swifthack
illconsidered | July 20, 2012Hopping down the bunny trail comes the (not) surprising news that law enforcement investigating the CRU email scandal (aka Climategate, aka Swifthack) have concluded that the email servers were hacked and this is not the imagined whistle blower the WUWT and Curry crowd like to pretend. Though they can not identify the perp, they do conclude that:
“However, as a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful…
illconsidered | November 28, 2011(not an original moniker in the title, someone remind me where it came from so I can give credit where credit is due!)
While I think the approriate response to ClimateGate 2.0 is to ignore it, I also think the mainstream media is doing mostly just that so it is safer to bring your attention to this good rebuttal to the whole affair from potholer54 on YouTube:
I think the most telling quote echoing around the denialosphere right now is this one from Jonathan Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid what's included and what is left out.
It's supposed to…
illconsidered | November 22, 2010One of the shocking revelations of the Swifthacking of CRU one year ago (aka Climategate) was the fact that scientists can be downright nasty. Contrary to all previous indications, scientists are not always shy, reserved and polite, prefering the inside of a lab to any possibility of confrontation.
On the heels of the discovery of this new phenomenom comes a fresh bit of research from the icey confines of Antarctic research facilities.
After three long months of studying ice core samples in the Antarctic, a multidisciplinary climate research team presented startling evidence showing that all…
illconsidered | November 18, 2010November 17 marked the one year anniversary of the hacking of CRU mail servers and the release of thousands of emails between climate scientists.
Though irrelevant to the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change, the event was significant in the public relations sphere. I have not found the time to do a proper memorial write up though I think it is important to reassess and reframe the controversy with the benefit of hindsight. But as luck would have it, a young climate blogger named Kate at Climate Sight has written a piece as well laid out and written as I could ever have hoped to…
illconsidered | July 26, 2010I am a skeptic.
Not a climate skeptic, not in the sense of the improperly commandeered word we use in the climate debates. In my experience they know little of real skepticism as a general rule. But me, I really do dislike taking assertions on their face if I don't have all the facts and I really do try to form my own opinions, especially about people.
So I have tried very hard to reserve judgement on Judith Curry and her emerging role in the climate blogosphere despite reading some pretty damning reviews of her blog performances from voices in my own "camp". My first awareness of her is…
illconsidered | May 22, 2010Roy Spencer, darling of the climate skeptic community, says he is not very organized, as Phil Jones said of himself, and that
"if you asked me to find original data from 20 years ago I'd have great difficulty too. We just didn't realise in those days how important and controversial this would all become - now it would just all be stored on computer."
This is quoted in a BBC article on the recent Heartland climate conference in New York.
Spencer goes on to say:
"Phil Jones has been looking at climate records for a very long time. Frankly our data set agrees with his, so unless we are all…
illconsidered | May 20, 2010Love the title of that post! Keith Kloor tries to defend journalism's role in fiascos like "Swifthack" (aka Climategate) and climate science in general but really ends up simply providing a perfect example of the problem.
I urge any and all to read the comment thread, it is an excellent and fascinating one, though I am only about a third of the way through. Great contributions from Things Break and Michael Tobis, appearnces by Andrew Revkin and Judith Curry.
It is still going on though I would wager it's utility has diminished to near zero (I could be wrong).
I would like very much to…
illconsidered | April 8, 2010Here is a fascinating exchange between George Monbiot and Steve Easterbrook exploring the larger issues behind the recent Swifthacking of CRU email (aka ClimateGate).
Steve makes an excellent presentation of the case for what happens to be my personal view on this mess, namely that the media has failed in a major and tragic way and that this is a tale of a successful propaganda campaign not scientific corruption. In my opinion, Monbiot seems to understand Steve's points but still does not get the real story.
Have a read:
The computer scientist Steve Easterbrook wrote an interesting critique…
tlambert | December 17, 2009The latest story exciting the denialosphere is being put about by novelist James Delingpole and is based on an analysis (translated here) by a right-wing Russian think tank. Delingpole quotes from a news story:
On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming…
tlambert | December 11, 2009The phrase "hide the decline" from the stolen CRU emails has been taken out of context and construed to refer to a decline in temperatures this century when in fact it was a reference to a decline in tree-ring density since 1961. Steve McIntyre knows this, but instead of a correction, he offers another misrepesentation of its meaning, quote mining the stolen emails to argue that the IPCC was hiding stuff:
IPCC Lead Authors met in Arusha, Tanzania from September 1 to 3, 1999 ... at which the final version of the "zero-order" draft of the Third Assessment Report was presented and discussed…
tlambert | December 8, 2009Not content with publishing George Will's fabrications about the stolen emails (for which, see Carl Zimmer), they now have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes. Let's look at just one paragraph:
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even…
tlambert | December 7, 2009Josh Nelson has set up Swifthack.com as a clearing house to correct disinformation about those emails stolen from CRU.
Peter Sinclair's Climate Denial Crock of the Week is on the stolen emails.
It certainly seems true that the quote miners almost always misrepresent what "hide the decline" refers to be explicitly or implicitly saying that it refers to temperature.