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The problem is, how trustworthy is any of the provided data, when we have seen that the historical records are edited (in the climategate nonsense) https://web

The problem is, how trustworthy is any of the provided data, when we have seen that the historical records are edited (in the climategate nonsense) https://web.archive.org/web/20160322230859/http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160322230859/http://blogs.tele... "Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP): ……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."

boringg 3y ago
Man that link you provided is quite an entertaining fiction read circa 2009. Good thing I followed the author's lead: "If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. "
hotnfresh 3y ago
For anyone else taken aback by the nostalgia-inducing mention of "climate gate" and wondering what's up: no, there don't appear to have been any new developments, it continues to be the case that scientific misconduct was not uncovered.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Its very hard to find any of the emails to make up one's own mind. The wiki page is pure information management. That is one of the few places where you can see what the researchers said in their own words.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Your waybackmachine archive link? That page is the opposite of convincing. Half the examples are "climate scientists human, news at 11", another quarter don't say what the framing claims they do (unless further context shifts their meaning—but that's not provided, what is provided does not say what the framing claims it does) which makes me really wary of the remaining 1/4 or so (strongly suspect their meaning shifts to be rather less nefarious as one expands context). And that's a good source for this?
    - verisimi 3y ago
      Please provide a link to the original emails if you can, so we can see what was said.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        They appear to be all over Scribd, but I'm not convinced it's worth creating an account to see more than the first page. The case for there being anything worth reading doesn't look strong. You seem to feel otherwise, though, so go for it. First page of DDG with naïve search terms, multiple results. Or, here: https://www.scribd.com/document/23678362/Climate-Gate-Emails https://www.scribd.com/document/23678362/Climate-Gate-Emails Can't verify it's unaltered (how would I?) but it's 261 pages and the first page reads like it's raw emails. That seems like a plausible length for ~1000 emails, assuming quite a few are very short. Not sure if it's organized so that it's easy to follow email chains. Climate change skeptics seem to share around some other PDFs, but they're all heavily edited and contain only a small part of the total set of stolen data, often not even very many complete emails, just parts of them, as far as I can find. They seem to have no trouble getting access to them and are keen to share excerpts, which appear to survive just fine—reddit, internet archive, their PDFs are everywhere—but not the whole thing.
space_fountain 3y ago
Every time I hear people talk about leaked emails proving a conspiracy I'm reminded of an incident on a Minecraft server I played on when I was 16. One faction (us) leaked some internal chats from another group, they made them look pretty bad, but we were selective about it. We choose the bad quotes and then implied more meaning on top of the words. We took things out of context, and then there was the fact that if anyone had leaked our slack (this was before discord took off), they'd have been able to paint a pretty nasty picture of us. Also here's the wikipedia article about this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c.... I think Scott Alexander was right when he pointed out that scientists are willing to say pretty unpopular things in anonymous polls, but the vast majority still report, even anonymously that they believe in human caused global warming
- jpadkins 3y ago
  human caused global warming is a low bar. That part (humans create CO2, CO2 creates some warming) is not debated. The debate is catastrophic change due to CO2, which requires runaway positive feedback loops beyond what CO2 alone can do. A better anonymous scientist poll would be: Will human sources cause catastrophic warming or results by 2100?
  - space_fountain 3y ago
    I think the precisely better poll would be: "Will the consequences of continuing to emit CO2 at the current rate be greater than the cost of reaching net 0 by 2100?", but regardless of how weak the idea that humans aren't at least contributing to global warming that's exactly what the link verisimi posted seems to me to be doing. Yes it's true that we're very unlikely to tip Earth into becoming another venus, but tipping it into becoming another Pliocene on a short timetable would be pretty catastrophic. I don't expect global warming to kill me or render the earth uninhabitable, but things aren't looking very sustainable right now and I think most scientists if polled would say we aren't currently doing enough to address the problem.
    - 3y ago

boringg 3y ago

Man that link you provided is quite an entertaining fiction read circa 2009. Good thing I followed the author's lead: "If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. "

hotnfresh 3y ago

For anyone else taken aback by the nostalgia-inducing mention of "climate gate" and wondering what's up: no, there don't appear to have been any new developments, it continues to be the case that scientific misconduct was not uncovered.

verisimi 3y ago
Its very hard to find any of the emails to make up one's own mind. The wiki page is pure information management. That is one of the few places where you can see what the researchers said in their own words.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Your waybackmachine archive link? That page is the opposite of convincing. Half the examples are "climate scientists human, news at 11", another quarter don't say what the framing claims they do (unless further context shifts their meaning—but that's not provided, what is provided does not say what the framing claims it does) which makes me really wary of the remaining 1/4 or so (strongly suspect their meaning shifts to be rather less nefarious as one expands context). And that's a good source for this?
  - verisimi 3y ago
    Please provide a link to the original emails if you can, so we can see what was said.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      They appear to be all over Scribd, but I'm not convinced it's worth creating an account to see more than the first page. The case for there being anything worth reading doesn't look strong. You seem to feel otherwise, though, so go for it. First page of DDG with naïve search terms, multiple results. Or, here: https://www.scribd.com/document/23678362/Climate-Gate-Emails https://www.scribd.com/document/23678362/Climate-Gate-Emails Can't verify it's unaltered (how would I?) but it's 261 pages and the first page reads like it's raw emails. That seems like a plausible length for ~1000 emails, assuming quite a few are very short. Not sure if it's organized so that it's easy to follow email chains. Climate change skeptics seem to share around some other PDFs, but they're all heavily edited and contain only a small part of the total set of stolen data, often not even very many complete emails, just parts of them, as far as I can find. They seem to have no trouble getting access to them and are keen to share excerpts, which appear to survive just fine—reddit, internet archive, their PDFs are everywhere—but not the whole thing.

space_fountain 3y ago

Every time I hear people talk about leaked emails proving a conspiracy I'm reminded of an incident on a Minecraft server I played on when I was 16. One faction (us) leaked some internal chats from another group, they made them look pretty bad, but we were selective about it. We choose the bad quotes and then implied more meaning on top of the words. We took things out of context, and then there was the fact that if anyone had leaked our slack (this was before discord took off), they'd have been able to paint a pretty nasty picture of us. Also here's the wikipedia article about this incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c.... I think Scott Alexander was right when he pointed out that scientists are willing to say pretty unpopular things in anonymous polls, but the vast majority still report, even anonymously that they believe in human caused global warming

jpadkins 3y ago
human caused global warming is a low bar. That part (humans create CO2, CO2 creates some warming) is not debated. The debate is catastrophic change due to CO2, which requires runaway positive feedback loops beyond what CO2 alone can do. A better anonymous scientist poll would be: Will human sources cause catastrophic warming or results by 2100?
- space_fountain 3y ago
  I think the precisely better poll would be: "Will the consequences of continuing to emit CO2 at the current rate be greater than the cost of reaching net 0 by 2100?", but regardless of how weak the idea that humans aren't at least contributing to global warming that's exactly what the link verisimi posted seems to me to be doing. Yes it's true that we're very unlikely to tip Earth into becoming another venus, but tipping it into becoming another Pliocene on a short timetable would be pretty catastrophic. I don't expect global warming to kill me or render the earth uninhabitable, but things aren't looking very sustainable right now and I think most scientists if polled would say we aren't currently doing enough to address the problem.
  - 3y ago