I read DotEarth; because there are so many comments, I rarely post comments. Today, I posted this in response to Raypierre’s letter.
Hi Andy,
Raypierre’s letter makes a few valid points, but mixes in quite a bit of dubious speculation. He is correct that the release of these emails, files and codes was an illegal act. As such, the act itself is to be condemned. However, the act was committed, the data are publicly available and quite naturally, there is now, considerable interest in their contents. So, it is quite reasonable for reporters and bloggers to be reporting and buzzing. Naturally, you Andy reported on the incident.
In this context, Raypierre writes to tell you that he is disconcerted you did not express indignation about a number of things that, as far as I can tell, are speculation on Ray’s part.
1) Raypierre suggests it was just luck that none of Phil Jones personal information was contained in the emails. It seems more likely that the lack of personal information had nothing to do with luck. A cursory examination of the emails reveals no announcements for group meetings, no invitations to the lunch room to celebrate a coworkers birthday, no email exchanges between husbands and wives discussing their shared love of Lassie DVDs, no letter from the safety training people, nothing related to performance reviews, and no pesky nag notes to update ones cyber security training. (Maybe CRU doesn’t have cyber security training?) Whoever assembled this edited, and it appears that all emails containing very highly personal information were removed from the collection.
Had the emails contained embarrassing revelations about the purchase of Lassie DVD’s, the blogosphere might be abuzz with indignation over the posting of truly personal information. In reality, no such information seems to be contained in what has come to be called the CRU Hack.
2) Raypierre suggests that the CRU data was made public as part of a concerted and sophisticated hacker attack, that the perpetrator is part of some shadowy network. He further suggests that hacking into CRU must be more difficult than hacking into Sarah Palin’s yahoo account. Unless Raypierre knows more than the rest of us, both notions, though plausible, appear to be mere speculation on his part. Based on publicly available information, we cannot know whether the data was leaked by a CRU insider, a disgruntled former employee or hacked by an outsider who never had any association with CRU. If done by an outsider, we cannot know whether the hacker took advantage of slovenly password handling practices by an naive CRU employee, or using sophisticated methods known only to skilled crackers. We don’t know if the cracker (if there was a cracker) was a lone wolf or a 16 year old computer nerd hired gun by a super secret band of nefarious conspirators funded by whatever nameless shadowy conspiracy funds 16 year olds to do this sort of thing.
Since we do not yet know how the information was obtained, or by whom, it seems a bit premature to pin the illegal leak on some shadowing network and express indignation over their behavior.
3) Raypierre suggest this event was an attack was on a single man (Phil Jones) rather than a government entity and that for this reason, we should not view this as similar to the Pentagon Papers incident. While it appears that Phil Jones files were the ones leaked, we cannot know whether the perpetrator’s intention was to attack Phil himself or simply to obtain information related to internal operations at CRU. Speculations on the web are the motive may have been anger over CRU’s refusal of yet another of Steve McIntyre’s requests for information under FOI’s; if so, the perpetrator attack was on CRU itself. It may turn out that Phil’s files were an easy target for the hacker who, otherwise, has no intention of attacking Phil himself. We will not know which until the perpetrator is identified.
4) Raypierre insinuates the leaked files are somehow related to the petition to change the wording of the A.P.S climate statement, and that the hack somehow proves that “they” (whoever “they” may be) have no leg to stand on advancing whatever unstated claims “they” might be making during the upcoming meetings at Copenhagen.
I don’t know how Raypierre sees the world, but it seems to me that it is not divided into two camps consisting of “us” and “them”. Eventually we may learn whether those behind the petition to change the wording of the A.P.S. climate statement have anything to do with the person who leaked the CRU documents. But even if both acts turn out to have been performed by the agent of one single shadowy groups, there will still remain plenty of people who are not part of that group, who did not hack into CRU, and who had nothing to do with trying to change the A.P.S. climate statement. Some of these people disagree with Raypierre, and they think their claims have two sturdy legs to stand on.
If Raypierre wishes to sway people to share whatever hopes he has for Copenhagen, he would do well to find better arguments to support his position. Those who currently disagree with Raypierre’s position are unlikely to chage their views merely because someone whole unconnected to them illegally obtained and leaked information that, on reading, seems disadvantageous to Raypierre’s position.
Since Team members find it so challenging to archive their data and code, it’s no wonder that Raypierre finds this attack to be “sophisticated.”
It’s easy enough to insinuate that there’s some sort of organized and well-funded conspiracy involved (big oil, etc), and there are folks out there who will swallow that hook, line, and sinker. But when it comes to cyberattacks, NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Lucia,
All your Raypierre’s letter link are belong to 404
Now I shall have to do the onerous work of finding the damn AndyRev link all on my own. *one tear*
yeah, it was those physicists at APS. That’s the way they work. Everyone knows they can’t be trusted. After all, they are always to trying to break the laws of physics.
lord, what a stretch, trying to link a petition at the APS to release of UEA information.
Lucia:
You claim the release of these emails etcetera is an illegal act. How do you know this information does not in fact arrive in the public domain from a completely lawful act protected by the fact of whistle blower status held by the leaker?
Foz:
She was giving Raypierre the benefit of the doubt I think.
If it is a whistler blower (as appears likely now), then it is protected by applicable statutes under British law.
Not meaning to “pile on” but too much evidence points to an “inside source” at CRU. Not a hack at all, but a whistleblower. Which is an entirely different thing.
BTW the best summary I’ve seen yet is this one:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/global-warminggate-what-does-it-mean/
Although Bishop Hill does a creditable job, too.
There are also a couple of good posts on Powerline Blog:
The alarmists do “science”: a case study
When in doubt, delete.
Anybody who thinks this hasn’t hurt AGW credibility, or the credibility of science in general, needs to remove their blinders.
An action that in one context might be thought to be unethical is generally considered ethical in
another context where it aims to prevent a greater evil. This is the Just War argument. Normally, killing people is unacceptable, but in a just war it is acceptable. This was also the basis for James Hansen’s involvement in the UK trial of the power station vandalisers. They broke a little law, but only to save the planet from death by CO2. So is the crime of hacking/whistleblowing justified because it revealed that what the participants were saying to each other in private is not what they were saying in public? Given the potential for huge job losses and cuts in standard of living that potentially follow when people believe the public position, I have no trouble at all in finding the hacking/whistleblowing to be not only ethical but admirable. I think a Victoria Cross is in order.
Lucia,
If the way in which this material became public is illegal, a good number of “follow the ambulance” “lawyers” would aleady have lined up to file a “class action” suit.
If the way in which this material became public -which was in all probability not through hacking but through a “Deep Throat” inside HadCRU- is illegal, and if the Team’s apologists are to be believed that no wrong was done, then by way of analogy the “tape” of the concerted liberal media driven political witch hunt to impeach Nixon on the basis of Watergate and his ultimate resignation should be rewound to zero. Not possible of course, but you no doubt get the drift.
Wanna play gotcha? One day you’ll get gotcha…..
A really important issue here regarding science and credibility. These kinds of passages at arms are present in ALL scientific disciplines. Simply glance back at the contemptuous handling of the initial arguments about continental drift. An accepted theory, even one with glaring inconsistencies, e.g. geosynclinal theory of mountain building, or climatic sensitivity to atmospheric CO2, will always prove satisfactory to the majority of scientists in a discipline: they are human, they are lazy, they need their jobs, and they are not scientists to be laughed at. However, the real scandals here involve the modification or suppression of raw data and methods.
As long as a clique of scientists persists in modifying in ever more complex fashion their theory to try and account for empirical data, these kinds of tiffs do no real harm. Even if the clique tends to control publishing and peer review, sooner or later the old fogies retire, die or wander off, while the new fogies have other enthusiasms and new or different ideas can have their day. Usually this good. It instills a little important humility and provides amusement and an opportunity to say “I told you so.” Destroying data however, or modifying it to better reflect what “should” be is worse than immoral. The original data, especially historic time series data is precious beyond ready comprehension. Raw data of this type is often impossible to reproduce. You can’t recover original temperature data taken in the past that has been destroyed.
More importantly, science is not about “credibility.” Science deals with fact rather than truth per se, a point the public is rarely exposed to. Far more importantly, science is about critical thinking. AGW however has never exhibited much critical thinking. The theory never accounted for evidence such as the data from ice cores. It absolutely ignored geological evidence spanning 500 million years, and offered nothing but obfuscation in exchange and incivility to any persistent questioner. Science is not about faith and no scientific argument should conclude with, “trust me.”
One of the worst aspects of the AGW debate is that it polarized populations politically BEFORE there was any successful science to work from. The fault lies not merely with bad science and scientists with an agenda. If the AGW hypothesis had been legitimate and the doomsday scenarios, cost (taxes, carbon credits, you name it) would have been irrelevant. If the AGW hypothesis was wrong, then actions to remediate the human influences could well be worse. Rather than sitting down and asking, “how long would it take, and what kind of data would it take, to clarify this,” we see masses rushing in opposite directions. The “right” is screaming – in effect – “it can’t be true. It will cost too much!” The “left” is worse, sounding the apocalypse at every turn, accusing dissenters of being bought out by big oil. Discussing prosecution and even execution of “denialists.” These emails document the evolution of a siege mentality in the “Team,” coupled with a very-likely good-intentioned struggle to forestall the apocalypse they invision. And we all know what road is paved with good intentions.
Re: Jdougherty (Comment#24306)
It seems really simple to me, the data is in. The hypothesis is that (human caused or otherwise) rising CO2 levels cause rising temperatures. We now have 10 years of observations (and that excludes 1998, possibly a special case, but I don’t think so) that show rising CO2 levels with no rise in T. Theory wrong. And we’ve seen that twice before in the historic record (latest being the ice-age scare of the 70s), so we’re not talking outlier stuff here.
OK, there might be other unknown factors here that we don’t understand. But by that argument we now have a THEORY that the observations are wrong. Not one scrap of evidence that that THEORY is right or wrong, but it is possible that it’s right.
Therefore (!?, as they used to say in chess), we embark on the most radical transformation of human affairs that has ever been considered. On the grounds that there is a theory (not actually explicitly described) which says that the observations could be wrong.
Can you get closer to madness than that?
Just wondering about legality here: There is a line, somewhere, between bad behavior and misconduct, isn’t it? While whistleblowing is clearly justified in the case of misconduct, is it likewise with just plain, bad behavior? In general not, I would think.
Maybe Lucia is a bit “legalist” in this case, but I think we should be a bit careful about accusations of misconduct – especially if that will be investigated by competent personnel any case, and I guess it will.
I, personally, would have liked to have general ethical rules of scientific conduct in place to be able to at least question whether some of the actions re peer review etc can be classified as misconduct, but I doubt there is something like that. And there does not seem to be any cases of conspiration to suppress really good scientific work – we would have heard about that by now, wouldn’t we? If the contribution is somewhat less than outstanding, who you are and what you have to tell will be important for whether and where you get it published. But that’s the way it is.
In general, overselling is not misconduct. Won’t be either.
This is a sober argument by Lucia, I think.
By the way: This material seems to have been collected in connection with a FOIA request, turned down on Nov 12-14. Whether leaked or stolen, is hard to tell. On RC, Gavin tells that someone broke into the RC server last Tuesday morning, from a IP-adress in Turkey, and tried to upload the material. So there is certainly not only innocent whistle-blowing going on here.
And while the immediate scientific effect of this leak is, in general, judged to be relatively minor, the political effect may be huge. So we can of course entirely rule out a political agenda here, can’t we? While I would probably not agree with that agenda, I’m glad this material is out.
I think this case provides a useful precedent under UK law:
Six Greenpeace protesters were arrested for breaking in to the power station, climbing the 200 meter smokestack, painting the word Gordon on the chimney and causing an estimated £30,000 damage. At their subsequent trial they admitted trying to shut the station down but argued that they were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change from causing greater damage to property elsewhere around the world. Evidence was heard from David Cameron’s environment adviser Zac Goldsmith, and an Inuit leader from Greenland, both saying that climate change was already seriously affecting life around the world. The six were acquitted after arguing that they were legally justified in their actions to prevent climate change from causing greater damage to property around the world. It was the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a “lawful excuse” defence in court.[22]
“On RC, Gavin tells that someone broke into the RC server last Tuesday morning, from a IP-adress in Turkey, and tried to upload the material. So there is certainly not only innocent whistle-blowing going on here. ”
I wouldn’t trust Gavin on that. Why would anyone try to “upload material” from RC. It’s just an advocacy site. What secrets would you find out that you wouln’t find by cut’n’paste? That they have a position? The difference between them and UEA is that some people actually believe that UEA is responding objectively to inform people, thanks to the public funding (>$25m at minimum) they have received.
davidc,
I also think the RC claim is BS. It makes no sense because any hacker would know that the material would be taken down immediately. If RC was, in fact, hacked the only thing the hacker would do is post a page linking to the download.
I suspect what really happened is RC got a post identical to what appeared on Jeff’s blog but they either misunderstood the post or deliberately lied about it to garner more sympathy from the faithful.
There is a quote:
RP:
“Or at the next level, since the forces of darkness have moved to illegal operations, will we all have to get bodyguards to do climate science?”
Which just tickles me. Well it seems a reasonable idea and perhaps they would not cost as much.
Alex
@davidc (Comment#24310)
“It seems really simple to me, the data is in. The hypothesis is that (human caused or otherwise) rising CO2 levels cause rising temperatures. We now have 10 years of observations (and that excludes 1998, possibly a special case, but I don’t think so) that show rising CO2 levels with no rise in T. Theory wrong. ”
If it only were that easy! If the observable effects of CO2 changes were direct and huge, we could test them that way. They aren’t. Instead, they are, in the first place, rather small modulations on natural cycles and oscillations with much larger amplitudes, and most of the effect seems to be indirect (feedback). And if Akasofu and Roy Spencer are right, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) may be the most important determinant of medium-term climate, with apparent periods of some 30-60 years. In that case, precise assessments of CO2 effects over less than one such period may turn out to be rather meaningless. We don’t really know.
Furthermore, when adjusted for other known influences (solar cycle being a prominent one), there seems to have been a temperature rise during the last decade, so the general AGW hypothesis may in fact be supported by the observations. I say “may”, because there may be other interpretations – but this one is by no means non-standard.
What is NOT supported, is assumptions of relatively strong positive feedbacks (e.g. 4-6 deg C temp rise with CO2 doubling) approximately constant over time. Too strong assumptions seems to be implicit in most global climate models, and I guess that is the main reason they haven’t done too well recently. But they are updated, refined and adjusted, so we should be a bit careful about assuming they will not improve in the future.
davidc (Comment#24315) November 23rd, 2009 at 3:54 am
‘On RC, Gavin tells that someone broke into the RC server last Tuesday morning, from a IP-adress in Turkey, and tried to upload the material. So there is certainly not only innocent whistle-blowing going on here. ‘
“I wouldn’t trust Gavin on that. Why would anyone try to “upload material†from RC. It’s just an advocacy site. What secrets would you find out that you wouln’t find by cut’n’paste?”
Why don’t you check it out with Gavin yourself, if you don’t trust him, instead of spreading doubts about him here?
Is says “upload to”, right? And that would really have been some hacker’s feat (I prefer “cracker”), if this material for a while could have been downloadable from the priesthood’s own site, after a break-in early in the morning. They didn’t succeed. But I darn well understand that this was their plan A 🙂
Raven (Comment#24317)
“I also think the RC claim is BS. It makes no sense because any hacker would know that the material would be taken down immediately. If RC was, in fact, hacked the only thing the hacker would do is post a page linking to the download.
I suspect what really happened is RC got a post identical to what appeared on Jeff’s blog but they either misunderstood the post or deliberately lied about it to garner more sympathy from the faithful.”
A couple of minutes, enough for the first (planned) download would have been enough. Afterwards, upload that to other sites, just as actually happened – most downloads of the material happened after the original server was shut down, from more or less spontaneous mirrors. Surely I would have preferred RC to an obscure server in Tomsk for the initial download if I were in charge of that.
Your unfounded speculations about the RC people may tell a lot more about you than about them. If you look into the actual conversation, this was something Gavin only expanded on when specifically asked, though he, naturally, had antecipated the question, since RC was mentioned in Phil Jones’ first response.
Raven:
The Kingsnorth Six affair, is interesting in many ways. Firstly the Six were Greenpeace, either worked for them or volunteered for them prior to the break-in. And Greenpeace can muster the troops. Most importantly they were up on serious charges, (for something that was not considered to be that serious locally) and hence got a jury trial in the local Crown Court.
Kingsnorth is not hugely popular and the authorities did themselves no favours by the way it was policed. They shutdown the Hoo Peninsular (all roads leading to Kingsnorth), and terrorised some of the locals (not just the protestors), mostly petty stuff, stop and search, and confiscate (this included taking crayons away from kids, allegedly).
There were a lot of police (>1000) and the ones on our side of the river seemed to have been bussed in form Wales. Not a bright move.
The police restricted all access, and that included, journalists, and cameramen and other observers. Even still they managed to get themselves filmed wielding their battons. (Hitting out at a cameraman with a running camera was perhaps not one of their better moments, (man ok, camera worse for wear but footage saved).
Being known as the Kingsnorth Six did not hurt them, We have learned that any group identified by a name and a head count are best acquitted.
As an aside,back in 1991. Steven Owen was aquitted also at Maidstone Crown Court, of the attempted murder, assault and wounding (sawn-off shotgun both barrels) of the hit and run driver that killed his son. Done in cold blood, in the street a couple of years after the tragedy, (after the driver had spent about a year in gaol), apparently the driver tried to hide behind his girlfriend. Owen pleaded inocence but admitted the details, the judge directed the jury to find him guilty, the jury acquitted and the crowd went bananas.
I expect there is a strong streak of anarchy remaining in the land of Wat Tyler, perhaps we are still revolting peasants. But we know how to arrive at perverse verdicts.
Alex
SNRatio (Comment#24321) says
“Your unfounded speculations about the RC people may tell a lot more about you than about them.”
I don’t find the guys at RC trustworthy. They have been caught being fast and loose with the facts too many times to merit the benefit of the doubt.
In any case, Gavin’s comments seem to suggest that they managed to take complete control over the website which means they could have locked the admins out for a while. That makes the story plausible.
Raven (Comment#24323)
SNRatio (Comment#24321) says
‘Your unfounded speculations about the RC people may tell a lot more about you than about them.-
“I don’t find the guys at RC trustworthy. They have been caught being fast and loose with the facts too many times to merit the benefit of the doubt.
In any case, Gavin’s comments seem to suggest that they managed to take complete control over the website which means they could have locked the admins out for a while. That makes the story plausible.”
I have not said that I find Gavin et al particularly trustworthy, either. But assuming that someone lies, and publicly suggesting that, without having looked into the matter at all, really affects only one person’s trustworthiness: Yours.
This is not about the benefit of doubt, which is quite OK for me if you don’t grant them – you may have your own very good reasons for that. (And me, I’m not blind, either..) It is about checking the facts first, and applying fair criteria of interpretations.
I think we have more than enough accusations flying around already.
I’ve commented on this dotEarth post too at my blog – http://www.di2.nu/200911/23.htm – suffice it to say that I think one can easily turn Ray Pierrehumbert’s commenst around given the contents of the leak.
Now I’m trying to avoid being tempted to work through “HARRY_READ_ME.txt” and the related /cru-code/ directory tree. It really is a gem of poorly maintained code
Carrick (Comment#24299): “She was giving Raypierre the benefit of the doubt I think.”
Seems to me it aint the man being given the benfit of the doubt but rather a series of unsupported suppositions on the nature and intent of the act which gave rise to the documents being made public.
I see no justification for these assumptions, moreover – Occam’s razor sez different.
TerryMN–Link fixed. That’s for telling me.
Those who commented on whistleblower: It may turn out to be that. I don’t know and I don’t know those laws from the UK.
Strange. Andy has clear the post queue this morning but your response did not show up.
I think Gavin is telling the truth here. I read a longer discussion somewhere. It sounds as if someone tried to hack into the WordPress account possibly with the intention of creating and publishing their own post.
WordPress accounts can and have been hacked. My knitting blog was hacked long ago. There are bunches of things people can do to make it more difficult to hack their blog than other peoples. For example, you can add a plugin that will only let you try the login/password combination three times. After that, it locks you out for 15 minutes. (This slows people who might write a script to try login/password combination.) You can use htaccess to put a second layer of protection (either by second password or by IP) But… well.. those methods don’t always work.
Eitherway, I should think whoever did this might easily be motivated to upload material to WP. That still doesn’t prove there was any high level of sophistication. When my knitting blog was hacked long,long ago, I clicked the link they left in the post they added. It was to a link to a page that warned you to be more secure! I then googled around more and it appeared to be a band of teenager… playing a game! They were keeping score of how many blogs they defaced and they got points when their post appeared.
Dang! My comment didn’t get posted! I didn’t think the tone was too vitriolic and/or in other ways too obnoxious. Oh well. Either the spam filter ate it, or Andy doesn’t like my style.
I hope they publish your letter. It deserves its own post.
[edit, I didn’t Lucia’s comment above before I posted].
Resubmit it.
Lucia,
I would bet the spam filter because of length.
Andy has never deleted any of my comments which are generally more confrontational than yours.
Bill– I’m going to try to resubmit. I always forget my NYT password, and my mac doesn’t seem to remember the right one. I’m in the “forgot your password” loop. Sigh. . .
Ahh.. it was about 300 characters to long. I deleted the introductory paragraph and resubmitted. 🙂
The HARRY_READ_ME.txt is a bit of a labyrinth, but it is recent 2006-2009 and does contain:
“Back to the gridding. I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation – apparently linear as well.”
So maybe he was working with CRUTEM3 software/data.
Also:
“What about the ones I used for the CRUTEM3 work with Phil Brohan?”
Does this mean that Hadley Centre bods do work on CRUTEM3?
Also I wonder if this is the work of:
Mr. Ian (Harry) Harris:
Dendroclimatology, climate scenario development, data manipulation and visualisation, programming
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/
ALex
Raven–
It was length. I didn’t notice the ‘number of characters’ tally last night. After you submit, it doesn’t put up a big red banner saying “You long winded coot! I’ve put your comment in the spam bin!!!”
This morning, I retried. I was the ‘number of characters’ tally, edited and submitted.
Sigh… my blog is hinky. I keep getting error messages. (This predates the spike in traffic due to the ‘CRU Hack’. Dreamhost is aware of the problem and it’s just equipment related.)
Well I guess that was not exactly news. Just put it down to slow but independent research.
Alex
I’m not buying raypierre’s disconcert at Revkin’s lack of indignation. Just a bit too prissy.
I see that Andy Revkin is looking for someone to provide him an article to serve as counterpoint to raypierre’s characterization of this as an act of terrorism. it’s after post # 82. Lucia’s is post #58.
Revkin says:
Thanks for reminding folks what this “Your Dot” feature is about. I’ll be posting a voice rebutting the “cyberterrorism” assertion as soon as I can get someone who’s a non-anonymous contributor to step forward with a reasoned, substantiated counterargument.
I am not a writer; anyone here up for the challenge? My only thought is that “terrorism” is a loaded word that is tricky to use. I believe I once heard that the “christian science monitor” does not let its writers use it lest in injects opinion into their objective writing.
Counter argument? Did Raypierre actually present an argument?
Beck Has it on his show on Fox
Raypierre’s comment shows an astonishing lack of reason and judgement. It’s almost a spot-the-fallacy wordsearch. You’d think a *scientist* would do better than this.
Ranging from outright speculation, appeal to emotion, irrelevance (what has the difficulty in hacking a system got to do with the ethics of it?), smears, guilt by association… My personal favourite though is the slippery slope argument at the end (where he ramps knitting up to thermonuclear armageddon in six easy steps)
Revkin did the sceptics a favour by highlighting this post!
Right on!
My response was not nearly as polite as yours, Lucia. If there is any justice in this world, Dr. Raypierre will soon be able to start a second career writing alternative history novels. He certainly won’t be able to make a living at it, the way Turtledove or Flint, do, but at least he’ll have something to occupy his time.
@Robert E. Phelan (Comment#24436)
Why start a new second career writing altenative history novels, right now he is gainfully employed writing science fiction, bad science fiction true, but science fiction.
boballab (Comment#24441)
what you say is true, but, In’ch’Allah, not for much longer.