AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty

[steven johnson]

With the leaked climate scientist e-mails, one is apparently seeing normal science politics, big egos and spinning of data for maximal effect.

Not the smoking gun of fraud climate deniers wish to paint it, though.

(AP) – 1 day ago

LONDON — E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Frankel saw "no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very 'generous interpretations.'"

The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and rereading them — about 1 million words in total.


AP IMPACT: Science not faked, but not pretty

[Teaser]

1. yes, most scientists are assholes, and I speak as one

(scientist and asshole).

but they also happen to be right.

[The Doctor.]

4. They (by which I mean 'we') have reason to be assholes.

The meticulous study of empirical reality yields some very real clarity.

They (meaning 'we') can project outcomes based on interactive properties of reality.

We believe in and live in reality.

Those that do not are adrift on a vast sea with no hope of reaching land.

[sam sarrha]

2. that was all spun bullshit.. the E-mails were over 10 years old.. most of the data we have today was

that was all spun bullshit.. the E-mails were over 10 years old.. most of the data then was covered up.

what data we have today was either hidden then or didn't exist, the satellite data has turned all the theories around in just the last couple years.

it's all Corporate/Fascist propaganda and Reich Wing HaterAid

[Nederland]

5. Bullshit yourself

I heard Al Gore say the same thing. I guess it's too much to actually go look at them and see that the most recent email in the zip file was dated 11/12/2009.

[TxRider]

7. They were not 10 years old

The leak contains e-mails from ten years ago all the way up to e-mails from just last month.

[StClone]

3. Russia is pretty much known to be source of the e-mails.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html

[Nederland]

6. Wrong--it was an inside job

Here are the technical reasons why it looks that way:

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/FOIA_Leaked/

<snip>

Conclusion

I suggest that it isn't feasible for the emails in their tightly ordered format to have been kept at the departmental level or on the workstations of the parties. I suggest that the contents of ./documents didn't originate from a single monolithic share, but from a compendium of various sources.

For the hacker to have collected all of this information s/he would have required extraordinary capabilities. The hacker would have to crack an Administrative file server to get to the emails and crack numerous workstations, desktops, and servers to get the documents. The hacker would have to map the complete UEA network to find out who was at what station and what services that station offered. S/he would have had to develop or implement exploits for each machine and operating system without knowing beforehand whether there was anything good on the machine worth collecting.

The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn't be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip.

It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.

If as some say, this was a targeted crack, then the cracker would have had to have back-doors and access to every machine at UEA and not just the CRU. It simply isn't reasonable for the FOI Officer to have kept the collection on a CRU system where CRU people had access, but rather used a UEA system.

Occam's razor concludes that "the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one". The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn't because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples.

<snip>

[StClone]

8. Occam's Razor is a saying not a law

It works best on a micro scale not macro totality -- take Particle Physics for instance.

There may be some truth that the e-mail release was an inside job; but, there is no compelling reason to exclude completely the Russian connection just yet.