferred for this information to come to light via the
legal way for exposing it: a FOI request. Unfortunately, there seems to have
been a consp^H^H^H^H^H intentionally organized effort to defeat FOI requests.
That makes things sort of a catch-22. (I am starting to believe the theory
that this archive was prepared for a FOI request, quashed, and then leaked by
a whistleblower. The argument that cinched it for me: how the heck did
somebody get a random dump of emails and documents with the ratio of work :
personal : spam looking like infinity: negligible: negligible? Either our
mysterious hacker has OCD or someone was pretty careful when collecting this
data.

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motters
Surely if the original data sets upon which important decisions will
ultimately be based are missing or destroyed, such that the results can't be
independently reproduced, that alone ought to be cause for concern and
discussion.

~~~
fnid
Most decisions at that level aren't made based on data and facts. They are
made based on the emotional appeal of the acquisition of power both through
increased control and financial benefit.

Politicians ignore the facts all the time. They invent facts all the time.
Politics has little to do with science.

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azgolfer
HAHAHAHAHAHA !!! The surface station audit is almost completed BTW, Check out
the graphic at <http://www.surfacestations.org/>

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DanielBMarkham
This is a very interesting resource. Thanks for the link.

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brc
The IPCC and CRU are really starting to look very guilty in their words and
actions, whether they are or not. This whole thing reminds me of the 'sexing
up' of intelligence reports to justify invasion of Iraq. It started out as a
trickle of leaked information and turned into a torrent that eventually led to
a lot of people losing a lot of respsect. They need to come clean now, admit
their faults and invite others to look at the data and come to independent
conclusions.

It's turning into a big mess, and it's not going away. Whoever was behind it
knew exactly what they were doing.

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diego_moita
It is very funny that many of the people that spent 8 years saying amen to the
broad war against science by the Bush administration are now "oh, so chocked!"
by some out of context comments and suppressed data by some researchers in a
UK university.

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robotrout

       war against science
    

I'm not familiar with that war. Is it "outlawing stem cell research", when all
he did was say we wouldn't use federal tax dollars to do it? Or is it not
toeing the line as far as Kiyoto, because "all scientists agree the end is
near if we don't"? Refresh my memory as to this "war against science"? I'm
interested.

~~~
Achorny
1) They banned using ANY equipment or resources payed for with ANY federal
dollars in stem cell research (and very strictly enforced it). Since many labs
have to share equipment between projects, this effectively banned most stem
cell research.

2) They had direct ties to the Discovery Institute, the main force behind the
Intelligent Design Creationism pseudoscience movement.

3) And whether or not there's a vast pro-AGW conspiracy, that doesn't excuse
interfering with publication of climate science from NASA.

And that's just off the top of my head, fortunately I haven't thought about
this in a while. For more info: [http://www.amazon.com/Republican-War-Science-
Chris-Mooney/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Republican-War-Science-Chris-
Mooney/dp/0465046762/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259539189&sr=8-1)

