
Climate science document hacked - danut
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/11/hacked-hadley-cru-foi2009-files.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LuboMotlsReferenceFrame+(Lubos+Motl%27s+reference+frame)&utm_content=Google+Reader
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WilliamLP
It's kind of amusing to see these guys froth at the mouth at the prospect of
scouring through millions of lines of text to find a couple of scientists with
less than absolutely pure motivations and research methods. When the witch-
hunt succeeds, it of course invalidates everything we leftist propagandists
try to convince the people that we know!!

It's exactly parallel to creationists taking some instance of one scientist
mistaking some fossil early in the century and milking that for decades to
disprove evolution.

~~~
mattmaroon
I'm just flagging it all and suggesting everyone else do the same. I don't
know how global warming skepticism got so popular here, but it's at best way
off-topic and at worst trolling.

~~~
bokonist
Would you advocate flagging all posts about global warming, period? Or just
about skepticism? Would you advocate flagging all posts about science, or just
scientific matters that are controversial?

~~~
gloob
_Would you advocate flagging all posts about global warming, period? Or just
about skepticism?_

All of them.

 _Would you advocate flagging all posts about science, or just scientific
matters that are controversial?_

Neither. Just the ones that are _political_.

~~~
nkurz
Have you indeed concluded that all posts about global warming are 'political'
rather than 'scientific'? Possibly true for the majority of such articles, but
it would be nice if there was somewhere that the small remainder could be
discussed in a scientific but non-political manner.

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adamcrowe
Speaking of skepticism...

Skeptics Handbook <http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming>

Skeptics Handbook II [http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/skeptics-handbook-ii-
global...](http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/skeptics-handbook-ii-global-
bullies-want-your-money/)

It's always been about the science.

~~~
vannevar
And god knows, good science always involves political cartoons and exclamation
points. Spam.

------
nkurz
Here's the question that interests me: how much is this information worth, and
to whom? Who stole and published this information, and why?

Given the amount of money in play here, the value of this release to certain
parties is enormous. What would a multinational oil company be willing to pay
to derail Copenhagen? What would the Chinese government pay to avoid being
subject to global CO2 emissions rules down the road?

While this is probably an inside job by a disgruntled IT worker, if this was a
paid job the value delivered is truly enormous: definitely hundreds of
millions of dollars, and conceivably _much_ more.

Is there any level of data security that can protect against such a large
incentive?

------
te_platt
Perhaps a better link here:

[http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/20/hackers-steal-
in...](http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/20/hackers-steal-information-
climate-research-unit/)

------
tome
_These people have acquired millions if not billions of taxpayers' money_

Millions I can imagine. That's several peoples salaries over several years.
But billions? Surely he shouldn't be making such an extreme claim without
detailing how he thinks that value is broken down. It seems obviously nonsense
just by rough order of magnitude estimates.

~~~
te_platt
Does he mean climate scientists in general or Hadley Climate Research Unit
specifically? Or some mix?

From <http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220>:

"Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased
federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars
pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today"

Billions of taxpayers money is no exaggeration for the general case.

~~~
electromagnetic
Hadley is presently the only place where proof of tampering has emerged, which
IMO casts serious doubt on any work emerging from Hadley if it cannot prove
that its work is not being tampered with.

IMHO I doubt this is an endemic problem in climate research, no matter how
much I despise the many statisticians claiming they're scientists.
Statisticians _show_ correlations, scientists _prove_ causation. However with
literally billions of dollars on the table, it certainly makes me curious of
the validity of other researchers work.

With a $1.7B cake on the table, are people lying so that the host of the party
(the federal government) gives them a slice?

~~~
CWuestefeld
AIUI, Hadley is the origin of much of the baseline data that everyone else
uses. And that data itself isn't just raw numbers, but is massaged to factor
out the heat island effect, for example.

The snippets of emails that I saw suggest (but don't prove, contrary to their
opposition) that the methodology for building that baseline data was tainted.

So if that underlying data must now be considered corrupt, then it also calls
into question any other research that used the baseline data.

