User:DeepNorth/DetailAGWIssues

[Note: this is a draft of a reply to Jimmy Wales. It contains too much detail, but the detail may be desired/required by some and helps me to sort out what best to say in a reasonable space.]


 * Mr. Wales: Thanks for your reply. It seems as though you find my allegations implausible. In fairness, even though I have spent a great deal of time looking at it, it seems downright impossible. However, it is what it is.

Nothing I say should be construed as a criticism of you personally, nor do I feel that it is incumbent upon you to do anything. Having fostered Wikipedia, you can be assured that you may rest upon your laurels. There is no failing on your part here and even if there were, it would have a negligible impact on the great work you have done. I am making an appeal because I can't see any other place trustworthy to go and I really think we have a problem with our Encyclopedia. This problem is indicated by a specific stain on its reputation, but it indicates a deeper problem of governance that has apparently not anticipated a concerted effort to spread disinformation over long periods of time.

Ironically, I would never have presumed to come to your personal page except that one of the bully boys in the Climate space was jeering at someone else who had posted here and I see that people I know are long suffering have made an appeal here only to be repudiated by the usual suspects. Hopefully other lurkers will chip in as well. What is being promoted as the 'majority/consensus' view in the Climate topics is false. The reason a particular POV exists there is because it came to rest there a long time ago and its proponents appear to have perfected techniques of systematically baiting, warning, sanctioning and chasing away or banning editors with any other POV.

Groups of people with very strong POV have been at war here for a long time. It is non-trivial to look at this, hence my severe suggestion (I would/should myself, BTW, thereby be banned from that topic area). You really have to look at a lot of stuff to see that the bias is no accident. These people are good at this game.

Re: You wrote, among other things, that you "took a stab at trying to cure the ills of the bogus thing attempting to make it appear that there is no such thing as Climategate." Can you point me to more specifics? I just looked for the article, it is there, and does not seem to deny the existence of this incident at all.

We do not have an entry proper for Climategate. We have a redirect that points to something different. In fact, it points to something you rightly describe as 'this incident'. Climategate should have its own article and it should take its proper name. I deal with that naming issue and how it relates to (nominal) policy here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DeepNorth/Drafts

Wikipedia's guidelines for naming an article are very clear and the only name that satisfies them is 'Climategate'.

Instead of the umbrella name for a sweeping scandal affecting huge numbers of people, enormous sums of money, criminal offenses (say, denial of FOIA requests), the destruction of 'scientific' data, falsification of data, scientific misconduct (amongst other things collusion to suppress publications of other scientists), outright fraud and cover-ups of same, misrepresenting facts (well, lying really) to the British Parliament, investigations by the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the retraction of many of the most salient points of the IPCC 'gold standard' Climate reference (2035 and the quote 'voodoo science' come to mind), investigations and cover-ups at Universities on both sides of the Atlantic (there is a total doozy of a press release from UAE at ground zero that is deliberately misleading to the point of being a lie), misrepresentations of science, bogus statistics (a variant of the 'hockey stick' simply cannot be removed from Wikipedia), etc, etc. Instead of the term that covers all that -- misbehavior and alleged misbehavior spanning decades, we redirect someone searching for 'Climategate' to 'Climatic Research Unit hacking incident' -- as if Climategate is merely about a smallish crime ('incident') directed *against* people at UAE and the thing that is immediately known and important about this is that somebody illegally hacked into the UAE system and that the hacking event was being taken very seriously and being investigated by the police. Really, except on 'opposite day' the 'persons of interest' in a crime here are the authors of some of the Emails, not the (IMO whistleblower) person who let them out into the wild. In the rest of the world, (even to some extent UAE which is furiously attempting to wish this away), what is germane is the content of that FOAI.zip data file and what it may mean for the integrity of Climate Science in particular and now even the governance of mainstream Science in general. Last I checked, Wikipedia puts an entirely different complexion on this than the rest of the world and that complexion is a false one.

I deal with the Article as I found it at the time (before I had witnessed how truly dreadful things are here) in the link below. I attempted to get a balanced view, based on what was actually known, similar to that given at 'Watergate Scandal' by using that page (Watergate) as a template. Watergate's opening paragraph has since (by co-incidence as far as I can tell) subtly morphed into something a little closer the opener for 'Climatic Research Unit hacking incident'.

First, Here are the diffs between what Watergate said when I referenced it and what it says now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Watergate_scandal&action=historysubmit&diff=348617087&oldid=331864938

The difference is subtle, but a little creepy. I have no evidence (and can't really believe) that it was done as a part of the meddling with the thing that replaces Climategate, but it is a little spooky. Before my note mentioning Climategate/Watergate propagated in the Blogosphere, the opening paragraph says "... Named for the Watergate office complex ...". After, it says "...resulting from the break-in into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex..."

Before confirmation bias runs rampant on both sides of the AGW debate, it would be best to shut things down and review.

Here is what I wrote. It was widely referenced prior to being pitched into oblivion here at WP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AClimatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident&action=historysubmit&diff=331711452&oldid=331711409

I didn't sign it (my bad), but at the time I really was just an uninvolved editor. There are about 50 web pages properly referencing my modest comment, even though it was quickly disappeared from the discussion.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=4lN&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=climategate+%22this+commentary%22+%22uninvolved+editor%22+%22makes+clear%22&start=90&sa=N

There are about 70 pages properly referencing the title of the article replacing Climategate even though it has been Ranked number one in a Google search for months.

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=G42&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=%22Climatic+Research+Unit+hacking+incident%22&start=110&sa=N

There are anywhere from 1 to 50 million pages properly referencing 'Climategate' (as such, by name) depending upon how you look at it.

The current article title is about as wrong as an article title could be and still have some relation to its subject matter. This is a wide ranging scandal of great interest. It is not an 'incident'. It involves, at some level, most of the people in the world, not merely a single part of a department at a school. There is no clear evidence of 'hacking'. Hacking is not even a good candidate for how this came to be. Even if it was hacking, it is of minor importance and would not merit an article in WP. This article that purports to stand in for an article on 'Climategate' is distorted to the point of complete deception. By virtue of it's wide acceptance, 'Climategate' is not particularly even loaded or POV anymore. The current title, on the other hand, annihilates NPOV. Even the people that brought this mutant into existence agree the title is a poor one. Nobody could go to that article, look at its title and read its opening paragraph and gain a proper perspective on Climategate. If you look at the extensive discussions since this scandal broke, you will see that it is no accident. What legitimate stuff resides in that article now was very difficult to put in place. The fact that it still has that completely misleading title is testimony to how bad the skew is.

As it stands, the article title is a lie both of omission and commission. It goes down from there. The opening paragraph is just a big fat whopper of a lie. Were that an honest opener for this article, it would fail the test of notability and be put up for deletion. There are more than a billion people on the Internet. Real hacking that we can prove happens all the time. It is a commonplace. The UEA is not particularly notable in this respect. Loss of data happens all the time through a variety of means. In fact, if we are to take them at their word, the UEA lost some of the crucial data upon which many of their publications depend.

I took a quick look at some University rankings and none of them rank UEA close to the universities I attended. Some don't rank it at all. My Alma Maters (U of T, York) are not that notable in the grand scheme of things and I certainly would not expect to see an article about some data breach at them. UEA itself is not even that notable beyond its role in Climategate.

Watergate, from which 'Climategate' takes its form, is about a scandal that brought down the President of the United States. The break-in at the hotel is a minor detail. Watergate is not a scandal because somebody broke into a hotel and Climategate is not a scandal because somebody broke into a school. Watergate was a scandal because it revealed greater wrongdoing and resulted in a celebrated coverup and important public consequences. Climategate is a scandal because it affects a lot more than Watergate ever did and may have (already) consequences that dwarf Watergate.

As it happens, I am a computer programmer. From what I saw of the code released, it could not possibly be expected to yield usable results in production. Were the stakes not so high, it would just be humorous. More importantly, as the admin for a number of networks and their mail systems and security, I find it highly doubtful that the file called (IIRC) FOIA.zip is primarily the result of someone 'hacking' into the UEA systems. Certainly, if one reads the material released, the villain in the piece is hardly the person who made that information available and even if there was a breach, all it did was release material that was arguably the subject of an illegally denied FOIA request.

No element of the article title 'Climatic Research Unit hacking incident' is reasonably germane to the 'Climategate' article it presumes to replace.

Also, as it happens, I have a B.Sc., majored in Biology and by coincidence did a paper about how Climate affects seasonal adaptations in living things for which I had to research the where, what why and how of heat in the biosphere. The alleged 'Climate Scientists' are not doing science as I know it and what they have to say about Climate is laughable on its face and demonstrably false. I would not have been able to get away with that weird 'hide the decline' grafting of one data set onto another when I was in high school. It is to laugh. Finally, I also do a lot of modest statistics for my own research program and for clients. The Hockey stick is not 'easy' in terms of spotting the exact nature of the error (how the statistical treatment went south). However, it is not all that hard once it is explained. The hockey sticks are bogus, but we can't seem to remove them from WP. Similarly, the other graphs (or other aspects of the hockey stick) are misleading in a host of ways. Tree data that sends the wrong message is improperly truncated. Tree data and measured temperature data are improperly grafted on to one another an presented as if they are the same thing. A close look at the fine print on one shows that all graph lines were (again, improperly) centered (fake calibrated) against a chosen point in time to make them all fit together. The alarming graphs show a 'variance' whose provenance is suspect, whose trends are not in line with data I have personally looked at (flat with a meaningless R-Value for my location), are likely within the real error of measure for the highly suspect data sets which they purport to represent and at least some graphs should show the thing in context measured in Kelvin so that people can appreciate the tiny variances we are talking about. They don't do that, of course, because what they are trying to show about 'temperature' would be hard to see on a graph of an actual measure of heat. Greenhouse gas effect? Bait and switch. If we tripled CO2 in the atmosphere, it is not likely it would have any appreciable long term effect. CO2 already is a spent force. It already blocks most of what it can at any concentration. Besides, plants and the Ocean gobble that stuff up. If we set fire to everything we could lay our hands on (well, don't do that) we have no evidence that it would have much of a long term impact. The AGW crowd would have you believe that CO2s undisputed ability to act as a (so called) greenhouse gas is in dispute and they attack that straw man with gusto. They would further have you believe that the tiny remaining greenhouse effect it is able to have (never in dispute) implies that it is mysteriously amplified in a sort of science fiction feedback loop. That is a dumb idea and despite billions of dollars and decades spent trying to show how that works, they have come up empty. There is peer reviewed literature that refutes the shaky AGW positions. Having spot-checked that and the junk presented on the AGW side, I am at a loss to see how anyone could take AGW seriously. Sorry for the rant, but really, everywhere I looked, things stank to high heaven. Pro AGW stuff is either, upon inspection, weak, irrelevant or downright false. Arguments repeatedly return to the now exposed as corrupt 'peer reviewed' 'Climate Science' literature, the debunked IPCC report, irrelevant misdirections of a variety of sorts such as ad hominum attacks, appeals to authority, argumentum ad populum, etc. There is, apparently, 'overwhelming evidence' that AGW is happening, is catastrophic and correctable. I can't find it and the people claiming this either just state it baldly or point to junk references and bankrupt arguments. The IPCC report is compromised. The UEA stuff and stuff from the Climategate authors is suspect. The temperature record from the Met and GISS is suspect. Supporting data from earlier UEA publications has been lost. If we take those away, there should still be evidence, because the alleged evidence is apparently 'overwhelming'. Yet we are continuously referred to back to the IPCC, the (known corrupted) narrow 'peer reviewed Climate Science' literature and the demonstrably false hockey sticks.

The current article title is not 'Climategate' and the article is not really about 'Climategate'.

The article title is clearly POV. It emphasize the wrong thing entirely and does not even get that correct.

Here is the Wikipedia page, for those who are interested on Climategate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climategate&redirect=no

It is just a stub that redirects you to a discussion that might as well be about something else.

How reputable is UEA?

ICO criticism of UEA was reported as “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.”

The UEA wanted a retraction. Instead, they got:

"It is hard to imagine more cogent prima facie evidence."

They then released the following howler:

"A subsequent letter to UEA from the ICO (29 January 2010) indicated that no breach of the law has been established; that the evidence the ICO had in mind about whether there was a breach was no more than prima facie; and that the FOI request at issue did not concern raw data but private email exchanges."

What has made this subject areas so contentious is its importance, its 'mindshare' and the incredible extent to which it has been manipulated and distorted. It is difficult to read the Climategate Emails and trust their authors. It is more difficult still when you recognize how perverse their notions are. It is unfair for them to masquerade as scientists. It is unfair for them to characterize their churlish behavior as being 'ordinary' for scientists in private correspondence. There is, to be sure, a competitive spirit and all people go over the top sometimes. However, there is a persistent pattern of dishonesty, clear misunderstanding of 'science' per se, unbecoming boorishness (I, for one, have never found the death of anyone 'cheering', certainly not a colleague), an agenda to find and demonstrate certain things whether true or not, a positively fiendish attitude towards those who might disagree, etc, etc. I have known plenty of scientists and I don't know any that would fit in that group.

Similarly, the most strident supporters of the ideas of the above 'scientists' (I honestly do not think of them as real), have a 'take no prisoners' attitude towards anyone who might disagree. They delight in comparing those who are unconvinced by 'climate science' to holocaust deniers and the most egregious of creationists. They have somehow managed to turn the honorable notion of 'skeptic' into an insult when healthy skepticism is at the very heart of the scientific enterprise. My background is in biology and I take exception to comparing AGW skeptics to creationists. I also take exception to the notion that Biologists do not spend considerable time explaining evolution to those who disagree with it and therefor AGW proponents have no obligation to bring out their evidence. I am a lot more respectful as a 'biology person' to creationists than pro AGW people are to honest AGW skeptics. I am not afraid to talk about the theory of evolution and evidence for it. It is well supported. I don't have to call people who don't believe me names.

There are two polar sides to this debate that delight in calling names and further polarizing the debate. For whatever reason 'liberal' is a bad name in some circles and those who are pro AGW theory are branded 'liberals', 'leftists', etc. In others, conservative is considered an insult and those who are skeptical are branded conservatives. Both sides seem to call the other anti-science. Those polar extremes are dumb, but if I had to identify as liberal or conservative, I would identify as liberal. I am decidedly left of center any way you slice it. I am also an AGW skeptic. I was trained in science and do research, but I know that science has its limits. It should not be a religion and certainly all scientific theories should be ready willing and able to be falsified.

As it happens, I am a computer programmer, have a B.Sc. (Biochemistry), wrote a paper that involved research into climate while in school and I do statistics for work. As a programmer, logic is, to some extent, my business. However, I also took a course on formal logic in University. I also spent many years working with and for financial institutions. To the extent that I have training and experience in these areas, everything 'Catastrophic AGW' stinks.


 * Using computer models to extrapolate climate for a century? Fail. Especially nothing approaching the toy scrap code that was leaked. The programmer that wrote it did not even take it seriously. I do not expect to live long enough to see us predict the weather more than a few weeks ahead and even that is a stretch.


 * Hacking incident? Unlikely. What person capable of intruding into a system and gaining access to all that disparate information would bother to read and cherry pick all those Emails and other stuff? This would not be a 'black hat' job. A white had might wish to, but I find it doubtful they would have the time and energy to see it through. Besides, a white hat would be smarter and go the social engineering route on something like this. Finding and packing the data was definitely an inside job. Getting it out of the system may have been an accidental or deliberate placement of the file on an ftp server or a copy to a USB key or something. It is not very likely to be a 'hacking incident' for any meaningful value of 'hacking'.


 * The science? A big fat fail all around. So poor it is actually a little hard to grab an edge to criticize. I could not have gotten away with graphs like that in high school. That is not hyperbole.


 * The Climate Science? That is almost an oxymoron these days and an insult to the people that came before and actually contributed to our knowledge in that area. I am going to go out on a (very short, thick) limb here and say that a century from now none of the main players in Climategate will be celebrated as a great scientist. There are things we can know about Climate and likely we can predict it to some extent. However, controlling it or making reliable and accurate predictions is ridiculous unless we are simply plotting ordinary long-term fluctuations. What is 'forcing', really? It is the ghost in the machine. It is as if they are quietly confessing that their dog tells them what is causing global cooling/warming/climate change. This really is 'voodoo science' as they were fond of calling the skepticism that glaciers would be gone by 2035.


 * The statistics? No way. I can see how they might (wishing mightily for a specific outcome) have made an honest mistake in the first place, but to continue with it they are either dishonest or incompetent. There is a saying in my circles 'if you torture data long enough it will eventually confess'. That is about what has happened in modern 'Climate Science' and the torture was unusually long and cruel. From what I have seen of the data, it is very poor. The 'value added' stuff is simply made up. It is meaningless. No semi-serious inquiry into Climate will make you think that a handful of suspect weather stations will even let you say what is there, let alone what is going to be there later. The disdain of the current crop of climate scientists for the sun is mind-boggling. If you plot the expected incident radiation of the sun for the planet, guess what you find? Animal species phenotypes follow the shape of those curves.


 * The logic? It would be funny if it were not so sinister. There is a long chain of evidence and argument that is required to support the AGW POV. We are not allowed to see the evidence, the arguments are generally formally incorrect on their face, the links don't link. The main arguments boil down to 'trust us', '100 scientists can't be wrong', 'those arguing against us are bad people, forget about the evidence', 'we know more than you', 'the ends justify the means', 'only our sources are allowed', 'yours is a fringe position and we need not address your concerns', etc. These guys are nothing if not experts in advanced sophistry. The burden of proof for extraordinary claims rests squarely with them and with no other. They are unable to even come close to meeting that burden. So ... they shift the burden to you. They have flatly stated that the Easter bunny is real (poor example, because I'm on the fence with that one) and that it is up to you to prove he is not. Then they laugh at how inadequate you are to the task. With no evidence to falsify, it is a tough go. I admit it.


 * Finance? Oh my. I spent a lot of time working with Banks. They like money. If they are heavily involved, there is money there (duh). Brokering CO2 credits is a bankers wet dream.