For those of you who don’t know of the blog Bishop Hill, let me say that he is a succinct and careful writer who has earned praise from many (including myself and Steve McIntyre) in taking a difficult niche subject such as the Hockey Stick and paleoclimatology and condensed into into a readable form for the layman. He’s also writing a book about it called: The Hockey Stick Illusion
In his latest post, Climate Cuttings 33, he gives a list of interesting issues he’s identified. I’ve reproduced it below for WUWT readers to consider. Be sure to visit his blog and have a look and drop an encouraging word. – Anthony
If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.
General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.
In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I’ll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.
- Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
- Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
- Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
- Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.(1075403821)
- Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
- Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
- Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
- Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
- Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)
- Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)
- Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
- Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
- Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)
- Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
- Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
- Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
- Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
- Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
- Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)
- Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
- Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
- Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
- Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
- Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
- Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
- Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
- Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
- Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]
- Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
- Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
- Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
- Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
- Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
- Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
- Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
- Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
- Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
- Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
- Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
- Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
- Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
- Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
- Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
- David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
- Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
- Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
- Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)
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Every day when I start my computer at work, a warning pops up reminding me all communication done on their computer is owned by them. There is no “private communication” when it comes to using computers on their network. Nor are emails “deleted” just by hitting the delete key.
One wonders if those requesting others delete their emails realize there a always backups and backups of backups on servers. If they also got the IT department to wipe the server drives, well, that’s another problem they have.
If this was just research understanding how climate affects the growth of trees we probably wouldn’t care. But these guys have had millions of public money, tax-payers money, to develop and propagate the very science, the uncertain science that would now change whole economies and all our lives.
Details of the funding to the lead scientist’s group was released and is on the web for all to see:
http://i46.tinypic.com/4uv13n.png
I tell you, whoever hacked this stuff out of the CRU should be given a medal, or something positive. It is frankly the most frightening stuff I’ve read, even though I don’t understand all of it of course. That these guys try to manipulate the data to reach a preconceived conclusion, it shakes my faith in science. Then again, my faith in science has never been that strong, because I know what some modern scientists have been trying to do – acquire a power and influence all out of proportion to its value.
Keep up the good work posting all this stuff, Anthony.
Another fascinating and highly illuminating insight into how this all works. This time from the documents side of the dump. Translation: Shell International has an apparent financial interest in bringing about CDM (carbon offsets from 3rd world countries applied to industries in 1st world countries), and is willing to supply institutional bribes in order to generate research that supports CDMs.
documents\uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc:
Shell International would give serious consideration to what I referred to in the meeting as a ‘strategic partnership’ with the TC…. 2. Shell’s interest is not in basic science. Any work they support must have a clear and immediate relevance to ‘real-world’ activities. They are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.
Nick Stokes (13:21:15) :
i don’t read it like that. Mann is seriously concerned about Briffa’s data, and the serious implications of it being “warmer” than the Mann/Jones series. Everyone in the IPCC room saw this as a problem if it were included – particularly as to why Keith’s series went the opposite direction to Jones’s and Mann’s series over latitudinal samples. The fix was:
“So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case.”
” Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates”
2 years later, Briffa writes:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=272&filename=1024334440.txt
“Sick to death of Mann stating……”
To a scientist, one senses advocacy, and I garner that Briffa is (was) more the honest scientist than his colleagues.
The tone of the e-mails makes these scientists act lik a gossip chat room. No wonder they did this. What a shame for the school.
Stock analyst is getting cold feet(sic) on AGW fraud.
Remember the old adage: Money is panic.
These words tell us that the AGW fraud is a false religion, in particular the word “sacrilege”:
“What I am writing here may be sacrilege to some people.”
More: “but what happens if Mr. Market decides to price in the possibility of global cooling?”
…-
“Global Cooling?
I woke up on Saturday to see the New York Times headline Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute. The New York Times headline editor was restrained while others were far more outraged. As an example, Mish’s blog stated the story as:
It’s now official. Much of the hype about global warming is nothing but a complete scam.
Thanks to hackers (or an insider) who broke into The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and downloaded 156 megaybytes of data including extremely damaging emails, we now know that data supporting the global warming thesis was completely fabricated.
He went on to detail some of the incriminating emails in his blog post about the alleged conspiracy to fudge the data. You can also see the emails here.
Sunspots and global cooling
Before the news of this hacker break-in, there had already been skepticism about the global warming thesis. I had previously speculated on this topic in a post:
What I am writing here may be sacrilege to some people. The popular consensus about Global Warming is that the Earth is undergoing a warming period caused by the effects of industrialization. However, there is another view that global warming is caused by solar activity – sunspots and solar winds.
Currently, the forecast for the latest solar cycle is that it’s late. Such extended cycles have been associated with cooling periods such as the Little Ice Age experienced a few hundred years ago. Indeed, there have been reports that there is more ice in the Arctic (yes – it’s only one data point) and there has been some hand wringing among the scientists about the timing of the solar cycle.”
“I am not investing based on global cooling as my base case, but what happens if Mr. Market decides to price in the possibility of global cooling?
What do you think that would do to energy demand if the Earth were to undergo a period of global cooling?
What are the possible effects on food production and commodity prices?
Just thinking out loud…”
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3656847
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property. Accessing any computer system without authorisation is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
Phil: I am not familiar with British Law. What is the penalty for obstructing Freedom of Information requests?
“Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, a married couple and EPA lawyers in San Francisco, have been railing against cap-and-trade proposals for a while. Most recently, they had a sharply-worded op-ed in the Washington Post that said current legislation would be ineffective and even counterproductive. ”
This may haunt the EPA.
“Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, or NCEE, submitted his research on the agency’s greenhouse gases endangerment findings and offered a fundamental critique on the EPA’s approach to combating CO2 emissions. But officials refused to share his conclusion in an open internal discussion, claiming his research would have “a very negative impact on our office.” ”
Is our EPA trying to pull the same stunts?
Now to the point. If the EPA does very litte research and relies on the IPCC which also does little research and relies on the quacks that massage data and reports,
how will the EPA fine a company and the company fight to get documents exposed that prove AGW?
The word is (correct or not) that CRU is responding to the crisis – by conducting mass-purges of their files.
Phil Clarke – you suggested that the email accounts and computers they were held on were not government property. This is simply untrue. Universities in the UK are government funded and are subject to all the FOI legislation exactly the same as other branches of government. In fact, the researchers are stretching the case to suggest that Intellectual Property Rights would protect them from having to release their code. It is arguable that the IPR to anything they produce while working for the university belongs to the government, not the individual. That would certainly be the case in Australia, unless a prior arrangement had been made.
I was watching “The Patriot” with Mel Gibson and there is a place where Cornwall is having a “rant” about how “these are just militia” “Just farmers and merchants” or some such… Reminded me a great deal of the “Not Peer Reviewed” rant and the great sniffing pridefulness of the UEA / CRU email about the various folks standing against them… not being ‘real scientists’ and ‘not even peer reviewed’… I found myself fondly picturing us “colonials” being “climate militia” shooting from the bushes and not even peer reviewed…
How unfair of us… Snif…
Geoff Sherrington (17:20:07) :
Geoff,
I don’t read these emails as many people here do, going through looking for gotcha phrases (often with rather ludicrous results). I’m fairly familiar with the sort of correspondence that goes on when people are trying to get publications together etc, and I followed that with interest, and was quite impressed. The general standard of enquiry is high, with cases robustly argued.
I have sympathy with the response of Nate Silver. I don’t think there’s much there. Obviously Phil Jones has a knack for talking his way into trouble, and I guess we’ll hear more about the FOI issue. I’m happy to leave that to the lawyers.
Reading through this thread and others, I can’t get too angry about the occasional disrepectful references to sceptics. Regrettable, of course, but there’s plenty on both sides.
I didn’t see much wrong with 1228330629.txt. It’s just describing what a FOI DOS attack looks like from the other side. It is a big distraction.
One email sequence which did disturb me was one listed by His Grace – 1140554230.txt. This is one of the really bad effects of the hacking and subsequent publicity. The sequence is more or less the complete Journal review process of a significant paper. Now journal review (peer review) has always been confidential, for very important reasons. Trust in that confidentiality enables full frankness (as with secret ballots), and that is vitally important in maintaining scientific standards. It will now take a long time to restore.
evanmjones (18:23:47) :
“The word is (correct or not) that CRU is responding to the crisis – by conducting mass-purges of their files.”
Not that there’s anything left to hide… no, no, of course not ;o)
If “The Team” shows up, Copenhagen could wind up being really interesting after all, eh?
What is perhaps most disturbing of all about these revelations is the extent to which the Team were simply doing the bidding of their political masters, the IPCC. Will this scandal reach the stage where one of the Team breaks ranks and attempts to offload the blame on those higher up the foodchain? (There are plenty of precedents, but I don’t want to invoke Godwin’s Law)
Nick Stokes
its not so much the looking for catch phrases as what I see as a level headed/complacent, taken for granted dialogue connected to contriving for results that agree with the objective -to prove unequivocally AGW-. Ok there is the occasional hostility and p*** take of doubters who don’t take the advocacy line in science. Why should they bother with *sceptics* afterall? – acting like overlords gives them that power, however, its the secretiveness of the process that’s also being revealed. I can understand that keeping out difficult individuals who know/understand enough to pose tricky questions puts accepted climate understanding into doubt, but that isn’t peer review. Its censorship though i’m sure you can gloss over that one too.
Phil Clarke (15:19:42) :
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property.
Prove it.
I see nothing here showing these were private gmail or aol accounts. I see a great deal of footers showing typical official affiliations. I see folks discussing their work product as public employees. (Typically, using non-approved communications to hold corporate data and work product are offenses against employment policy. For any communications to the USA, it will violate SARBOX requirements that work related data be kept and archived for the required intervals. I presume you are not accusing these folks breaking US law by circumventing SARBOX, are you? Don’t know if the UK has a similar law, but would expect one.)
Accessing any computer system without authorisation
Prove it was without authorization. I’ve seen no evidence that it was not any of:
1) An FOIA product.
2) An authorized insider leaking.
3) An off site tape and data extract (i.e. not a “computer system”).
4) Archived copies from one of the recipients, leaked to salve conscience.
5) Archived copies from a BCCd recipient for same.
6) Upper management, or any other official agency that has authorized access, leaking the documents as part of a scorched earth damage control for the upper ranks (it happens…).
You have a ways to go to prove those negatives…
is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
But it was done “for the greater good!”. It is now allowed, under English precedent, to break the law if it holds off what the party doing it believes is a terrible thing. And lord knows the AGW fantasy is a terrible thing. So I think they are completely justified, even if it was ‘unauthorized’. Prove it isn’t.
Phil Clarke (15:19:42) :
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property.
Prove it.
I see nothing here showing these were private gmail or aol accounts. I see a great deal of footers showing typical official affiliations. I see folks discussing their work product as public employees. (Typically, using non-approved communications to hold corporate data and work product are offenses against employment policy. For any communications to the USA, it will violate SARBOX requirements that work related data be kept and archived for the required intervals. I presume you are not accusing these folks breaking US law by circumventing SARBOX, are you? Don’t know if the UK has a similar law, but would expect one.)
Accessing any computer system without authorisation
Prove it was without authorization. I’ve seen no evidence that it was not any of:
1) An FOIA product.
2) An authorized insider leaking.
3) An off site tape and data extract (i.e. not a “computer system”).
4) Archived copies from one of the recipients, leaked to salve conscience.
5) Archived copies from a BCCd recipient for same.
6) Upper management, or any other official agency that has authorized access, leaking the documents as part of a scorched earth damage control for the upper ranks (it happens…).
You have a ways to go to prove those negatives…
is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
But it was done “for the greater good!”. It is now allowed, under English precedent, to break the law if it holds off what the party doing it believes is a terrible thing. And lord knows the AGW fantasy is a terrible thing. So I think they are completely justified, even if it was ‘unauthorized’. Prove it isn’t.
***************************
Nick Stokes (18:48:31) :
I didn’t see much wrong with 1228330629.txt. It’s just describing what a FOI DOS attack looks like from the other side. It is a big distraction.
***************************
This is pure hubris. FOI requests are most certainly not Denial of Service attacks. Again, if the Team had used only raw data that could be forwarded to the journals (and also if the journals had abided by their own rules), then there would have been no necessity for FOI requests. The use of confidential data has no place in science.
I think that a fair possibility of what has happened here is being ignored. If you were in great danger of having to disclose incriminating documents in a FOIA case, what would be the best way to taint the documents before you were forced to release them?
How about this, release them yourself on the internet anonymously and claim that they were “hacked”. Now, They are tainted and doubt about their authenticity, accuracy and legality are raised by honestly concerned individuals. Muddy the waters and only the “CRU” benefit.
DR (17:33:14) : One wonders if those requesting others delete their emails realize there a always backups and backups of backups on servers. If they also got the IT department to wipe the server drives, well, that’s another problem they have.
Under SARBOX (US law) it is illegal to erase the archive copies. The Corporate Officers can do a “Perp Walk” if it happens (not a lot of excuses allowed either…). Since these folks did business in the USA (i.e. their email and visits to GISS and NCAR) at least part of their work will be subject to US law. Hope their IT guy knows SARBOX requirements…)
I would not want to be the IT guy who was asked to do the deleting. I would refuse. (Fired vs jail time, not a hard decision… besides, the “Chief Mumble” would reinstate me for saving his tush from the slammer and making his VP do the Perp Walk instead…)
Also, as you noted, email servers have LOTS of backups. Typically the month endings and year endings are kept for years to decades. Deleting would take a great many hours to days to do, if it were doable at all. I’ve typically had a system where the ‘retrieve from offsite’ required a fairly high authorization. Retrieving all the copies would take special management authorization. We also had a “3 locations” requirement for really important things (like legally mandated email retention…) with an on site copy, a remote ‘hot site” and an offsite tape archive. The whole system is set up to prevent accidental or deliberate loss of the data…
For some very important archives, we also had an ‘undocumented 4th copy’ stored in the local bank vault. It was known to the upper IT management, and their VP, and not much else. I did the copy (as department manager) and gave it to my boss who was the only guy who had authorization / keys to the box at the bank. (HIS boss had a letter granting access if my boss was no longer with the company…).
Heck, even service downtime is not supposed to happen (either with parallel servers or remote hot sites and sometimes both)… I’ve made systems with 2 redundant copies on 2 RAID 5 servers at both the local and remote CoLo site with hot failover AND backups of each server at both their local and their offsite archives. I make that 8 copies right there (not counting the redundancy in the monthly and yearly archives of each…)
NetApp has a nice package aimed exactly at SARBOX compliance that has an “impossible to delete” feature. It is so that the management that buys the box knows they can not go to jail because some underling followed a Director or VP level order to delete things. It is literally the case that the data archive prevents any deletion. The Chief Mumble can sleep nights knowing that the underlings will get hung, not him. Sells well, too.
As I mentioned once before: Petard, meet hoist…
(FWIW, I take great glee at watching Congress Critters hung with copies of emails, text messages, IMs, etc. They created this monster. Let them live with it…)
Oh, and any emails sent TO any US address will be on those US servers and stored per SARBOX mandates… so delete all you want, the ghosts will arise…
And that doesn’t even count the copies folks save on their individual machines that go into a different set of backups… or that pass through interdepartmental gateway servers or intercompany servers with all their backups… and if anyone used an external email provider, well, then it’s on their servers with their backups…
And folks wonder why I discourage any email beyond “call me”…
Terryskinner (05:53:39) :
And still the scandals keep on coming! Very interesting piece here by American Thinker about what the e-mails reveal about the CRU attitude to funding.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/cru_files_betray_climate_alarm.html
A very interesting article… (I took the ‘sca’ off the front of the url so it ought to work now…)
Michael Mann should forever more be known as Michael Venkamann a la Ghostbusters fame:
Dean Yeager: Doctor… Venkman. The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge… or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable! You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman
I’m a global warming agnostic. This episode hasn’t really changed that. Here is what I think is going on:
When the possibility of global warming from CO2 became prominent, everyone involved was faced with a dilemma. If what Hansen and some others were saying was true, we were going to be in deep trouble and we needed to take urgent (and expensive) action. The problem was (and is) that establishing cause and affect in something as complex as climate is incredibly difficult. How certain did the science have to be before it was rational to turn society upside down?
Now we could have had a rational debate about that, but things took a different course. A section of the political spectrum, both in and out of science decided that there wasn’t really a downside to turning society upside down. RIghtly or wrongly they felt that society would be better off if the changes indicated by global warming happened. They felt that would be true whether or not global warming was ultimately proven. As a result, they found it easy to accept what they considered a harmless little lie: That the science of global warming was settled.
That ‘harmless little lie’ has turned out to be extremely destructive. It has set climate science back decades. In spite of millions of dollar spent, climate science is in many ways not as far along as it was 20 years ago. Much of the infrastructure for monitoring climate has been allowed to decay while these guys sat at their computers and played games with their computer models and gamed the peer review system.
The “harmless little lie” has also tarnished the reputation of science. Most importantly, at some point we probably will be able to settle the important questions of causes in climate change. It may show that CO2 or (much more likely) some other man-made cause actually will cause the temperature to rise or fall in a major way. The problem is that is the science actually eventually leads there an awful lot of people won’t believe it because of fiascos like this.
H.R. (19:01:19) :
evanmjones (18:23:47) :
“The word is (correct or not) that CRU is responding to the crisis – by conducting mass-purges of their files.”
The parsimonious explanation for the delay in calling in the police.