An Inconvenient Hack

Watching a fascinating story unfold in real time on the blogosphere (I saw it on Twitter first). There has been a hack on one of the main Pro Global Warming group's files and it turns out that they maybe were being a little economical with the truth - NYT:

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Not entirely surprised, it's been clear that the AGW - Anthropomorphic (Human Caused) Global Warming - industry has been an "industry" - ie has a lot of money is riding on it - for quite a few years now, so there is now a huge investment by vested interests. To be honest its always irritated me somewhat as I know enough maths* to know that most of the allegations of man made warming activity are just noise in the standard deviation of Good Old Gaia, which is in addition quite a complex system and can flip from state to state quiet fast. Also a mere smidgen of historical research makes you realise the world has been warmer than today even in recent millenia (grapes were grown in Yorkshire in Roman times and cattle grazed in a green Greenland in early medieval times for example).

But I am in favour of reducing reliance on fossil fuels and ensuring our energy consumption is optimised on purely rational "what happens when its gone" basis, so its been an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing as the sceptic lobbies are heavily populated by the Status Quo and do need quite a big push to do the right thing - and they are certainly no angels in this either.

I've long felt the risk that the populist AGW argument was too over the top and that it would eventually crash and burn and take all the good pro Global Warming science down with it. In that respect this is quite worrying.

There are also three useful internet based lessons from this:

- The truth will out, eventually - and its usually not a techy issue, its good old human intervention at the heart of the system. (i.e. when you write an email, think - would I like this read out in public?)

- Once out, its gone - this stuff has been mirrored on servers across the world.

- Once its out, hordes of people will start to spend brain cycles looking at it, and start to talk about it, and put together a more accurate analysis - and with modern social media tools they will do it fast, and people like me will read it and comment, and write about it......

The resulting broahaha should be very entertaining, at any rate. Should make the Copenhagen conference quite a bunfight.

*being a qualified engineer I've not only studied (a lot of) maths, but physics, chemistry and thermodynamics as well.... not that many pundits feel the need to be constrained by these things in this debate!