6 ms·

CRU Admits to Dumping Raw Climate Data

53 points by mnemonicsloth 17y ago

mnemonicsloth 17y ago
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843517 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843517 Which is a strange read. "Looks like the National Review was way out front on this one," is not something I expected to say to myself today.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  This is turning into the biggest science story of the year, and for weeks most of the MSM refused to cover it. I'm not trying to allege bias, just making the observation that stories that don't fit into pre-existing media narratives take a lot of push to get out there. Usually it's the fringe media that keeps kicking and kicking until somebody finally picks it up. If I remember correctly, the National Enquirer was running stories of John Edwards' love child for months before anybody else would pick it up. (And love or hate Edwards, it was a real story that deserved national attention) I wonder if blogging has changed any of this? Sure would be great to read a study on how this type of anti-narrative story breaks today versus 20 years ago.
  - spamizbad 17y ago
    There are several reasons why the media is reluctant to cover it. 1) The emails were acquired through an illegal hack, which makes them a highly tainted source for journalists who aren't pushing an agenda. Naturally journalists who are pushing the opposite agenda will ignore it, as those who who are skeptics will readily jump on them. 2) This leak was initially trumpeted as a the end of AGW theory, and has since turned out to be nothing more than scientists being douchey and unprofessional wrt their critics. Smoke, but no fire. There's an important lesson in marketing here: Make sure you set appropriate consumer expectations. 3) (US only) It's technically foreign news, and the American media generally doesn't do foreign news unless it pertains to our various wars or some 3rd world dictator says something bad about America. Long story short, this would be covered in the MSM if: 1) The emails were acquired through a whistleblower with legal protection 2) it wasn't over-sold in the blogosphere the moment it broke 3) US Media actually gave a crap about what happens outside of America's borders that doesn't involve a military escapade.
    - gaius 17y ago
      In answer to your point 3, hasn't Obama just set energy policy, which will affect the living expenses of every American, on promises he made in Denmark? This is a story of great relevance to the domestic American news consumer.
      - davidw 17y ago
        > This is a story of great relevance to the domestic American news consumer. Which means it probably is not hacker news. (Also, consider whether we want to see both sides of this issue posting their stories - if the anti-warming folks post a lot of these, the other guys are sure to want to see their side all over the site as well. I think it belongs elsewhere)
        mnemonicsloth 17y ago
        I posted this article precisely because I'm not one of "the anti-warming folks". The tribal aspect of this debate somehow manages to be both boring and corrosive, so I ignore it when I can. This article is special because its facts aren't in dispute, and yet still tend to cast doubt on the consensus view that I, at least, thought was the truth. The discussion between "the anti-warming folks" and "the other guys" has been ongoing for some time on this site: http://searchyc.com/submissions/global+warming http://searchyc.com/submissions/global+warming Have you always taken the position that global warming is not hacker news? Or has something changed so that is was hacker news before and isn't any longer?
        davidw 17y ago
        I flag anything that has anything to do with it, pro or contra.
        mnemonicsloth 17y ago
        Bravo. HN would be a better site if more people did that. Particularly on Sundays. I have a few bête noir topics I try to moderate away, too, but I tend to draw the line at explicit endorsements of one side over another in a tribal conflict. I can see how it would make sense to just excise tribal issues and have done, though.
  - patio11 17y ago
    I'm not trying to allege bias I'll allege bias for you, then. There is no conceivable way that you could produce documentary evidence of a Republican saying, in as many words, "Destroy this so that it can't get used for a Freedom of Information (Act) request" and not have that be the front page of the NYT the next day. I don't care if he was the Deputy Undersecretary of the Department of Who Gives A Care, that sort of thing is normally blood in the water. It attracts front page attention, massive follow-up coverage, and Pulitzer prizes. When it targets the right people.
    - spamizbad 17y ago
      You mean like the George W. Bush White house email scandal? It got MSM some coverage, not front page, and certainly no awards. In fact, it was only noteworthy because it was a meta-scandal that lived inside the far bigger one of the firing of US attorneys, a story that was basically set ablaze not by the media but by the moronic testimony of Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling before congress. And it was never wrapped-up or followed-up on beyond diggings from the progressive blogosphere because after AGAG was hung out of dry the media deemed its job complete. Anyway, your comparison is apples and oranges. Political scandals will always carry more weight in the public eye than science ones, if for no other reason than the fact that their hands are directly on the levers of power, whereas scientists just use a (relatively) small amount of taxpayer money compared to what is doled out in the halls of political power. And their impact on our daily lives is significantly less direct than even a mid-level staffer.
      - cwan 17y ago
        Do you also not see this as a political scandal given the policy measures that are being proposed in response to the conclusions some of these people make? These political measures being proposed have a real impact (financial and social) that far exceeds any war in recent years. Personally, I suspect that the AGW thesis probably stands given that it's more than this handful of apparently corrupt scientists. That being said, where does the science stand if we take out these suspect models and the ensuing research that was based on them? Given these scandals, why is there not more of a movement to make these climate models and data in effect open source? The level of secrecy, defensiveness and arrogance as shown by example in the Scientific American is especially troubling when you realize that practically all this research was publicly funded. Why are there non disclosure agreements on the data to begin with? (A real question - does anyone know?)
  - mhartl 17y ago
    I'll join in with alleging bias. Here's a representative sample from the Los Angeles Times front page a few weeks ago (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-climate-mtkenya10-2009nov10,0,3451662.story http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-climate-...): From a tree-shaded plateau facing Mt. Kenya, the worshipers gaze anxiously at its melting ice cap and wonder: Is God dead?...The scientific community is divided over the causes of melting ice caps in Africa. But many experts believe the retreating snow on Mt. Kenya is one of the continent's clearest examples of climate change and global warming. There are two layers of bias here, one obvious and one subtle. Obviously, "The scientific community is divided over the causes of melting ice caps in Africa" means that some experts think the melting is due to global warming, and some experts think it's not. Long-time observers have come to expect the Times (and the MSM generally) to choose the pro-global warming interpretation every time. The subtle bias is that the Times wrote this article at all.
motters 17y ago
I guess that's one way to deal with outliers.
electromagnetic 17y ago
So to put it another way, these 'scientists' purposely made their data unverifiable and thus non-scientific. IMO any adjusted or modified data is unscientific without the original data set and how and why the data was modified the way it was. If you adjust data to normalise it due to the differing global climatic effects of El Nino or La Nina then that's perfectly reasonable, if someone can corroborate what you did and if you did it right. However with no original data set, and apparently no mention of how or why the data was modified the way it was leaves it completely unverifiable and might as well be entirely fabricated.
- thras 17y ago
  No, no. I agree with you that we need to hold them over the fire on this. But "purposely" is going too far. The best explanation, until proven otherwise, is that somebody goofed.
  - patio11 17y ago
    I tend to think good faith is a nice assumption to have, but it should be rebuttable. For example, if someone were to say "I'd rather destroy my data than let it fall to a Freedom of Infomation Act request", and then they were served with a Freedom of Information Act request, and then the data were to be suddenly missing...
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    Yeah, "goofed" by sending emails that talk about a plan to delete data rather than turn it over. ;)
    - Anechoic 17y ago
      Were there emails that actually talked about deleting data? I've seen the emails that talked about deleting emails, but not raw data.
      - patio11 17y ago
Tichy 17y ago
So all the weather stations in the world sent their data to CRU, which then deleted it. Because the data dates 100s of years back, it was not in digital form, so they never copied it. All the little field researchers just trusted the big momma CRU to keep their data for them, and now it is all lost. Climate science is dead, anti-warming campaigners have won. Boo-Hoo!
jellicle 17y ago
I think there's a forum somewhere on theglaciersarenotmelting.com that needs these sort of posts a lot more than this forum does.
- thras 17y ago
  I like reading what the HN crowd thinks about this. And I like the articles posted so far on it...but yeah, you're probably right.
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ars 17y ago
"Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity." So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence based on unreleased data is worthless. If I can't reproduce your work, you are a crackpot (isn't that the definition of junk science?) I can't reproduce their work, so they are crackpots. (Or deliberate frauds.) Did they even record their methodology on how they adjusted the numbers? Maybe we can undo that methodology? If they didn't record even that, then they are incompetent. And I see no reason to pay attention to incompetents. What if someone made a simple arithmetic error? Without the raw data, and the methodology of adjustment how could we ever know? Their conclusions are worthless, and unless there are others (are there?), then there is no evidence the earth is warming.
- chez17 17y ago
  "So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence based on unreleased data is worthless." Unfortunately this is true. As someone who has never doubted that global warming was man made (yes, those last leaked emails were private conversations and held no smoking gun whatsoever. People were reading into one term used ten years ago to sex up a graph), this is embarrassing. This, more than any other thing has made me reconsider my views. The problem is that glaciers and polar ice are melting at unprecedented rates, this is unarguable. The earth is getting warming in those areas and it is effecting the sea levels and biodiversity of the planet. How do we tell if it's man made? What can we do to stop it? Remember this doesn't prove that global warming isn't real.
  - timr 17y ago
    No, it's not even remotely close to true. What happened here? They threw away their copy of the raw data. That data still exists (they gathered it from public repositories), and the methods of the paper describe what they did. You could reconstruct the results. Essentially, the "skeptics" are getting worked up over what amounts to throwing away the lab notebooks for a paper published two decades ago. Even if you assume malfeasance on the part of these authors (an assumption that does not appear to be justified), you'd have to disregard the results of thousands of other papers to leap to the (wild) conclusion that "there is no evidence the earth is warming."
crocowhile 17y ago
This article is mere bullshit. CRU never dumped their own data. They just dumped their own copy of the data they got from other sources, because anyway they could not give those around. The original are safe where they belong. Also, this is hardly news related to the hack considered that this information was put online on August 11 2009. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/comment-page-14/#comment-144845 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cr...
protomyth 17y ago
It would actually be very interesting to get a graph of all the papers that are based on the altered data. I get the feeling it would be a significant percentage, and not having the raw data would make things painful. humm..... citeseer with evidence / result tracking....
danbmil99 17y ago
finally, a reasonable discussion of this issue. For over two years I've heard rumblings from my sience-y friends that GW was being overhyped. I don't know if anyone had any specific data, but there is some sort of pattern-recognition thing where you just smell that something is fishy. None of this means that human-caused GW isn't a fact -- what it means is that proving it and quantifying it are turning out to be very difficult. What the email scam shows is that people on the 'right' side of the debate (ie proponents of human-caused change) at some point went over a bit to the dark side, and decided that "failure is not an option" -- ends justify means, etc. This saddens me because I don't want 'my' side (liberal, rational, forward-thinking) to be guilty of the same anti-science bullshit that GWB and crew were. If science becomes completely politicized, it will cease to be science. Where will be then?
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53 points by mnemonicsloth 17y ago

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843517 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=843517 Which is a strange read. "Looks like the National Review was way out front on this one," is not something I expected to say to myself today.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
This is turning into the biggest science story of the year, and for weeks most of the MSM refused to cover it. I'm not trying to allege bias, just making the observation that stories that don't fit into pre-existing media narratives take a lot of push to get out there. Usually it's the fringe media that keeps kicking and kicking until somebody finally picks it up. If I remember correctly, the National Enquirer was running stories of John Edwards' love child for months before anybody else would pick it up. (And love or hate Edwards, it was a real story that deserved national attention) I wonder if blogging has changed any of this? Sure would be great to read a study on how this type of anti-narrative story breaks today versus 20 years ago.
- spamizbad 17y ago
  There are several reasons why the media is reluctant to cover it. 1) The emails were acquired through an illegal hack, which makes them a highly tainted source for journalists who aren't pushing an agenda. Naturally journalists who are pushing the opposite agenda will ignore it, as those who who are skeptics will readily jump on them. 2) This leak was initially trumpeted as a the end of AGW theory, and has since turned out to be nothing more than scientists being douchey and unprofessional wrt their critics. Smoke, but no fire. There's an important lesson in marketing here: Make sure you set appropriate consumer expectations. 3) (US only) It's technically foreign news, and the American media generally doesn't do foreign news unless it pertains to our various wars or some 3rd world dictator says something bad about America. Long story short, this would be covered in the MSM if: 1) The emails were acquired through a whistleblower with legal protection 2) it wasn't over-sold in the blogosphere the moment it broke 3) US Media actually gave a crap about what happens outside of America's borders that doesn't involve a military escapade.
  - gaius 17y ago
    In answer to your point 3, hasn't Obama just set energy policy, which will affect the living expenses of every American, on promises he made in Denmark? This is a story of great relevance to the domestic American news consumer.
    - davidw 17y ago
      > This is a story of great relevance to the domestic American news consumer. Which means it probably is not hacker news. (Also, consider whether we want to see both sides of this issue posting their stories - if the anti-warming folks post a lot of these, the other guys are sure to want to see their side all over the site as well. I think it belongs elsewhere)
      - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
        I posted this article precisely because I'm not one of "the anti-warming folks". The tribal aspect of this debate somehow manages to be both boring and corrosive, so I ignore it when I can. This article is special because its facts aren't in dispute, and yet still tend to cast doubt on the consensus view that I, at least, thought was the truth. The discussion between "the anti-warming folks" and "the other guys" has been ongoing for some time on this site: http://searchyc.com/submissions/global+warming http://searchyc.com/submissions/global+warming Have you always taken the position that global warming is not hacker news? Or has something changed so that is was hacker news before and isn't any longer?
        davidw 17y ago
        I flag anything that has anything to do with it, pro or contra.
        mnemonicsloth 17y ago
        Bravo. HN would be a better site if more people did that. Particularly on Sundays. I have a few bête noir topics I try to moderate away, too, but I tend to draw the line at explicit endorsements of one side over another in a tribal conflict. I can see how it would make sense to just excise tribal issues and have done, though.
- patio11 17y ago
  I'm not trying to allege bias I'll allege bias for you, then. There is no conceivable way that you could produce documentary evidence of a Republican saying, in as many words, "Destroy this so that it can't get used for a Freedom of Information (Act) request" and not have that be the front page of the NYT the next day. I don't care if he was the Deputy Undersecretary of the Department of Who Gives A Care, that sort of thing is normally blood in the water. It attracts front page attention, massive follow-up coverage, and Pulitzer prizes. When it targets the right people.
  - spamizbad 17y ago
    You mean like the George W. Bush White house email scandal? It got MSM some coverage, not front page, and certainly no awards. In fact, it was only noteworthy because it was a meta-scandal that lived inside the far bigger one of the firing of US attorneys, a story that was basically set ablaze not by the media but by the moronic testimony of Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling before congress. And it was never wrapped-up or followed-up on beyond diggings from the progressive blogosphere because after AGAG was hung out of dry the media deemed its job complete. Anyway, your comparison is apples and oranges. Political scandals will always carry more weight in the public eye than science ones, if for no other reason than the fact that their hands are directly on the levers of power, whereas scientists just use a (relatively) small amount of taxpayer money compared to what is doled out in the halls of political power. And their impact on our daily lives is significantly less direct than even a mid-level staffer.
    - cwan 17y ago
      Do you also not see this as a political scandal given the policy measures that are being proposed in response to the conclusions some of these people make? These political measures being proposed have a real impact (financial and social) that far exceeds any war in recent years. Personally, I suspect that the AGW thesis probably stands given that it's more than this handful of apparently corrupt scientists. That being said, where does the science stand if we take out these suspect models and the ensuing research that was based on them? Given these scandals, why is there not more of a movement to make these climate models and data in effect open source? The level of secrecy, defensiveness and arrogance as shown by example in the Scientific American is especially troubling when you realize that practically all this research was publicly funded. Why are there non disclosure agreements on the data to begin with? (A real question - does anyone know?)
- mhartl 17y ago
  I'll join in with alleging bias. Here's a representative sample from the Los Angeles Times front page a few weeks ago (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-climate-mtkenya10-2009nov10,0,3451662.story http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-climate-...): From a tree-shaded plateau facing Mt. Kenya, the worshipers gaze anxiously at its melting ice cap and wonder: Is God dead?...The scientific community is divided over the causes of melting ice caps in Africa. But many experts believe the retreating snow on Mt. Kenya is one of the continent's clearest examples of climate change and global warming. There are two layers of bias here, one obvious and one subtle. Obviously, "The scientific community is divided over the causes of melting ice caps in Africa" means that some experts think the melting is due to global warming, and some experts think it's not. Long-time observers have come to expect the Times (and the MSM generally) to choose the pro-global warming interpretation every time. The subtle bias is that the Times wrote this article at all.

motters 17y ago

I guess that's one way to deal with outliers.

electromagnetic 17y ago

So to put it another way, these 'scientists' purposely made their data unverifiable and thus non-scientific. IMO any adjusted or modified data is unscientific without the original data set and how and why the data was modified the way it was. If you adjust data to normalise it due to the differing global climatic effects of El Nino or La Nina then that's perfectly reasonable, if someone can corroborate what you did and if you did it right. However with no original data set, and apparently no mention of how or why the data was modified the way it was leaves it completely unverifiable and might as well be entirely fabricated.

thras 17y ago
No, no. I agree with you that we need to hold them over the fire on this. But "purposely" is going too far. The best explanation, until proven otherwise, is that somebody goofed.
- patio11 17y ago
  I tend to think good faith is a nice assumption to have, but it should be rebuttable. For example, if someone were to say "I'd rather destroy my data than let it fall to a Freedom of Infomation Act request", and then they were served with a Freedom of Information Act request, and then the data were to be suddenly missing...
- randallsquared 17y ago
  Yeah, "goofed" by sending emails that talk about a plan to delete data rather than turn it over. ;)
  - Anechoic 17y ago
    Were there emails that actually talked about deleting data? I've seen the emails that talked about deleting emails, but not raw data.
    - patio11 17y ago

Tichy 17y ago

So all the weather stations in the world sent their data to CRU, which then deleted it. Because the data dates 100s of years back, it was not in digital form, so they never copied it. All the little field researchers just trusted the big momma CRU to keep their data for them, and now it is all lost. Climate science is dead, anti-warming campaigners have won. Boo-Hoo!

jellicle 17y ago

I think there's a forum somewhere on theglaciersarenotmelting.com that needs these sort of posts a lot more than this forum does.

thras 17y ago
I like reading what the HN crowd thinks about this. And I like the articles posted so far on it...but yeah, you're probably right.

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ars 17y ago

"Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity." So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence based on unreleased data is worthless. If I can't reproduce your work, you are a crackpot (isn't that the definition of junk science?) I can't reproduce their work, so they are crackpots. (Or deliberate frauds.) Did they even record their methodology on how they adjusted the numbers? Maybe we can undo that methodology? If they didn't record even that, then they are incompetent. And I see no reason to pay attention to incompetents. What if someone made a simple arithmetic error? Without the raw data, and the methodology of adjustment how could we ever know? Their conclusions are worthless, and unless there are others (are there?), then there is no evidence the earth is warming.

chez17 17y ago
"So basically there is no evidence the earth is warming? Because evidence based on unreleased data is worthless." Unfortunately this is true. As someone who has never doubted that global warming was man made (yes, those last leaked emails were private conversations and held no smoking gun whatsoever. People were reading into one term used ten years ago to sex up a graph), this is embarrassing. This, more than any other thing has made me reconsider my views. The problem is that glaciers and polar ice are melting at unprecedented rates, this is unarguable. The earth is getting warming in those areas and it is effecting the sea levels and biodiversity of the planet. How do we tell if it's man made? What can we do to stop it? Remember this doesn't prove that global warming isn't real.
- timr 17y ago
  No, it's not even remotely close to true. What happened here? They threw away their copy of the raw data. That data still exists (they gathered it from public repositories), and the methods of the paper describe what they did. You could reconstruct the results. Essentially, the "skeptics" are getting worked up over what amounts to throwing away the lab notebooks for a paper published two decades ago. Even if you assume malfeasance on the part of these authors (an assumption that does not appear to be justified), you'd have to disregard the results of thousands of other papers to leap to the (wild) conclusion that "there is no evidence the earth is warming."

crocowhile 17y ago

This article is mere bullshit. CRU never dumped their own data. They just dumped their own copy of the data they got from other sources, because anyway they could not give those around. The original are safe where they belong. Also, this is hardly news related to the hack considered that this information was put online on August 11 2009. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/comment-page-14/#comment-144845 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cr...

protomyth 17y ago

It would actually be very interesting to get a graph of all the papers that are based on the altered data. I get the feeling it would be a significant percentage, and not having the raw data would make things painful. humm..... citeseer with evidence / result tracking....

danbmil99 17y ago

finally, a reasonable discussion of this issue. For over two years I've heard rumblings from my sience-y friends that GW was being overhyped. I don't know if anyone had any specific data, but there is some sort of pattern-recognition thing where you just smell that something is fishy. None of this means that human-caused GW isn't a fact -- what it means is that proving it and quantifying it are turning out to be very difficult. What the email scam shows is that people on the 'right' side of the debate (ie proponents of human-caused change) at some point went over a bit to the dark side, and decided that "failure is not an option" -- ends justify means, etc. This saddens me because I don't want 'my' side (liberal, rational, forward-thinking) to be guilty of the same anti-science bullshit that GWB and crew were. If science becomes completely politicized, it will cease to be science. Where will be then?

doulaimi 17y ago

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