BPSDB If you haven’t been following the CRU hack story, the Union of Concerned Scientists has a nice overview:
Debunking Misinformation About Stolen Climate Emails in the “Climategate” Manfuactured Controversy
The manufactured controversy over emails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has generated a lot more heat than light over the past two weeks. The email content being quoted does not indicate that climate data and research have been compromised. Most importantly, nothing in the content of these stolen emails has any impact on our overall understanding that human activities are driving dangerous levels of global warming. Media reports and contrarian claims that they do are inaccurate. Read the rest
Are the CRU data “suspect”? An objective assessment.
Conclusion: There is no indication whatsoever of any problem with the CRU data. An independent study (by a molecular biologist it Italy, as it happens) came to the same conclusion using a somewhat different analysis. None of this should come as any surprise of course, since any serious errors would have been found and published already. Read the rest …
Science not faked, but not pretty –
The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Read the rest …
As expected and predicted … can we all go back to bed now? Sadly no, the climate change Denialosphere responds to the AP story with:
Seth Borenstein: AP Has a ‘Science’ Writer Problem
Anyone who’s familiar with Borenstein’s body of work on climate science for the news cooperative can be certain of two things. 1-That when the AP does a story on climate science, Borenstein’s name will likely be on it; and, 2-Whenever a Borenstein AP story and climate science meet, Seth will do his best to scare the bejeezus out of readers: there ain’t no happy ending.
A quick look at what this objective “reporter” has written–and the AP has distributed–since the CRU leaked emails surfaced. Readers can make their own judgment.
Recent AP articles by “Science” writer, Seth Borenstein, include:
* Review: Scientists’ e-mails don’t devalue climate theory Sun Dec 13, 2009
* AP verdict: Climate emails show science not faked, but not pretty either Sat Dec 12, 2009
* United Nations to probe climate e-mail leak Fri Dec 4, 2009
* Global warming may require higher dams, stilts Thu Dec 3, 2009
* Obama science advisers grilled over hacked e-mails Wed Dec 2, 2009
* ‘A million small changes’ to better climate Fri Nov 27, 2009
* ‘We are in more trouble than we thought’ Monday Nov 23, 2009Keep in mind these were all written after the ClimateGate emails were made public on November 19, 2009. One question upon perusing the above list: is Seth Borenstein responding as an objective reporter would?
In standard Denier fashion what is completely missing from the screed is any evidence that Borenstein is wrong or says anything that is not a fact. They are just playing the man, not the ball (ad hominem fallacy). As noted before: “Conspiracy theorists view logical argument as cheating.” To the Deniers, that he accepts the scientific realities based on verifiable facts rather than embracing the Denier Canon is all the proof required to determine that he is “biased.”
SWIFTHACK
Josh Nelson (aka Enviroknow) is trying to stay on top of it all with SWIFTHACK (tip of the hat to Deltoid), a site dedicated to the CRU hack story. Good luck with that is all I can say; I am simply drowning in CRU links and it will be a while before I am able to clean them up.
A few good reads on the CRU email hacking
are Coby’s picks; see the third on in particular 😉 Sadly it’s not going away either. For example, from Richard Littlemore at DesmogBlog we have
ClimategateTV: Deniers Start Their Own Station
The Deniers have rustled up their own TV station, an offshoot of the right-wingy Corbett Report called ClimateGate TV. The site has everything you could possibly want in terms of hyperventilating and belligerent commentary about the emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The only thing missing is even the tiniest hint about who’s paying the the bills for the new “service.” Read the rest…
In an attempt to keep the all important myth of the “Whistleblower” alive the Deniers have posted:
Climate-Gate: Leaked
The details of the files tell a story that FOIA2009.zip was compiled internally and most likely released by an internal source.
The contents of the zip file hold one top-level directory,
./FOIA. Inside that it is broken into two main directories,./documents. InsideIn comparison,
./documentsis highly disorganized. MS Word documents, FORTRAN, IDL and other computer code, Adobe Acrobat PDF’s and data are sprinkled in the top directory and through several sub-directories. It’s the kind of thing that makes the co-workers disorganized desk look like the spit and polish of a boot camp floor. usw
Perhaps some of the Uber-geeks can debunk this one, because it’s definitely not in my competence to do so.
“Over the 20th century, ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic main development region warmed during peak hurricane season, with the most pronounced warming occurring over the last four decades.” Earth GaugeWe give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
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Greenfyre's 
Maybe you mean “CRUde Hack smorgasbord”?
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This is assuming that the mails are stored on the CRU servers in the exact same formats and file naming conventions as those in the .zip file. Which also assumes that a potential cracker is too stupid to, like, write a program to process the e-mails into a different format. Duh.
And that aside, what kind of FOI Officer is so lucky that his stuff happens to be seen by someone who is (!) a legitimate RealClimate blogger and owns a valid account at tomcity.ru?
Our “analyst” certainly severely underestimated the capabilities of crackers and overestimated the likelihood of really lucky coincidences. I think Occam’s Razor says that he is talking garbage.
— bi
Surely the emails were from different mailboxes and then selected and brought together by the hacker? If the original file names were based on Unix time and there were any clashes, it would be easy to adjust the clashing names by a digit (second) or 2?
Don’t forget that the creation date-times are all the same: 1 Nov 2009.
My guess is that the files, regardless of original naming convention, were selected, then the names generated based on date-time of the emails themselves in order to show the chronology in the final single ‘mail’ folder. The same date-time was also applied then.
I think you mean 1 Jan 2009…
That’s sort of my guess too. (Well, my understanding is that the traditional Unix mailbox format is just one single flat file where the start of each e-mail is indicated by the 5 characters “From ” at the line beginning (which explains why messages containing “From ” in the body are sometimes munged (but I digress…)))
What’s more, according to climatemonitor.it, the time-based filenames only match up with the emails’ times if they’re interpreted as being in the -0500/-0400 timezone. How likely is it that a UEA internal mail server will use a date/time convention corresponding to a different part of the world?
— bi
(Sorry, not keeping up with this thread.)
Yes, of course. 1 Jan 2009, or 2009.01.01 in a form that would make vastly more sense than the numerous date formats that people use. 🙂
TrueSceptic: Welcome back! 🙂
In case you need to keep up further: it’s becoming obvious that the mails were processed in an unorthodox (and erroneous) fashion from the Eudora mbox format.
I recently started a new sub-blog dedicated to the CRU crack, and one of the commenters pointed out that there are some e-mail files which contain two e-mails strung together, with the second e-mail beginning with “From ???@???” and with the original e-mail headers intact. Then there are the “Attachment Converted:” tags in the messages pointing to files in “c:\eudora\attach\” or “c:\documents and settings\tim osborn\eudora\attach\”.
And some messages have a “References” section which look like they were output from the Lynx web browser — i.e. the original messages were actually HTML, and were run through Lynx to convert them into plain old text format.
I think that pretty much settles the question of whether the mails were ripped from a UEA mail server as-is.
— frankbi, IJI
Via a comment on my blog, I see that Gareth Renowden’s blog has also just been cracked. The IP address on the server log entry apparently leads to a web site of a company in Saudi Arabia, which makes it really weird.
(Blog posting on WordPress is dog-slow again, alas…)
— bi