Actually for me as an IT person, what this shows is someone with an agenda, hacking this purposefully or hiring someone to do so. I would be more interested in how they were hacked, why, by who, and how this in turn led to the news being “leaked” to just the right type of people. I’m sure this is because I’m in IT and the forensics intrigue me more than the email of a few folks.
For all we know it could have been someone from that organization that now has a grudge against someone there. “I hate these mother #(&#$#, I’m copying their entire mailbox and sending it to ____.”
The good news is that 100 years from now we will understand if the data was right or wrong. :)
They may be real; however, the wording just sounds so fake. It’s like someone is trying, in a couple of sentences, to set someone up. To me, it doesn’t sound like an email exchange between two people who routinely email each other.
I don’t think the e-mails are fake at all, and hanging your defense on the e-mails being fake is a losing strategy, since most if not all are surely authentic.
I’m sure the “hackers” took this huge trove of text and did some keyword searches to find suspect things. I’m sure the things they found actually sound suspect to uninformed people, especially if they already have an inclination to see fraud in this work. That doesn’t mean any of it is bad science (although I don’t know enough to rule out bad science being done).
The stuff only sounds damning when you don’t understand the context. The worse that can be said is that they aren’t very nice in private conversation about people with whom they have profound disagreements. This is unsurprising.
I completely disagree with your interpretation. The worst that can be said is that climate scientists for years have been actively manipulating data, attempting to circumvent laws which would compel them to share data, and trying to mislead the public as well as a worldwide scientific body. As a scientist, and as someone who has been following the climate change debate, I find some of the emails shocking. I think that hanging your defense on “scientists aren’t very nice people” will prove to be a losing strategy once people start digging into all the emails.
However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.
Jones did not indicate who “Keith” was in his e-mail.
Two other American scientists named in leaked e-mails — Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado — did not immediately return requests for comment.
The University of East Anglica said that information published on the Internet had been selected deliberately to undermine “the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world’s climate in ways that are potentially dangerous.”
“The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way,” the university said in a statement.
As I said, the worst that can be said when you understand the context. Try educating yourself on the specific issues that were actually being addressed in the e-mails that have you so riled up.
The shit is too politicized and sensationalized. Maybe… if they started doing science the way most non-climatologists understand it… people who are too busy to basically redo all of their “questionable” research would stop heckling them, because the hecklers mostly don’t really care about that stuff anyway. But they do care about people doing “questionable” things and acting like it’s good science.
holy shit @ Brooski. Casually tossing off a ‘political agenda’ remark, suggesting that experts are automatically suspect because they have dedicated their careers to the researching a theory and are too invested in it … HOLY SHIT. Then making like there’s something dodgy going on when they don’t make their data freely available IMMEDIATELY - when that data was discovered by commercial grants and is thus restricted commercially. lololololololol. FOIA lolololol.
For any data set referenced in the e-mails that you think the e-mails show was handled fraudulently, describe what the data measure, how they were collected, how methods of collection changed over time, and ranges and likely sources of random and systematic errors. Also, describe specifically how the data set was used in particular published work, and how you think the fraud affected the published work.
Keep in mind that complaining “they aren’t releasing the raw data” is a very general complaint that doesn’t tell me anything about the context of these e-mails. Which data and methodology do you dispute? How are they referenced in the e-mails? How do the authors’ publications address (or fail to address) your objections?
Please limit your response to things that actually arise out of the released e-mails, since I don’t want to rehash past debates, and since you seem so sure that you clearly understand why these e-mails are so damning.
I think you’re the one who is riled up, not me. I’m not sure what the point would be of arguing about research with you, especially since you admit in a previous post that you don’t know enough to evaluate whether or not any of this is bad science or not. I don’t have any interest in spending more time on it here.
Your posts in this thread are distilled BAWWWWWWWW. You only take time out from BAWWWWWWWing to make obnoxious insinuations, vague statements that try to sound authoratative and just generally oily pathological dishonesty. Quotemining from unethically acquired private emails = totally reliable! Career researchers = HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS. What kind of scientist are you, anyway? Tell me so I can ignore your input because of how invested you are in your research!!!
If climate change theory predicted that we would fix it by drinking beer and eating donuts, there would be no climate sceptics at all.
The fact is, it rpedicts we need to stop using fossil fuels big time, and change our lifestyles (barring sudden dramatic and revolutionary tech to fix the climate). As a result, people cling to any random bullshit to kid themselevs that the diagnosis must be wrong.
What do people think is the agenda behind the shadowy cabal of lizard scientists that are faking data?
Does every climate change scientist have major shares in wind farms?
I don’t get why THIS topic is the one that everyone thinks has an agenda. I mean there’s no way that Bruce or any other such critic is anti-science (well, maybe a few of them, but not many). They use science all the time in other ways. They see doctors, and they watch the weather, etc. So why is THIS issue the one that is hopelessly corrupt bad science?
I don’t understand what you mean by “hanging my defense?” I don’t care one way or the other - I was just making an observation that the emails sounded odd. Period. I exchange probably 50 - 75 emails a day with scientists on active research, and in that context the emails sounded odd to me.
