climate researcher "very tempted" to "beat the crap out of" a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.

[scandal 951]

climate researcher said he was "very tempted" to "beat the ####### out of" a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.

Sounds just like a typical day on VJ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1258834052...=googlenews_wsj

Hacked Emails Show Climate Science Ridden with Rancor

By KEITH JOHNSON

The picture that emerges of prominent climate-change scientists from the more than 3,000 documents and emails accessed by hackers and put on the Internet this week is one of professional backbiting and questionable scientific practices. It could undermine the idea that the science of man-made global warming is entirely settled just weeks before a crucial climate-change summit.

Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England, were victims of a cyberattack by hackers sometime Thursday. A collection of emails dating back to the mid-1990s as well as scientific documents were splashed across the Internet. University officials confirmed the hacker attack, but couldn't immediately confirm the authenticity of all the documents posted on the Internet.

The publicly posted material includes years of correspondence among leading climate researchers, most of whom participate in the preparation of climate-change reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative summaries of global climate science that influence policy makers around the world.

The release of the documents comes just weeks before a big climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, meant to lay the groundwork for a new global treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change. Momentum for an agreement has been undermined by the economic slump, which has put environmental issues on the back burner in most countries, and by a 10-year cooling trend in global temperatures that runs contrary to many of the dire predictions in climate models such as the IPCC's.

A partial review of the emails shows that in many cases, climate scientists revealed that their own research wasn't always conclusive. In others, they discussed ways to paper over differences among themselves in order to present a "unified" view on climate change. On at least one occasion, climate scientists were asked to "beef up" conclusions about climate change and extreme weather events because environmental officials in one country were planning a "big public splash."

The release of the documents has given ammunition to many skeptics of man-made global warming, who for years have argued that the scientific "consensus" was less robust than the official IPCC summaries indicated and that climate researchers systematically ostracized other scientists who presented findings that differed from orthodox views.

Since the hacking, many Web sites catering to climate skeptics have pored over the material and concluded that it shows a concerted effort to distort climate science. Other Web sites catering to climate scientists have dismissed those claims.

The tension between those two camps is apparent in the emails. More recent messages showed climate scientists were increasingly concerned about blog postings and articles on leading skeptical Web sites. Much of the internal discussion over scientific papers centered on how to pre-empt attacks from prominent skeptics, for example.

Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as "prats" and "utter prats." In other exchanges, one climate researcher said he was "very tempted" to "beat the ####### out of" a prominent, skeptical U.S. climate scientist.

In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with.

One email from 1999, titled "CENSORED!!!!!" showed one U.S.-based scientist uncomfortable with such tactics. "As for thinking that it is 'Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us' … as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant. Science moves forward whether we agree with individual articles or not," the email said.

More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.

Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

GW alarmists take heed.

[Ban Hammer 13,656]

GW alarmists take heed.

watch it, or some pro climate researcher will want to beat the ####### outta you.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

GW alarmists take heed.

watch it, or some pro climate researcher will want to beat the ####### outta you.

Well, my GW alarmist can beat up your GW alarmist.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Scientists are all wimpy geeks. Real men (and women with comfortable shoes) become engineers

[scandal 951]

An update to the aftermath of this story. I'm really rather surprised how little attention VJ has given this. I would have thought the GW conspiracy nuts would have been all over this little adventure. Is it possible even THEY see that there is no story here? Possibly, but doubtful.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/1...-on-display.ars

UK hack reveals climate science's ugly side, little more

Someone broke into the e-mail system of a British university and made off with the private correspondence of members of its Climatic Research Unit. The resulting firestorm has probably told us more about the status of climate science than the actual e-mails do.

By John Timmer | Last updated November 23, 2009 2:29 PM

Late last week, a collection of e-mails and documents began appearing on a variety of websites, purportedly a selection of a much larger cache of material obtained when hackers gained entry to the UK's Climatic Research Unit. All indications are that the documents are legitimate, and they reveal the scientists behind them as fully human: snarky, dismissive, prone to using colloquialisms instead of technical terms, and protective of their data—perhaps unethically protective. A lot of the material sounds very familiar to people working in scientific fields, but the response suggests that the e-mails may expand the gap between scientists and the public in this contentious field.

The scientific community became aware of the hacking when the perpetrators, fresh from their success, attempted to deface the popular Real Climate blog, turning it into a host for the archive. Shortly afterwards, the documents appeared at a site frequented by climate skeptics, and have since been mirrored elsewhere. This isn't the full trove of stolen files, as the hackers have only uploaded a selected portion of the material (presumably, items they felt made the scientists look especially bad), and it's possible that there was some manipulation of the contents. But the majority of the material appears to be legitimate; a New York Times reporter has tracked down some of the people who wrote the e-mails and confirmed their accuracy (the reporter's own correspondence with a number of the scientists made an appearance).

But the questions don't end simply with whether the e-mails are legit, as the larger meaning of their contents isn't necessarily obvious. So far, they've acted a bit like a Rorschach test, revealing more about the person reading them than they do about the text's author, with reactions ranging from a collective yawn to hyperbolic claims that they reveal all of climate science as a complete fraud. In the end, there seem to be three issues that the e-mails illuminate that are worth discussing separately (there may be others buried in the archive, but there are three that seem obvious from initial reports).

Pardon the vernacular

One of the problems caused by the e-mails is that the scientists involved aren't discussing their data and its analysis using scientific terminology; instead, things come across more as what you might hear in an office environment. In short, the scientists sound like regular human beings (more on that below). When faced with two different data sets that provide different answers, the e-mails don't phrase things in terms of "what scientifically valid adjustment can be made to bring these two data sets into agreement?" Instead, the authors consider the problem in terms of how they can make the discrepancy go away.

Similarly, it's apparently widely recognized that, although tree ring data nicely tracks the temperature record for roughly a century, it diverges after 1960, when the modern rise in temperatures started. So, in a variety of papers, researchers have presented the instrument record, either superimposed or instead of the tree ring data, for periods where it's available (and clearly labelled the graphs accordingly). In the e-mails, this is described as a "trick" to "hide" the problem.

All of this is more pronounced when the data is preliminary, and researchers may not yet know how to interpret it or fit it into the larger body of existing data. That will get smoothed out by the time the data eventually gets published, but preparing data for publication is generally a small portion of an entire research project, and the e-mails largely reflect the longer period when confusion and frustration dominate.

As a result, the e-mails sound awful. But, the unfortunate truth is that this is the way scientists talk. "Lab-speak is full of shortcuts," said physics researcher and Ars contributor Chris Lee. "The way I discuss things internally is not the same way as I present them to the rest of the scientific community." And my experience from biology is that if I heard a coworker mention they had a trick to get better data from mouse embryos, I'd assume they were talking about a microscopy technique, not scientific fraud.

Scientists behaving badly

It isn't just research and presentation techniques that get discussed in terms that might seem more typical of an office conversation; scientists refer to each other in terms that would sound familiar around a water cooler. People smart enough to get a PhD in extremely technical fields are routinely derided as idiots when, by any objective standard, they're extremely bright and accomplished. Simple errors are treated as moral failings. Researchers become emotionally invested in their own ideas and treat their critics to withering attacks.

All of that is on display in the e-mails, where there's no shortage of snark and personal insult.

And that's just within the climatology community. Because of the public controversy, the work of climatologists has been actively questioned by people with varying degrees of relevant expertise, and the language used for some of those critics is especially scathing.

The public scrutiny plays out in other ways, as well. Instead of simply being concerned with how the scientific community—which is used to tentativeness and uncertainties—will perceive the work, some of the documents suggest that scientists were also concerned with how the public would perceive the latest results. A few of the e-mails hint that researchers may have chosen to present some information with this public perception in mind, which clearly isn't the best way to conduct scientific communications.

Whose data is it, anyway?

The battle with the skeptic community also plays out in a problematic way when it comes to the data access. Researchers are supposed to provide data to their peers once it is published in the scientific literature. But this straightforward rule turns out to be rather complicated in real-world practice. Scientists tend try to limit the spread of their data, lest some other lab scoop them by publishing on the same topic. International collaborations may involve a mix of dozens of published and unpublished data sources, with different rules governing disclosure of government-funded data in each of them.

Data may also be poorly labeled, poorly archived, and require significant effort to get into any shape where they'd be intelligible to anyone outside the research group that gathered them. All of that makes data sharing difficult under ideal circumstances.

But the circumstances in climatology community are anything but ideal. What emerges from the e-mails is a community that feels under siege, and not interested in cooperating with a community that it suspects is not interested in a good-faith effort to understand the research (there are some obvious parallels to the Lenski-Conservapedia spat). Some of the mails reveal what appears to be a truculent disregard for scientific ethics when it comes to providing data to critics.

Again, these problems happen in other fields. (Rumor at one of my former employees was that the National Institutes of Health had to contact a researcher's department chair in order to force him to share reagents that the NIH funded him to generate.) But that certainly doesn't mean they're not problems.

A double standard?

The document trove makes it clear that scientists communicate on three levels: in common and emotional terminology during personal conversation, which gets translated to detached and technical terms when writing papers, which (ideally) is phrased in cautious language and analogy when presented to the public. The hackers have basically short-circuited that process, and given the public a window into the messy world of day-to-day scientific communications.

And boy, does it look ugly. The public and political contentiousness of climate science imbued everything with a sense of defensiveness and frustration that made it all look worse.

In the end, this appears to be how scientists act during their personal communications in other scientific fields—one blog post pointed out that similar phrasing appeared in Newton's personal letters. But that probably won't matter, simply because the public doesn't care about those other fields. In the Ars forum discussion of matters, one reader expressed this plainly:

This may be a double-standard (in fact, it's clearly a double-standard, with one set of rules for climatology, and another for other fields), but that doesn't change the fact that this is how the majority of the public is likely to feel.

The irony here is that a variety of science outreach efforts have focused on exposing the public to the human side of science, in the hope that it would seem more exciting and approachable. The e-mails make it clear that science's status as a human endeavor cuts both ways.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Scientists are all wimpy geeks. Real men (and women with comfortable shoes) become engineers

[HAL 9000 96]

What a day its been.