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.
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.
I think you would have to explicitly define climate change skeptic. That term leads to confusion. The set of people who do not believe there is any evidence for climate warming are strawdogs -- they are simply wrong.
However, there are other groups that are conflated with the straw dog group.
Examples:
There are people who claim climate models are wrong, as they have lost all predictive ability over the past ten years. They are correct that these models have proven to be bad models; they are incorrect in assuming, as bad models, this necessarily means temperature will not be as high. It is also possible that the temperature could be higher than forecast. It may refute their estimations, but not offering a better model weakens their argument.
There are others who claim that not only is the evidence overwhelmingly in favor of global warming, but anthropogenic warming. However, they claim that the costs of adopting "do anything to stop this" measures are ill-advised. The costs would be too high, they don't take into account any benefits, and they completely discount the emergence of new technologies.
Skepticism is a good thing. When someone practices bad science by massaging data, it's bad science, regardless of what side of line they are on.
Personally, I roughly fit the mold of my second example. I think global warming is obviously true; sun cycle theories are wholly inadequate; anthropogenic makes the most sense; and spending hundreds of billions on existing technologies for reducing emissions is a foolhardy plan.
Even if those fearing climate change are correct, the poor quality of the models shows they're right for the wrong reasons. And since they don't really understand what's happening, then any proposal to "fix" the problem might work, or might itself be disastrous. We don't know.
It should be completely clear that Al Gore's "precautionary principle" is bunk. And I'd claim that this whole thing is too important to use the Earth as a laboratory, to "do something -- ANYTHING -- to fix this".
What? Weren't you here for the Ron Paul epidemic of 2008?
I'd agree with you except 1) it's a story about server hacking, 2) it's a story about not only politics but science, and 3) there's been a long-term trend of posting climate articles on HN
I get tired of being sucked into the political side of the debate -- no winners there -- but dang it, climate change science is a really fascinating topic from a purely intellectual standpoint. The Earth is not just a black body, and various carbon-based molecular absorption spectra is not the do-all, end-all metric that pop science writers say it is. CA programming has a default behavior of producing runaway models, as Wolfram so aptly points out in NKS. Lots of cool and tech-weenie stuff in here. (But also lots of emotion, so I concede that it ticks a lot of folks off. But 100% "Erlang Innards" is probably not going to happen any time soon)
I agree - it would be nice to be able to talk about these things in a healthy academic environment. Sadly, I think that's quite impossible at this point (at least in the U.S.).
These scientists were out of line, but I can understand how they ended up there. The "drill baby drill" crowd pounces on every bit of academic debate and builds a little strawman to agree with them. "I think your model is flawed" becomes "global warming doesn't exist," and "what about the impact of the xxx effect" becomes "global warming doesn't exist" and "we're missing some data for this period" becomes "global warming doesn't exist."
If every bit of your research gets twisted and misreported like this, it's easy to see why you would start talking about how to hide data and skew the facts to leave no room for doubt. Presenting a flawless, united, impenetrable front would seem like the only way to make any real progress. Not saying what they did was right, but the motivation is there.
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?
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.
Its a hard line to draw on global warming because most of what's written about it (probably on both sides of the aisle) is politically-motivated pseudo-science at best. You can argue about whether Al Gore is right or wrong, demon or savior, but his involvement has undeniably tied the debate in with our typical right vs. left political dogfight. It's sad and alarming to see science caught up in such squabbling, but it has happened and taints the whole conversation.
Science in general does not cause flame wars and would usually fit within HN's guidelines. A surprisingly large number of people consider themselves qualified to have opinions on global warming because they read about it on a blog. That isn't true of physics.
If this particular article were more about how the servers were hacked, in some new, novel way, I'd be more inclined to give it a pass, but its not. It's basically trolling via intentional sample bias.
The issue is so heated because so much is at stake. The reason laymen have to weigh in on their opinions, is that ultimately, it is our tax dollars that will be spent and our way of life that will be altered. So at the end of the day, we have to decide, do we trust the scientists enough to spend $x hundreds of billions of dollars.
Most issues that a) have a lot at stake and b) are non-obvious are going to generate a lot heated controversy. But it seems to me those are precisely the issues that need to be talked about in a forum with a lot of intelligent people ( Hacker News).
When Wal-Mart needs to make a big decision they don't ask the door greeters for their thoughts. Door greeters know nothing of running a giant corporation (at least most of them). The results certainly have major impacts on the door greeters' livelihoods, but they're not qualified to make decisions like who should be the COO, or should the stock split 2:1, or how many stores they should open in China next year.
It's much the same with science. If you let the hoi polloi decide what we should do about the global warming issue (or lack thereof) you're going to get a result not based on science or economics, but based on whether more people believe Hollywood actors or radio talk show hosts, neither of whom know the slightest thing about it either.
As a concerned tax-payer that is exactly what I'd like to avoid. All of that is, of course, way off-topic, which is ironic in a thread where I initially exclaimed that these sorts of posts are off-topic :)
If you treat it reddit-like, then yes. But it still is a pretty interesting mix of how to do (or not to do) science when a lot of politics is involved.
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?
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.
"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.
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?
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.
Directly it may only be in the millions, but think about how many research assistants that they've had, plus all of their computer equipment, plus the money it takes for their offices/labs, plus the conferences they go to. Billions might be off, but tens or hundreds of millions seems reasonable.
I also think the author is grouping in a lot of extra climate scientists in with this group, which isn't technically fair but I personally don't think it is so unreasonable to think that this is a somewhat common practice in any collegiate research (let alone climate research). You can't get grant money if you don't show results. I think the one area where you'd have less of this influence is academic medical research - because double blind studies is a standard practice in that field.
If you lie/commit fraud to receive something it's theft. If they data was honestly misinterpreted then of course it's not, it's just a mistake. Also, this has nothing to do with current case, I haven't looked at it so I don't know what they did or did not do.
Agreed, what these people have currently taken is likely only in the millions, maybe tens-of-millions. However the UK government has pledged to essentially 'do whatever it takes' to combat global warming, which the governments 'own' (IE private company they paid) estimates state that combating global warming will require billions of pounds for the UK alone.
When we're talking about how much money is involved with this research, and claiming it as an incentive for climate scientists to lie, we realize that this is money that's being spent on research right? Do we? There is no incentive for them to do anything other than get published, and this by no means requires any lying or forging of data.
Please tell me we understand this fact. Nobody (that is, no scientists) is pocketing money and running here, they're spending this money on research gear and on hiring analysts and grad students and the like. Given this, how is the amount invested relevant at all?
> (that is, no scientists) is pocketing money and running here
Are they getting paid? (If not, who is paying their living expenses?)
Is it "money" only if it goes for hookers and booze?
> There is no incentive for them to do anything other than get published, and this by no means requires any lying or forging of data.
Scientists are people.
Refereed journals only publish what the referees believe and what they find interesting. (There were the equivalent of refereed journals for ether, phrenology, eugenics, etc. and I suspect that there are still refereed journals for astrology.)
Getting published may not require "lying or forging", but they can help in certain circumstances. So can being sloppy in the "correct way".
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.