[Vision2020] Hacked Climate Reseach Unit E-mails: 1,092 Responses to “The CRU hack”

[Paul Rumelhart]

It's not the personal attacks or the belittling of their enemies or their frank admissions that they think certain researchers are idiots that bother me.  As you say, they are human.  They seem to be under the impression that their emails are private, yet they work for an organization that takes millions in government money.  You would think they would have been more professional in their correspondence with that fact in mind.  On the other hand, I'm sure they didn't expect their systems to get hacked.

What does bother me are a few specific emails that make it clear that they are willing to abuse the peer review system in order to promote their agenda.  For example, this one was allegedly written by Michael Mann, who as you know is a frequent contributor to realclimate.org:

"It is pretty clear that thee skeptics here have staged a bit of a coup, even in the presence of a number of reasonable folks on the editorial board (Whetton, Goodess, …). My guess is that Von Storch is actually with them (frankly, he's an odd individual, and I'm not sure he isn't himself somewhat of a skeptic himself), and without Von Storch on their side, they would have a very forceful personality promoting their new vision. There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that couldn't get published in a reputable journal.

This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal!

So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…

What do others think?

mike"

This is a clear abuse of the peer review system.  They are talking about arranging things so that "skeptical" authors can't submit papers to peer reviewed journals, so that they can come back and criticize them for not having published in peer reviewed journals.  They are also talking about freezing out a credited scientific journal because they let some papers by "skeptical" authors slip through.  This includes stacking the deck by trying to convince other members of the editorial board to reject such papers.

That's not science.  That's politics.  "Peer review" is supposed to be about the science, not agendas.  If these papers are so wrong, how are they passing peer review in the first place?  Maybe it is the case that there was a "breakdown in the peer review process" at this journal.  What should happen is that these papers, which are assumed to be in error, will be dissected, analyzed, and ultimately will have failed to have been replicated. I wonder if what they perceive as a "breakdown in the peer review process" actually means that papers by skeptical authors passed a rigorous scientific review.  Note that not citing all papers in this journal and refusing to have anyone publish there hurts the authors that have nothing to do with this controversy.  Publishing papers and getting cited are the bread and butter of scientific research, without it your career aspects are greatly stifled.  But what does he care?  He's saving the world.

The way it's supposed to work is that you undergo a scientific (not political) review by your peers, after which (assuming you passed review) it gets published.  Other scientists read your paper, and a few of them analyze it and some others try to replicate the results.  If they find flaws in the paper, the reputation of the journal that passed it suffers.

This leads me to the second issue: lack of access to data.  There are a few emails where the individuals involved appear to be discussing ways of dodging FOIA requests for their data, and even lamenting the fact that some journals require the data to be published with the paper.  Why the secrecy?  This is science, funded by tax payers in the UK and the US.  It should be transparent.  The data should be available to others.

Anyway, lunch hour is over and I need to get back to work.

Paul

--- On Mon, 11/23/09, Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Ted Moffett <starbliss at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Vision2020] Hacked Climate Reseach Unit E-mails: 1,092 Responses to “The CRU hack”
> To: "Moscow Vision 2020" <vision2020 at moscow.com>
> Date: Monday, November 23, 2009, 10:02 AM
> The private communications of
> competitive professionals in any field would expose
> emotions, thoughts and behavior that would reveal them to be
> human beings, with the flaws many human beings possess. 
> That climate scientists have these flaws is not in the least
> a surprise.  These flaws would still exist among scientists
> in climate science, whether the issue of
> anthropogenic climate change became a political or
> economic issue, or not.  A percentage of professionals in
> any field have lied, distorted data, plagiarized, attacked
> others in their field, became angry or vengeful, etc. 
> Doctors engage in malpractice somewhere every day of the
> week, but this does not mean modern medical science is a
> hoax or a conspiracy.
> 
>  
> The Wall Street Journal piece on these hacked
> e-mails is lacking a thorough analysis of what these
> e-mails reveal or do not reveal, coming from climate
> scientists who understand these issues in detail, both
> professionally, scientifically and personally.  The
> Realclimate.org discussion of this issue offers a wide
> ranging and detailed analysis.  The thread became so long
> (1,092 responses to the original discussion) that
> Realclimate.org started a new thread under the same topic. 
> Below is pasted in only the Realclimate.org comments before
> the discussions begin, for both threads.  The full
> discussions can be read at the website links:
> 
>  
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853
> 
> 
> The CRU hack
> Filed under: 
> 
> Climate Science— group @ 20
> November 2009 
> 
> 
> As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails
> from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of
> East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite
> some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has
> absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a
> completely separate institution). As people are also no
> doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing
> private information is illegal, and regardless of how they
> were obtained, posting private correspondence without
> permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post
> any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence
> of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers
> attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU
> of their possible security breach later that day.
> 
> Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful
> selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back
> to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely
> circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them
> involve people here (and the archive includes the first
> RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and
> include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics
> related to the surface temperature record and some
> paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were
> accurate.
> 
> 
> Since emails are normally intended to be private, people
> writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing
> themselves than they would in a public statement. For
> instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many
> scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor
> that a large group of them thought that the Soon and
> Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al
> (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and
> should not have been published. These sentiments have been
> made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly
> less bluntly).
> 
> More interesting is what is not contained in
> the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide
> conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding
> climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’,
> no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of
> the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from
> our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly
> paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on
> the plot though.
> 
> Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually
> interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far
> cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People
> working constructively to improve joint publications;
> scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big
> picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and
> engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing
> frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in
> politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it
> wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out
> of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of
> this should be shocking.
> 
> It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of
> the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but
> it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work
> because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a
> useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t
> powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people
> around him. Science works because different groups go about
> trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are
> generally very competitive about that. That the same
> scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC
> chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.
> 
> No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded
> “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One
> example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in
> discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions
> stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick
> of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20
> years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to
> hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann,
> Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original
> multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’
> is just to plot the instrumental records along with
> reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is
> clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to
> a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than
> something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing
> problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is
> well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring
> density proxy diverges from the temperature records after
> 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence
> problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been
> discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in
> Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those
> authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part
> of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is
> probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in
> plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely
> appropriate, as is further research to understand why this
> happens.
> 
> The timing of this particular episode is probably not
> coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases
> from stolen personal emails is the only response to the
> weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on
> climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it.
> 
> There are of course lessons to be learned. Clearly
> no-one would have gone to this trouble if the academic
> object of study was the mating habits of European
> butterflies. That community’s internal discussions are
> probably safe from the public eye. But it is important to
> remember that emails do seem to exist forever, and that
> there is always a chance that they will be inadvertently
> released. Most people do not act as if this is true, but
> they probably should.
> 
> It is tempting to point fingers and declare that people
> should not have been so open with their thoughts, but who
> amongst us would really be happy to have all of their email
> made public? 
> Let he who is without PIN cast the the first stone.
> Update: The official UEA statement is
> as follows:
> 
> “We are aware that information from a server used for
> research information
> in one area of the university has been made available on
> public websites,”
> the spokesman stated.
> “Because of the volume of this information we cannot
> currently confirm
> that all of this material is genuine.”
> “This information has been obtained and published
> without our permission
> and we took immediate action to remove the server in
> question from
> operation.”
> “We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation
> and we have involved
> the police in this enquiry.”
> 
> -----------------------------
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
> 
> The CRU hack:
> Context
> Filed under: 
> 
> Climate Science— gavin @ 23
> November 2009 
> 
> 
> This is a continuation of the last thread which is getting a
> little unwieldy. The emails cover a 13 year period in which
> many things happened, and very few people are up to speed on
> some of the long-buried issues. So to save some time, I’ve
> pulled a few bits out of the comment thread that shed some
> light on some of the context which is missing in some of the
> discussion of various emails. 
> 
> 
> Trenberth: You need to read his recent paper on quantifying
> the current changes in the Earth’s energy budget to
> realise why he is concerned about our inability currently to
> track small year-to-year variations in the radiative fluxes.
> 
> Wigley: The concern with sea surface
> temperatures in the 1940s stems from the paper by Thompson et al (2007) which
> identified a spurious discontinuity in ocean temperatures.
> The impact of this has not yet been fully corrected for in
> the HadSST data set, but people still want to assess what
> impact it might have on any work that used the original
> data. 
> Climate Research and peer-review: You
> should read about the issues from the editors (Claire Goodess, Hans von Storch) who resigned
> because of a breakdown of the peer review process at that
> journal, that came to light with the particularly egregious (and well-publicised)
> paper by Soon and Baliunas (2003). The
> publisher’s assessment is here. 
> 
> I can update this if there is a demand. Please let me
> know in the comments, which, as always, should be
> substantive, non-insulting on on topic.
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
> 
> -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
> 
> =======================================================
>  List services made available by First Step Internet, 
>  serving the communities of the Palouse since
> 1994.   
>            
>    http://www.fsr.net         
>              
>           mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
> =======================================================