Climategate Thread (split topic)

[tater]

Funny the NYT was happy to publish this wikileaks stuff (damning to the US), yet they stood on principle, and did not publish the "private" "climategate" emails (even when the people in question were doing work for the UN and government with tax payer money).

[Tribesman]

Funny the NYT was happy to publish this wikileaks stuff (damning to the US),
Did you miss the news about them printing US "favourable" leaks from the wikileaks stuff at the request of the govt.?

yet they stood on principle, and did not publish the "private" "climategate" emails
Ah yes "climategate", despite the media frenzy and the conspiracy theories that story turned out to be 99.9% total rubbish.

[tater]

Ah yes "climategate", despite the media frenzy and the conspiracy theories that story turned out to be 99.9% total rubbish.


It was never independently investigated. Setting a few of your own folks to self-investigate is BS. Read the emails (I have). They are: 1. admitted to be 100% real bythe authors of said emails. 2. Paint a picture of collusion to disallow any alternate narratives in the literature. 3. clearly demonstrate massive QC problems with the code they use ("spaghetti" does't even begin to describe it, the SH analogy would be that midway through some torpedo runs you'd have to exit the game, then enter a value for a hit or miss (whatever you prefer!) in a text file, then reload the game (only for some date ranges, attacks made before some day in 42 might be fine, then all around, say, Midway, they don;t work at all...)

"Climategate" says nothing about the veracity of the science (though "use our model, except for a bunch of important time frames where we will insert better data "by hand"" is pretty damning (it's right in the remarks for the code they used, after all). It does paint a terrible picture of how science is being done where VAST amounts of taxpayer money is on the line. No honest science person can think it looked good (it's certainly not how they taught us the "system" worked in astrophysics).

So it's not 99% rubbish in the least, it's signal-heavy unless you have an agenda. (it takes an agenda not to read their own words at face value—the emails are an observational fact, after all).

My suggestion would be not to base your opinion on "climategate" on what a few loons on the anti-AGW side say about it (loons who don't understand the science in the first place), nor from loons who support it but can't do the math, themselves (being able to "do the math" is critical to even claiming a semi-informed opinion—if you can't read a real astrophysics paper (and understand it), for example, then your opinion on cosmology or astrophysics is... not very valuable. The problem was never one of discounting the science (there is SOME of that here and there, actually, where they discuss attacking GOOD counter arguments by not letting them get published, mind you), but of the WAY the science was being done. Anyone who cares about the scientific method should want transparent science where methods and data sets are 100% available so it can be replicated—that's the POINT, after all.

That the NYT would attempt to prop up the Obama admin is unsurprising, I'll chalk it up to them caring more about domestic politics than the US in that case. But their hypocrisy remains—they refused to publish the emails because they were "private." These cables also has a presumption of private correspondence. Publish both, or none, but don't defend NOT publishing one, then publish another that should have the same protection.


PS—that asshat Assange claims to have been the climategate news breaker, even though it was on other sites first, so this is slightly related. It's all about Assange... (least to him).

[Tribesman]

It was never independently investigated. Setting a few of your own folks to self-investigate is BS.
So you have a pile of different investigations at several levels through differnt groups and on both a governmental and non governmental basis and all find that it was nothing really.
Yet that doesn't fit with your view so there must be something wrong with the investigations
I see why you have the proiblem, it was an investigation of scientific methodology by scientists, to fit your criteria for an "independant" investigation in would have to be people who don't know science investigating science on the basis of a framework established by some crazy media reports made from just a few selected words.

[tater]

So you have a pile of different investigations at several levels through differnt groups and on both a governmental and non governmental basis and all find that it was nothing really.
Yet that doesn't fit with your view so there must be something wrong with the investigations
I see why you have the proiblem, it was an investigation of scientific methodology by scientists, to fit your criteria for an "independant" investigation in would have to be people who don't know science investigating science on the basis of a framework established by some crazy media reports made from just a few selected words.

The investigations never even talked to McIntyre. they were whitewashes. It was pretty much open and shut unethical behavior that paints the climate science community in a bad light---even those who are NOT unethical (hence the problem with these guys and why they should have been hammered). Again, this is not about science, but method, and appearance. When your work is the reason de être for massive government programs, even the appearance of impropriety is a serious issue.

They did not make available data and code required by the journals they published in. They intentionally dragged their feet on FOIA requests (in their defense in the "investigations" they claimed they were buried in requests, but in fact it was a handful over several years). The one guy said in an email he'd destroy the data and say he lost it instead of fufilling his legal FOIA obligations.

To not have a problem with this is to not care about how science is done. I'm trained in astrophysics, and have many friends who are active research scientists. The most common reaction to this by them is "how could they set important work back with this kind of nonsense behavior?" Of course my friends are in HARD sciences where most of climate models would be considered not nearly good enough (climate science is inaccurate even by astronomy standards, and in astronomy hitting an order of magnitude is getting pretty good results :) ).

As I said, separate what model you think best describes the global climate from the process. I think that the basic premise of human being affecting the climate is not unreasonable. I think that the current models are sloppy at best, however—with very important code being written in effect by amateurs who happened to take a FORTRAN class in grad school. It's actually kind of stunning how awful their code is given the truly vast amounts spent in the last decade on climate science. The trouble with science is that you need to "show the work" and it needs to be reproducible. Having guys work to hide the work is counter to this. People at large seem to forget that "peer review" is only the beginning, not the end. Being published doesn't make it true, it just makes it ready to be tested (and the peers miss serious math issues—even previously published in climate journals—even now (a fairly recent Nature cover on Antarctica, for example has the warming all wrong due to a statistical artifact (was really WARMER in some western areas than shown, but colder inland).

Anyway, openness and transparency is GOOD in science.

[Tribesman]

Tater, was "climategate" anything like the huge groundbreakng scandal it was portrayed as in the media when it broke?
No, so it was indeed 99.9% bollox

[tater]

Tater, was "climategate" anything like the huge groundbreakng scandal it was portrayed as in the media when it broke?
No, so it was indeed 99.9% bollox

It was not played up much at all by the media, IMO. Least not here.

It WAS a groundbreaking scandal, so if people failed to see it that way, then it was a failure of the news media. Read the emails, not the press. Read the code comments, and notes by the real programmer they finally hired to try and make sense of their (abysmal) code.

Knowing that literally trillions of dollars are on the line WRT policy initiatives largely based on the science of these very people, and it damn well should have be a scandal.

There was no "smoking gun." Anyone they get to say stuff like that is too partisan. It paints a terrible picture of the way climate studies get published (when a researcher can pressure a colleague to not publish (as an editor) papers that are contrary because they are below them at some institution).

Tax dollars fund their research, and trillions are at stake, nothing less than 100% transparency is acceptable.

What is clear is that they really do cherry pick data, too. Their work is sloppy, and their model is clearly broken. That doesn't mean AGW is wrong, it just means that some primary names in the field are not good scientists. From a public policy standpoint, that does mean they are not worth listening to right now, IMO. Policy and science are not the same. When a check needs to be written, I expect a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. That's not too much to ask. That means good, predictive models of what happens with different policies in place. The idea that it's better to do something, anything, rather than nothing is wrong depending on the cost. because "something" has a cost. Without good models, how can we know if a given policy will even have any measurable effect? Even bothering with a policy that does not fix the problem is pointless and wasteful, better to spend later on mitigation.

Trouble is the huge influx of cash into climate science has had a negative effect. It's a huge cash-cow. The more hype, the more cash available. They get huge grants, but don't hire a real programmer? Where's all the money going? (airfares to climate summits in scientific centers like Bali?) I saw this happen in the 80s with friends who worked as scientists/engineers at the labs (Sandia, Phillips (AF weapons lab), and Los Alamos). SDI money was everywhere, so almost every project ended up SDI related. Before med school my wife was a PhD research scientist in biology (human). AIDS money was everywhere, people stopped doing other work cause getting funded in AIDS was so much easier than clawing out a grant for something less hip like, say, cancer (except some cancers where they were interested in retroviruses as causes, or for treatment). A current buddy is an entomologist, and he said he can get a grant easier if his study of termites includes some nod to how "climate change" affects them.

[NeonSamurai]

Split this off as it had nothing to do with the wikileaks thread

[tater]

Split this off as it had nothing to do with the wikileaks thread

Assange has claimed credit for leaking the emails, though they were not in fact leaked by wikileaks (wikileaks might have hosted a copy, later, but they were already out there).

So it was in fact related.

[NeonSamurai]

It has zip to do with the other thread, which is dealing with Assange being arrested. So no, it is not related, hence why I split it. I also copied the first 2 posts in this thread as they were vaguely related to the topic, but moved the rest.

[tater]

NP, I know it was going OT, but it was tangentially related at least at the start. As is the hypocrisy of the NYT for not publishing "private" communications out of principle—unless they feel like they want to :)