Quote from Shotglass :

unless im mistaken the hacking was done by someone outside their group and being a research group naturally brings the possibility to come up with something patentworthy (although very unlikely in a field such as climatology) so being able to not give out all your information is a basic requirement for a research group to function

It's not clear in fact whether it's some outside hack or whether it was an internal leak. The weight of the evidence so far seems in favour of the 'whistleblower' theory. I'm sure the employees at UEA CRU would really like to know for sure.

The rest of your argument is a moot point now, as the UEA CRU has now issued a statement that it will release all data and methods (who knows when). Your forgetting (perhaps conveniently, you say you are a familiar with the scientific process after all) that the heart of this issue is the issue of replicability, that any claims being made by scientists are worth nothing unless they can be properly replicated by an independent means. Any claims/data which are being kept secret means that other scientists cannot verfify those claims- and therefore those claims must be automatically assumed to be false.

whoever did leak hack whatever doesnt matter anyway since were talking about activities conducted by the group that fall outside the universities repsonsibility and not that of potential outsiders or single members of the group

that is of course true but i got the impression that the questionable data came from studies conducted by other groups (eg the finely selected tree samples from iirc russia) and the group in question merely did the creative data analysis and filtering which of course means that not being the ones who collected the raw data they arent the right ones to ask about it either

It's impossible to replicate most of the studies performed by the group as, because of their primitive data storage system anything pre-1980 was deleted because they didn't have the capacity to store it. So what it comes down to is them saying 'trust us', which we can't do any more....

It also explains why they were giving people the runaround with FOI requests, because they didn't have the data! Now that's not an excuse for them, au contraire it's worse because you'd think a world-renowned research group would have adequate storage.

Quote :

(eg the finely selected tree samples from iirc russia)

You seem to be talking about Keith Briffa's paleo work and the Yamal chronology. The story on Yamal is over here. The problem is that Briffa had used a very small subset of data from Yamal (ie, he cherrypicked) for the 20th C period, only 12 trees out of a much larger set- which gave his desired uptick at the end of the 20th C. In particular one very special tree, an extreme outlier listed as YAD061, has been dubbed 'The Most Influential Tree in the World'.




Steve McIntyre's criticisms of Briffa's methodolgy seem to have been accepted by Briffa. But Briffa has apparently now 'moved on'.

The IPCC also quietly dropped the hockey stick graph as a basis for their predictions when it was revealed it was based on selectively chosen data to achieve the required results

Quote :

Google has just censored the word 'climategate' from its autocomplete search feature. It used to be there (it was there today), now it's gone!

Lol v1rgo.... made me realize.. An Inconvenient Truth uh?

I don't need to point out the irony here do I?

Quote from PhilS13 :

I don't need to point out the irony here do I?

Have you heard of the Gore effect?

http://www.washingtontimes.com ... 9/mar/04/the-gore-effect/

Quote from Electrik Kar :

edit: It appears that Google has just censored the word 'climategate' from its autocomplete search feature. It used to be there (it was there today), now it's gone!

Hint: Al Gore is a senior advisor to Google.

Uh... it's still working for me both in Firefox's google search and on google.com itself.

It's still there in the google search pages, but removed from the autocomplete function (well, it is from where I'm sitting)- the list of suggestion words which come up when you start a search.

example, if you start typing google- you'll get suggestions like 'google maps' 'google earth' etc, after you've finished typing 'go'. With 'climategate' you can get right to the end of the word and it still won't suggest ('climate guatemala' seems to be the closest match). That is now. But it was suggesting beforehand.

Try on some other search engines and you'll probably find that climategate is a popular suggestion term. Google just scrubbed it off the list.

edit: if it's working for you then that's pretty strange. I haven't heard of it working in some instances. If that's true then I could almost start to wonder what google is thinking about me

I am referring to auto-complete. It's the very first suggestion if I type in "climate".

EDIT:
As an afterthought, to avoid the "OMG PHOTOSHOP" responses which are totally possible now that we've reached the paranoia event horizon, I've also added the data showing the JSON response from the page's AJAX request.

Yeah, wow! Well that is weird (see my .jpg in the post just before yours).

Quote from Electrik Kar :

Yeah, wow! Well that is weird (see my .jpg in the post just before yours).

If you type in the full term you are looking for then there is no point in it suggesting it, no? Try typing less of the word "climategate", go for "climate" or even "climategat" or anything that just isn't the full word you'd like it to suggest ...

I only did that to show that you could (well, I could) get right to the end of the word without the suggestion. Typing in 'climate' doesn't bring it up for me. (or any amount of letters in the word)

edit: Maybe its a location thing. Any Australians want to do this experiment?

You're using google.com.au - obviously "climategate" is not a popular search term amongst people who use google.com.au so it won't rank in as a suggestion - switch to google.com and it will.

Yep, you're right. It shows up fine.

(paranoia receding)

It was placed back on autocomplete a few hours after the details of it being taken off emerged online....

Quote from mookie427 :

It was placed back on autocomplete a few hours after the details of it being taken off emerged online....

By Elvis, using advanced technology he finally managed to operate thanks to advice by JFK up on the mothership they were both abducted to after escaping from that retirement home they've been hiding in.

Quote from xaotik :

By Elvis, using advanced technology he finally managed to operate thanks to advice by JFK up on the mothership they were both abducted to after escaping from that retirement home they've been hiding in.

word

Just read through most of this thread. Lots of interesting material here and on external links. Got to say I'm really surprised at shot's attitude...how can you call yourself a scientist when you're spouting such nonsense? The fact that the original data that the UEA had has been deleted is amazing. The reaction from the general public when they hear about this is probably going to be "so man-made global warming is rubbish then?" but that's not the message people should be taking away from this. The message is that there needs to be a lot more transparency involved in what is inevitably in charge of our future. We are all subject to the policy decided based on this data and other data like it.

Quote from amp88 :

The reaction from the general public when they hear about this is probably going to be "so man-made global warming is rubbish then?" but that's not the message people should be taking away from this. The message is that there needs to be a lot more transparency involved in what is inevitably in charge of our future. We are all subject to the policy decided based on this data and other data like it.

I agree. PS, for what it's worth the BBC just ran an article called 'Show Your Working: What 'Climategate' means', which helps to address your point. Interestingly though, it's in part written by Mike Hulme, a Professor of Climate Change at UEA (yep he's in the emails) and founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and who has been known to advocate stronger relationships between science and politics in the past.

From Hulme...

Quote :

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.

…‘self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy.

Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…

...


I can get quite jittery when I think about the possible societal ramifications of chucking out (normal) science in favour of a more post-modern re-interpretation of science (or post-normal science, as it's apparently called). Humle seems happy that science should be driven by politics; I think that 'climategate' gives enough clues as to how this has damaged scientific objectivity and traditional scientific credibility. We should all stop and have a think about whether this is how we want science to operate in the 21st Century.

(More information on Hulme and some of his views on post normal science and climate change, here, here, here).

Quote from v1rg0 :

If we were to break down the two sides of this debate in to demographic groups we would find the group saying it's no big deal consists largely, perhaps entirely of German globalists.

the entirely irrelevant globalist angle is quite unique and creative
also basing this on a gigantic sample size of as far as i can tell 2 (none of which i can see anything globalistic from) shows a deep understanding of statistics
using the wordglobalist like its some kind of insult adds the edge the sentence would otherwise be missing
great work there

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This is the science behind the proposals to track our movements and charge them, "carbon-debt" payments to the third world from the first world amounting to billions of dollars, carbon tax on the industry and lives of virtually every entity in first world nations and more.

entity? as in tax paying microbes or are we talking about flatulent cows?


as for your request i really cant be bothered to explain basic science to you particularly not after the ridiculousness of this post

Quote from amp88 :

Got to say I'm really surprised at shot's attitude...how can you call yourself a scientist when you're spouting such nonsense?

what attitude? that humans are inherently untrustworthy? that scientists are humans too?

Quote from Shotglass :

as for your request i really cant be bothered to explain basic science to you

Read: I'm not able to. :mischievo

Quote from Shotglass :

what attitude? that humans are inherently untrustworthy? that scientists are humans too?

You seem to think it's OK for scientists to intentionally skew their data to meet a particular ideology. There's a difference between changing a couple of data points in a lab assignment (or even your thesis) and routinely skewing hundreds/thousands/millions of data points to fit in with a pre-determined ideology that will end up effecting billions of people. I just can't understand that.

would you please show me where exactly i said it was okay? i sure dont remeber typing any of that

Quote from Shotglass :

would you please show me where exactly i said it was okay? i sure dont remeber typing any of that

What do you think is the appropriate reaction to being told that many of the world's governments are spending hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars (therefore passing that cost along to their taxpayers) based on falsified data? If it's "scientists are humans too <shrug>" then I would call that attitude unintelligible. For a rational person with a scientific background (which you claim to have but don't appear to be showing) to excuse or even expect that behaviour from an entire team of people is something I find difficult to believe.

Look at the suspicious actions the CRU/UEA and their affiliates have performed (that we know about!):

• Destruction of source data upon which much of the current AGW information is based on. The excuse was a lack of storage space. My understanding is that the 'corrected' values which they store now were generated by applying a correcting factor to the raw source data. So, why not store the original data and the correcting factor (the correcting factor appears to be fairly static per year, so the overhead of storing the factors would appear small)? That way you would still have the source data to show to anyone who was interested in seeing how you arrived as your conclusions (which would make them accountable to not only the bodies which funded them but the scientific community as a whole).
  
• Intentionally provided falsified or otherwise untrustworthy data. NZ Story Part 1 and NZ Story Part 2 and "hockey stick" graph to name a couple of instances.
  
• Attempted to silence critics of their findings who questioned the integrity of their conclusions derived from suspect data (Source)
  

...and the list goes on.