Police Close Climategate Investigation 277
ananyo writes "The Norfolk Constabulary has closed its investigation into the November 2009 release of private emails between researchers at the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich after failing to identify those responsible. Despite not being able to prosecute any offenders, the police have confirmed that the data breach 'was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU's data files, carried out remotely via the internet.' The investigation has also cleared anyone working at or associated with UEA from involvement in the crime. The hacking resulted in the release of more than 1,000 emails and shook the public's trust in climate science, though independent investigations after the breach cleared the scientists of wrongdoing."
translation (Score:4, Insightful)
"The perpetrator used Tor so our investigation is fucked"
Re:"Cleard them of wrongdoing" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Cleard them of wrongdoing" (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah he was "cleared" by investigations of the National Science Foundation. That's like BP after the oil spill asking the American Petroleum Institute "Did we do anything wrong" and the API saying, "Nope." Investigations don't work when both sides are on the same team.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I like the way that this went down, but we rely on those scientists to provide the facts that make AGW more or less unassailable. If you can show that the scientists are possibly playing fast and loose with the data, AGW might still be a problem, but it is entirely valid to question their motives and try to discover what the real story is.
As I recall, the emails did have relevance to the AGW research, they weren't just unrelated smear attacks on the scientists. These researchers could well be good at research, but if they had been lying to get more funding for themselves, they're bad researchers overall and should not be trusted to give us an unbiased viewpoint to a very contentious debate.
As it stands, this was a tempest in a teapot, but I don't blame anyone for taking it seriously enough to investigate it. If anything, academic integrity can be just as important as any other.
Re:messenger (Score:5, Insightful)
You could have said that in a non-trolling/flamebait way.
My personal view is that it is a bit hypocritical to be in favor of diplomatic cable leaks, but against the Hadley CRU leaks.
That's something I regularly see on slashdot, for example it was a good thing that the guantanamo bay documents were leaked, but it's a bad thing that the Hadley CRU emails were leaked. I figure you'd if you want secrets to be open, that should apply to both the things you like and the things you don't like.
I found it to be a bit interesting that a top scientist mentioned he would go so far as to alter the meaning of peer review in his favor. But would he really do it? Probably not. It's already known that this is a hugely debated issue, so naturally some people would have said some dumb things. Hell, I've heard politicians say worse things and still get re-elected. Worthy of a leak? Probably not. It's mostly just a petty partisan squabble.
The GTMO documents pretty much only revealed what we already knew: people were waterboarded, and some were believed to be innocent. However it also could have put people's lives at risk. Worthy of a leak? I'd say no, though most people who wanted the leak were eagerly looking for something to hang Dubya over. Yet again, just another petty partisan squabble.
Re:Not an Inside Job (Score:5, Insightful)
and that's often discovered by an insider or via social engineering.
Or just knowing that the mail server is named "mail.university.co.uk" and stores people's mail in "/var/spool/mail"
Their conclusion is unlikely. (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? So some highly motivated skeptic managed to find a zip file on an illegally accessed remote server, took the time to recognize the contents as being what he/she needed, and further immediately publish the most damning of the contents? They did all this without being noticed? This conclusion and the timeline of how information was revealed suggests there's literally someone out there who is not only capable of such a job (likely wouldn't have been trivial to accomplish), but intimately familiar with Jones', Mann's, Wahls, McIntyre's and other's correspondence and motivations, and clearly paid to spend the time doing this. It suggests some "vast conspiracy" which doesn't very well jive with occams razor.
The likely situation is it was an inside job. Someone who knows Phil Jones knew he was refusing properly formatted FOIA requests, and likely had motivation to out the correspondence and data/algorithms inside an already created ZIP file that Phil made in case he was forced to respond to the FOIA request.
Epistemic (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, those in the epistemic bubble continue to believe that the world is about to start cooling, and/or that there has been no warming in the last 10 years -- a claim tenuously supported by the most blatant cherry-picking of the start and end of trends, and all the while, the natural signs of climate change continue, in accordance with the scientific consensus which emerged officially in a 1979 NAS report.
At what stage to ideologues ever accept new information into their epistemic bubble?
Re:title (Score:5, Insightful)
Guys, reading scientists' emails won't be of any use unless you actually have a clue about science. You can break into a library and steal all the books in the name of transparency, but it won't cure your illiteracy.
Re:"Cleard them of wrongdoing" (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>>>same people who cleared Sandusky of any wrongdoing.
>>
>>I don't know what you are getting at here. He was cleared in a court of law, was he not?
Wow where have you been hiding? Sandusky was cleared by Penn State University of all wrongdoing, but twelve years later the court of law convicted him of ~40 counts of child molestation. He's in jail for the rest of his life.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
If you can show that the scientists are possibly playing fast and loose with the data
Big IF. The worst thing these emails show is someone asking what function would best fit his data. That's totally SOP in every branch of the sciences. There is not even the slightest appearance of impropriety to anyone who practices science.
Re:Uncertainty = Doubt (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to get modded down, but I frankly don't give a damn.
It's watermelons all the way down.
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
All the proposed "solutions" to AGW basically boil down to "You 1st-world Western Capitalist nations are to blame for all the pollution, give us your wealth and cripple your industries and economies!", all the while completely ignoring most of the world's most populous and polluting nations and regions like China, India, etc, meaning that any reductions in the West will come to exactly diddly in actually having any meaningful effect on climate.
It doesn't really even matter whether AGW theories are correct or not. Until India, China, et al play ball (which they currently have no intentions whatsoever of doing), anything done in the West is simply a foot-gun contest.
Redistributing wealth won't reduce any claimed "warming". It just furthers anti-Western, anti-Capitalist ideologies and agendas.
Strat
Re:Wikipedia (Score:0, Insightful)
That's simply not true. I had (might still have, I should look) a copy of the leaked emails, and they did show worse things than that.
For example, they proved that the researchers:
(A) were engaged in a united attempt to keep other people's papers out of the peer-reviewed journals (maybe not illegal but certainly not ethical),
You seem to have some difficulty understanding what "peer review" is about. Peer review serves multiple purposes. One is to improve papers before publication by getting their authors to revise them based on feedback. Another is to exclude from publication those papers which are not worthy of being published. It is both normal and ethical to discuss ways of keeping junk science out of journals.
It's entirely possible that history may harshly judge any given era's notion of what constitutes unpublishable junk, of course. If you believe this will be so, it's up to you and your compatriots to refute contemporary climate science so thoroughly that objective observers will have no choice but to put the current scientific consensus into the "wrongheaded idiocy" category.
Oddly enough, none of you "skeptics" seem to be able to mount effective attacks on climate science, even after Climategate was supposed to have blown the lid off faulty science. Instead you're stuck just sniping at personalities, not the science.
(B) agreed to avoid giving information to certain people they viewed to be on "the other side", even if it meant they had to break the law to do so, and
(C) attempted to illegally refuse perfectly legitimate FOI requests.
It was mostly one guy (Phil Jones) who did these things you are complaining about, and of course you've deliberately avoided mentioning the context so you can make it sound extra bad. Yes, he was wrong to do such things, but to put it mildly, he was being provoked.
Guess what happens when conservative radio hosts and bloggers spend years pumping anti-GW propaganda into their mindless minions? Said minions decide that scientists are evil, and collude to harass climate scientists with frivolous, redundant, and neverending FOI requests in a volume intended consume an absurd amount of time and budget (because it's good to waste their time, them being evil environmentalists and all). Those weren't perfectly legitimate FOI requests, and I suspect you know it. Oh, and let's not forget about the neverending stream of violent threats from the same crowd.
Guess what happens when real people are being harassed and threatened? Sometimes they lose their shit and do the wrong thing. Climate scientists have been enduring a siege for a long time now. That some people crack under the strain is regrettable, but understandable.