But the real tragedy of the Climategate scandal is that a lack of confidence in climate data will seriously impair mankind's ability to assess and react properly to a potentially huge problem.
Now under pressure, the CRU has finally agreed to publicly release all of its temperature data. Just how valuable this will be has been thrown into doubt, however, since the CRU has admitted, "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data." This raises legitimate scientific questions about how the lost original data were manipulated to produce the "value-added." The Times (London) reported that Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. "The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us'. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science," he said.
And greater transparency should not be limited to just temperature data, but to all aspects of climate science. In an email response to me, climatologist Pielke Sr. argues, "I completely support the view that the computer software must be available for scrutiny by independent scientists. Otherwise these models should not be used in climate assessment reports." Only through such transparency can other researchers determine whether or not climate models are adequate forecasters of future climate change or are merely prejudices made plausible.
Climategate: was Russian secret service behind email hacking plot?
Does this matter? What difference do the motives of those involved make?
For that matter what difference do the motives of the scientists involved make? If the earth is warming up due to a human-caused increase in carbon dioxide levels then an honest assessment—by anybody—will show it.
All of us have biases, agendas, petty personal issues that color how we look at the world. Scientists are no exception. The way we keep those biases from driving important decisions is transparency and skepticism. No claim is true until it is proven, and the only proof that matters is if someone who isn't already convinced can repeat the results. True for special relativity, true for gravity, true for climate change.
The behavior exposed in the UEA correspondence showed people acting not like scientists but like activists. If they want to speak with the authority of scientists they have to use the discipline of scientists. They can't suppress dissent, they can't destroy the data they allegedly based their conclusions on. But they have.
They aren't the only people on the planet drawing the same conclusions, and none of this makes those conclusions wrong, but it does call their work into question. It changes what they've said on the subject from signal to noise. We already have more than enough of that.
There are enough shrill voices in this debate who, to be blunt about it, don't know what they're talking about. For them it's enough that a conclusion matches their prejudices. Disagreement isn't legitimate inquiry, certain to make the conclusions stronger when resolved, it's apostasy. You don't discuss your data and methods with those you haven't convinced, you burn them at the stake as heretics. You cast them out of the temple. You shut them up by any means necessary.
It's too bad their emails had to be hacked to expose this. Every time this kind of behavior comes to light it calls into question every inconvenient scientific conclusion. Does smoking really cause emphysema and lung cancer? Do germs really cause disease? Is sickle-cell anemia really an genetic trait, or was that just somebody with an agenda?
Blame the light if you like, but I blame what was going on in the dark.
As I have been on the road, I haven't had time to look at this video and others, but I am familiar with the fact that there hasn't been any warming in the past decade. That alone should be enough to cause people to stop and re evaluate the data in case the flat line is significant and means things might be going in the direction of cooling or that of long term stability. Sure we can come up with some valid contingency plans in case warming returns. But to foist an expensive knee jerk response due to a very short term (geologically) observation of warming is dangerous and could cause more harm than good. Isn't a 10 year (and growing) period of stability just as equally worth noting as only several decades of moderate warming ? Global weather stability would be bad for business, or at least the business planned in Copenhagen.
Climategate: was Russian secret service behind email hacking plot?
There was growing speculation on Sunday that hackers working for the Russian secret service were responsible for the theft of controversial emails in the ‘Climategate’ scanda
Thousands of emails, from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were first published on a small server in the city of Tomsk in Siberia.
So-called ‘patriot hackers’ from Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service, the FSB, to attack websites disliked by the Kremlin, such as the “denial of service” campaign launched against the Kavkaz-Tsentr website, over its reports about the war in Chechnya, in 2002.
Russia, a major oil exporter, may be trying to undermine calls to reduce carbon emissions ahead of the Copenhagen summit on global warming. The CRU emails included remarks which some claim show scientists had manipulated the figures to make them fit the theory that humans are causing global warming.
Achim Steiner, the director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said the theft of emails from CRU, which is a world-renowned centre for climate research, had similarities with the Watergate scandal which brought down US President Richard Nixon.
But he said: “This is not climategate, it’s hackergate. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so.
“So the media should direct its investigations into that.”
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he believed the theft of the emails was not the work of amateur climate sceptics.
“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” he told The Times.
“If you look at that mass of emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data but it’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random at all.
“This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs.”
Mr van Ypersele said the expose was making it more difficult to persuade the 192 countries going to Copenhagen of the need to cut carbon emissions.
“One effect of this is to make scientists lose lots of time checking things. We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators,” he said.
However he insisted the emails did not change the science. “It doesn’t change anything in the IPCC’s conclusions. It’s only one line of evidence out of dozens of lines of evidence,” he said.
A Russian hacking specialist told the Mail on Sunday: “There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been. There has been speculation the hackers were Russian.
“It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.”
Attempted breaches show larger effort to discredit climate science: researcher
Megan O’Toole, National Post
An alleged series of attempted security breaches at the University of Victoria in the run-up to next week's Copenhagen summit on climate change is evidence of a larger effort to discredit climate science, says a renowned B.C. researcher.
Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says there have been a number of attempted breaches in recent months, including two successful break-ins at his campus office in which a dead computer was stolen and papers were rummaged through.
"The key thing is to try to find anybody who's involved in any aspect of the IPCC and find something that you can ... take out of context," Mr. Weaver said, drawing a parallel to the case of British climate researcher Phil Jones, who was forced to step down this week after skeptics seized upon hacked emails they allege point to a plot to exaggerate the threat of climate change.
"People don't like it, so they try to discredit it, and the way they try to discredit it is by attacking the individual responsible for it," Mr. Weaver said.
University of Victoria spokeswoman Patty Pitts said there have also been attempts to hack into climate scientists' computers, as well as incidents in which people impersonated network technicians to try to gain access to campus offices and data. However, those incidents took place at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, she said — an Environment Canada facility located at the university. As such, Environment Canada would be the investigating agency.
"They have a completely separate computer system from ours," Ms. Pitts said.
The office break-ins took place late last year, Mr. Weaver said, while the other alleged hacking attempts at his colleagues' offices — all unsuccessful — took place within the past few months.
Both campus police and the Saanich Police Department helped probe the office break-ins, Ms. Pitts said, but to date, no suspects have been identified nor arrests made.
Sujata Raisinghani, a spokeswoman for Environment Canada, said while the agency has no evidence of "successful" hacking attempts at the climate modelling centre, it cannot comment on "threats against its infrastructure" for security reasons.
"Environment Canada routinely monitors its infrastructure and takes necessary precautions to protect its information assets," she said.
Mr. Weaver believes the timing of the alleged attempts to breach security is linked to the coming Copenhagen summit. In the Jones case, he blasted the media for being sucked in by the minutiae of old emails rather than trying to determine who is ultimately responsible for what he called an agenda-based campaign to discredit climate science.
"The real story in this is, who are these people and why are they doing it?" Mr. Weaver said, noting the Jones controversy was not the result of a "lucky hack" days before the Copenhagen conference. "They're trying to find anything. They don't care what it is."
He believes the campaign is driven by the fossil-fuel industry, citing "a war for public opinion."
In the Jones case, critics contend that a series of hacked emails from the computer systems of the British Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia show scientists have exaggerated the case for man-made global warming. Climate researchers deny any wrongdoing, saying the emails have been taken out of context.
Among those messages is one from Mr. Jones, which reads: "The two MMs 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."
In another, Kevin Trenberth, a lead IPCC author, writes: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.... Our observing system is inadequate."
Location: 543 miles west of Paradis,1491 miles eas Gender:
Posted:
Dec 3, 2009 - 1:48pm
dionysius wrote:
It's been disproved by that whole Tiger Woods thing. Don't you read the Nine Or Ten Denialist Blogs That Quote Each Other And So Generate The Illusion Of Groundswell?
yeah, I know. that question has always nagged me too.
It's been disproved by that whole Tiger Woods thing. Don't you read the Nine Or Ten Denialist Blogs That Quote Each Other And So Generate The Illusion Of Groundswell?
I got no problem with global warming (65 on today on Long Island)...I do have a problem with excessive pollution from the burning of fossil fuels which we continue to unnecessarily rely on for our energy requirements.
Hmmm... I wonder if somehow the two are related. I guess we'll never know.
I got no problem with global warming (65 on today on Long Island)...I do have a problem with excessive pollution from the burning of fossil fuels which we continue to unnecessarily rely on for our energy requirements.
By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford
A plan to build a 6,000km-long wall across the Sahara Desert to stop the spread of the desert has been outlined. The barrier - formed by solidifying sand dunes - would stretch from Mauritania in the west of Africa to Djibouti in the east. The plan was put forward by architect Magnus Larsson at the TED Global conference in Oxford.
A 2007 UN study described desertification as "the greatest environmental challenge of our times". "The threat is desertification.
My response is a sandstone wall made from solidified sand," said Mr Larsson, who describes himself as a dune architect. The sand would be stabilised by flooding it with bacteria that can set it like concrete in a matter of hours. North African nations have promoted the idea of planting trees to form a Great Green Belt to prevent the spread of the sand.
A similar proposal - known as the Green Wall of China - has also been proposed to stop the spread of the Gobi Desert. Ballooning idea In 2007, the UN issued a report that said that one third of the Earth's population - about two billion people - are potential victims of desertification. “ The idea is to stop the desert using the desert itself ” Magnus Larsson It is concerned that the slow creep of the sands will displace people and put new strains on natural resources and societies.
Problem areas include the former Soviet republics in central Asia, China and sub-Saharan Africa. "It affects about 140 countries," Mr Larsson told BBC News. Mr Larsson showed pictures of a village called Gidan-Kara in Nigeria which had had to be moved because of the creep of the dunes. He said it was one of many examples. The architect's proposed wall across the desert would be a complement to, rather than a replacement, of the Great Green Belt proposal. "It would provide physical support for the trees," he said. Crucially, he said, it would leave a barrier even if the trees were removed.
"People are so poor in these countries and these regions that they chop them down for firewood." The wall would effectively be made by "freezing" the shifting sand dunes, turning them into sandstone. "The idea is to stop the desert using the desert itself," he said. The sand grains would be bound together using a bacterium called Bacillus pasteurii commonly found in wetlands. "It is a microorganism which chemically produces calcite - a kind of natural cement."
Mr Larsson got the idea for using the bacteria from a team at the University of California Davis, which had been investigating its use for solidifying the ground in earthquake prone areas. Mr Larsson envisages injecting the dunes with the bacteria on a massive scale or using a barrage of giant bacteria-filled balloons. "We allow the dune to wash over this structure then we would pop the balloon," he told BBC News. The scheme would also have advantages for nearby populations, he said. For example, it could be excavated he said to provide shade, shelter or as a structure to collect water. However, Mr Larsson admitted that the scheme faced numerous practical problems. "There are many details left to explore in this story: political, practical, ethical, financial. My design is fraught with many challenges," he said. "However, it's a beginning, it's a vision; if nothing else I would like this scheme to initiate a discussion," he added.
TED Global is a conference dedicated to "ideas worth spreading". It runs from the 21 to 24 July in Oxford, UK. Story from BBC NEWS
