Climate science document hacked
motls.blogspot.com
motls.blogspot.com
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'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)
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.
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".
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.
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).
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 :)
The United States is essentially a giant property management company, run as a consumer co-op. The chain of decision making is: civil service (including NSF funded climate researchers) < Congress < voters.
So as voters we actually do need to research and understand the big issues, just as a shareholder needs to research the companies they invest in.
Of course, perhaps the U.S. should not be run as a consumer co-op (aka democracy). I am sympathetic with that view, but that is really a whole other discussion. But for now it is, so people do have to take an interest in the issues.
It would be nice if we could just delegate these issues to a class of experts. But how we do know if these experts are on the right track? At some point we must do at least some verification ourselves. There is no other option.
I am not an expert in climate science. But I do know quite a bit about politics and government. In college I began to major in political science. But I found that the researchers in political science were incredibly off base. Their research was wrong, irrelevant, and used models that couldn't properly work.
Thus I do not have a strong, baseline trust in academia. My experience in political science shows me that systematic error can flourish among "scientists". These leaked emails illustrate the climate "scientists" are not scientists seeking truth wherever it may lead, but are advocates with an institutional agenda.
So we have climate scientists who are smart, but who should be treated with the same amount as trust as the prosecutor lawyer in a criminal case. We have the hoi polloi who are ignorant. That leaves us, smart, thoughtful people, who have to make the best judgments we can.
Your job isn't really to study climate change and come to a conclusion. It's to elect someone who you think will do a good job of that.
It would be impossible to be informed enough about every issue you'd need to vote on while not working full-time on that sort of thing. Legislators have entire staffs for that purpose.
I realize I'm not thinking like the average American in that respect. They think something along the lines of "I think gay marriage is wrong, so therefore I'll vote for someone else who thinks gay marriage is wrong. He agrees with me so his decision making process must be good." To choose candidates by that system you'd have to be an expert on a large number of topics that 99.9999% of voters are not.
Instead my goal is to figure out which politician is most intelligent, hardest working, and has the correct motivation, and assume that they and their staffs will come to better conclusions than me since that's their job and not mine. I don't assume that someone who agrees with my relatively uninformed notions on things like climate change or the economy is correct just for that reason.
So I guess my point is, there is no relevant judgment we can make on the global warming topic. Consumer behavior is a drop in the bucket (if the CO2 problem really exists) and its going to take radical public policy changes that we do not get a direct vote on to fix.
I have two reasons for caring about climate change:
1) I find it intellectually fascinating. To me it unfolds like a mystery story, except one in which we're all involved. Thus I want to find the truth simply because I innately enjoy truth seeking.
2) Elite opinion matters for policy making. It might not matter directly. But maybe it's a NY Times reporter who reads a comment on Hacker News, that causes him to write an article differently, that is read by a Senate staffer. Or maybe it's a Hacker News reader who sees the article and decides to alter his career path and become a top scientist. Or maybe its a reader who forwards an article to his friend who is a policy maker.
Hacker News is a site of elite, intellectually curious people. Talking about important, controversial issues in any technical subject should be fair game. What's important is that whatever topic we discuss on this site, we discuss well (thoughtfully, politely, and backed with evidence).
All of them.
Would you advocate flagging all posts about science, or just scientific matters that are controversial?
Neither. Just the ones that are political.
This is unmodified, untampered data from climate scientists. Do you know how rare that is! Now you do. Of course we're excited!
Skeptics Handbook http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming
Skeptics Handbook II http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/skeptics-handbook-ii-global...
It's always been about the science.
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?
http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/20/hackers-steal-in...
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.
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.
They've appropriated it for their own ends, sure. But that's what academia everywhere does without having to give much of a justification.
From http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220:
"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.
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?
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.
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?
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".