It wasn’t Lost. It was destroyed!

“I think it was an inside leak of a whistleblower and not a hacker”

No kidding. I was once a very disgruntled employee and dreamed about doing something like this (no relation to climate change, so don’t even speculate). But I (and most other people) have a sense of perspective and respect for the law, so I’d never have actually done it. I saw this as an inside job as soon as I heard about it. It’s exactly what I would have done.

This guy narrowed in on precisely the best (worst?) stuff to embarrass the people he worked for (I think we can assume he/she has left the organization). It’s collected over a long period of time, from a variety of sources (i.e. not just emails – which would have been on completely different file systems to scientific code). He knew exactly what he was after. And then he filtered it for maximum effect and put it “out there” in a way that gave him deniability, but maximum exposure. I reckon it’s personal, and he knew the guys in those emails. Which means they know him.

So if CRU and the police have any sense, they’ll be talking to disgruntled ex-employees – probably from an IT section, or possibly a scientist who was marginalized or unpopular. When they find him (and my bet is “they will”), my bet is on prison time.

Thomas:

“Such data belongs to the national meteorological services in each country and they will all have copies of it.”

Exactly. That’s what the warmers have been trying to tell you – but nobody’s listening. Have a read:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/

The more we learn, the less “gate” there is in this “climategate”. I guess that’s the lesson we’ve learned from previous scandals – get the shouting in early, create a “controversy”, then you can refer to the controversy later after the (rest of the) facts come to light and the story loses any real interest. I give it about another 2 weeks – by the end of the copenhagen conference, this story will just be the bleating about the controversy.

It does not lend itself to laboratory experimentation or the double blinded ‘gold standard’ type of studies which medicine (my field) uses to bypass unknown or unquantifiable variables including researcher bias, which is unavoidable. Nonetheless even in medicine what was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow despite far greater latitude in experimental design.

This is much worse. The challenges are so large that I cannot imagine how they can be overcome to derive anything meaningful from historical data given the precision required in estimating the small changes we are talking about.

So this is less precise than anthroplogy in my estimation.

We all know that global climate is dynamic and has been long before our ancestors walked on two legs.

This bothered me from the start. Then the issue is compounded by trying to implicate a causative factor, human CO2, an admitted minor factor in the big picture of greenhouse gasses. Then the headache of politics kicked in over an esoteric science just beginning to see the dawn.

Too me, cancer is just beginning to see the dawn and we have lots of controlled experiments to study that. Every patient is essentially a controlled experiment.

So why is politics so interested? Why have these scientists and their celebrity spokesmen become so invested? Why is this a left-right issue at all? It should not be if it is science. There is no left-right issue over cancer treatment, automotive safety, or relativity theory for example.

My sense is that there is a crack in the vase and we will see some return to sanity. Maybe not.

When I see this I think about basics. This is a human endeavor and many formerly forgotten folks in the basement of the physical science departments are now hot celebrities. They cannot avoid the surge of applications for graduate students and the money pouring in. Simple human nature.

Spindok

This is one HELL of a caviat! My bet is this: it’ll take at least weaks, and quite likely months for them to release any data, it won’t be complete when they do, and they’ll make all kinds of excuses, based on the above, not to.

Methinks some “scientists” need to meet a big sweatty man with a rubber hose…