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Reader Comments (326)
SNTF
>putting material on the internet which is not secure has a special word - it's called 'publishing'
:-)
It also reminds that the RL of URL means 'resource locator'...
Re deliberately anoymous
Is this right?
"Am also thinking about crowd sourcing the quotes, open it up to the public. Would be effective way to build the resource and I'm quite keen on aggressively developing the quotes database. There's lots of data mining opportunities (eg -contradictory quotes) but I can't help thinking it would be good to keep a permanent record of denier's denial. Then publish or profile their denial. Make them accountable. People will have to account for the damage their denial has done and our database can be a star witness."
Do you think it ethical or moral to be collecting information about your political opponents and storing them in a database? Do you think Greenpeace dumpster diving to find information on sceptics is ok? How do you think we should be held accountable for disagreeing?
As a comment in the Gleick topic puts it:
"Privately: this is war. It is corporate power vs democracy. In war it is perfectly acceptable to use any method to obtain intelligence about the other side's actions, motives and sources of aid and succour."
Never mind that corporate power is happily driving the mitigation and adaptation strategy and policy for their own profit. Does that justify creating incorrect infographics showing the hourglass with Heartland's funding and spending? Propaganda is widely used in war to generate consensus, or support calls for action but is it how the climate debate should be run?
The SkS leak shows there are some reasonable people on that side who do seem interested in keeping the debate science driven, but some who are not.
Could someone please post a working link to the SkS files? The one at Shub's isn't working either. Shub, do you have the file?
AH
"Privately: this is war."
Which says it all. They have two personas, one public and one private, while we have just the one. It's a lot simpler!
Sorry sHx
Just tried the link I got it from and it is now dead.
This member thing is cool. I can fix typos in my comments.
At least their secret handshake is still safe.
I won't post at SkS because of the nasty and unproductive atmosphere, but for those SkS regulars viewing this thread, the people at SkS have my sympathy. I am a developer, and I know the kick in the stomach feeling that comes with this kind of event. No matter how carefully you set things up, and even if the software you build on has no holes, somebody can spoil it all by making a debug log, or a careless copy, or change some control or permission that has a knock-on effect.
SkS regulars are simply private individuals with a common interest. They are not paid with public money, are not subject to FOIA, and no policy decisions are based on their work. They do not hide their objectives. They are not engaged in illegal activities. They have a right to associate as they see fit. They should have been allowed to do so.
Granted, SkS certainly had no qualms about reposting and spinning the genuine Heartland documents, which were equally private information, and should have remained that way, so my sympathy is a little muted. The only difference between the two cases, as far as I know, is that nobody has posted a fake document appearing to be from SkS painting them in a bad light. Still, two wrongs don't make a right.
Simon Hopkinson,
do you think the 'hacker' behaved unethically?
John Cook commenting on the Heartland leak/hack:
Haha, good one John: Gore IS a bloody hypocrite isn't he!
Tom Curtis speaks sense to the crazies:
Example 'crazy':
-- theorises that Mosher was part of a HL conspiracy
What hacker?
Whether or not someone has acted unethically by retrieving content depends very much on how they came to access that content. Describing them as a "hacker" because they visited a site and downloaded a file doesn't cut it. It is not hacking to visit Bishop-Hill.net by clicking a link from another website. Neither is it hacking to prospectively type Bishop-Hill.net into your browser's address bar and hitting [ENTER].
If they "prospected" for the file and got lucky then no, they haven't acted any more unethically than any other visitor to the site, at all. This is because what is publicly accessible is accessible to the public, whether directly linked to or not. Protected files are protected. Unprotected files on a webserver, as someone else has correctly pointed out, are "published".
If, however, the person who retrieved the content did so by means of computer misuse - exploiting a security hole in a My/SQL server, or hacking into the server and altering directory permissions etc., then I would consider that unethical. There has been no evidence offered to support this claim, however. Merely the expectation that someone who we feel cannot be trusted be taken at their word. Thanks anyway, but.. umm.. nahh.
The fundamental problem with determining whether or not the files have been accessed through unethical activities is that we are being asked to take the word of someone who, we see in these very files, behaves unethically on a day-to-day basis. This irony is not lost on me. It's a bit like "Never mind our lack of ethics, what about the lack of ethics of the person who exposed our lack of ethics which we don't want to talk about!? And yes, they were unethical, because 'as I understand it... they *may* have' hacked the server!"
Really.
Jim
Jezz, Jim. I've done websites for years and I am an ISP even today and I don't let little boys play with the knobs, push the buttons and sure as hell don't let them change passwords.
These people are amateurs. They totally messed up. As Josh so correctly points out in his latest cartoon, they are little boys in a tree house somewhere pretending to be big boys and when they mess up, whine like little boys.
And these same little boys think they are smart enough to save humanity from their imagined eminent disasters? I think not.
Hand them a hankie and then some cookies and milk to make them feel better.
Phew!! That's all 261 comments read! With a few exceptions, a great read and, with experience, one can spot the comments it's best to skip, even as one reads them.
But my comment is not 'about the science' - as the guy named for a kangaroo would like it to be - it's more about the policies being derived from it. I want to know what people like Curtis and his mates want governments to do about their theories. I seriously want to ask them, just how much money do they think is going to 'fix' this problem? I want to know whether they think 2C warming is worse for humankind than 2C cooling. I want to know if they feel secure enough in their knowledge that they think they can alter the climate back to what they consider normal without making a mistake and driving it further into disaster. After all, they don't seem to be very good at managing the security on a simple web site.
Snotrocket
You forgot to ask what they wanted for Christmas. :)
Don Pablo: Christmas presents?? I figure they could do with the equivalent of a good old M/F RACF system (Age alert!!) ;-)
Robert Way, regarding the hockey stick, skeptics aren't going to just let it go as a mistake because they are still using it. The newest upcoming IPCC report makes references to Mann 08 and Mann 09 for example.
Snotrocket
I doubt that they would understand MACRO on a MVS operating system. I actually am older than that, having started on fixed partitioned OS rel 14, with HASP. No VM yet. I even wrote a program to automatically read in the load module or object modules, libraries and pseudo LINKAGE ED them (back then it was "linkage") to generate the overlay tree with up to four partitions. I doubt 99% of today's programmers have any idea what overlays were all about, but back in the late 1960's it was state of the art.
Nowadays your memory stick or video screen has a more sophisticated OS built into it.
I got my start in networking with BTAM -- and acousti-couplers at 150 bps -- incorrectly call baud at the time as baud was the inverse of the inter-bit time.
And I even know how to connect up RS-232C, Bisync and a few other useless obsolete communications methods.
So your age alert is not a worry for me.
And maybe you should put a lump of coal in their stockings so that they can burn it to keep warm when all the electricity stops working. Santa may not be so forgiving. :)
I'm a registered user at SkS and it really doesn't bother me that my email address is probably in the wild - it's a throw away address
What concerns me most is a comment by "Albatross" who stated he followed my comments at the BBC and WUWT and called SkS his "work"
I'm curious to know how many other people who are sceptical of CO2 induced CAGW are also followed by Cooks workers
It's hard to feel any kind of sympathy for what is effectively a smear site. Mango it's a compliment - your argument is obviously strong.
Has Hengist apologised? I checked his blog and it seems only Lazarus has visited (http://muchachoverde.blogspot.co.uk/) - but not even a visit from him can revive it.
Mango Chutney:
I came acrosss snide references to geronimo and Philip Bratby. And there’s Rob Painting’s remark about WUWT commenters: “Shame we'll never know who many of those people were, so that they can be dealt with appropriately in the future”.This is the kind of undertone I experienced in the conversation with Albatross
http://www.skepticalscience.com/tropospheric-hot-spot.htm#67834
notice #6 in response to me jokingly asking if they knew where I live (post deleted) - the response from Albatross begins Mango @6,
I gave up trying to engage SkS in conversation
Shades of 10:10 and their little red button, not to be confused with Mao's little red book.
jim: "nobody has posted a fake document appearing to be from SkS painting them in a bad light."
I began working on one but gave up when I realized that nothing I wrote could make the existing light seem worse.
Don Pablo,
Also shades of the Greenpeace threat: 'We know who you are, we know where you live'.
SayNoToFearmongers
Yes, indeed. Pretty soon we will have Greenshirt stormtroopers. Actually, we do already if you watch the activities of Paul Watson on the TV show "Whale Wars." I am surprised that nobody has been killed, so far. While I am as interested in protecting the few whales we still have as anybody, ramming boats and other criminal acts on the high seas is taking it way too far.
What comes next, CO2 chambers for the deniers? That seems to be in the back of their minds.
And remember I am a psychologist --- perhaps a physiological psychologist, but I did study Freud, Jung, Adler and all the rest as well. These people do scare me and that is not paranoia -- they will turn dangerous.
"And remember I am a psychologist --- perhaps a physiological psychologist, but I did study Freud, Jung, Adler and all the rest as well."
LOL
MangoChutney
I want to thank you for the pointer --- interesting read. Definite signs of schizoid personality disorder in at least one of the commenters and a bit of a "power trip" as well.
Hampy
Ph. D. from Cornell. What is your training? If you are looking for an psychoanalysis I will need a larger sample of your writing. Perhaps 1000 words. Or are you just visiting?
Hengist McStoned said:
The one-sided moderation on this blog is shameful. At 3:10 PM a commenter makes snide underhand ad-hom comments suggesting I suffer from a 'debilitating condition'. That commenter who is clearly using a pseudonym has never met me nor has ( to the best of my knowledge) any medical qualifications, and is thus clearly unable to support his (or her) assertions.
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Thanks Hengist - I missed that comment 1st time through - glad you drew my attention to it.
Hi Hengist -- Got a new name, have we? How clever!
Don Pablo...cut Hengist some slack. He genuinely doesn't realise how the way he twists and distorts and misinterprets people's remarks in order to build up faux outrage could lead to offence. He is a true disciple of the SkS site. Perhaps he is toasting marshmallows in the hut with the big boys as we write these words.
Jack Cowper
A visit to Hengist's website appears to indicate that he is unrepentant - and judging from the appearance of Mr Bliss, lonely.
I do suggest you all go have a look. It appears that our Bishop has used his magic crosier to block Hengist's IP address -- an amazing act. Even more amazing is that it appears Hengist hasn't figured out that he can use the WiFi at the pub to get around such a banishment, if it actually occurred.
diogenes
Have you visited his website in the last couple hours? I suggest you do. Then tell me about slack.
Tom Curtis,
I am sorry that any of this happened; whether it was openly available or not, I don't think this is the way to deal with the topic of Global Warming.
However, I don't really understood your position. You have essentially said that you put forth your view of the ethics of discussion of the FakeGate scandal, and...others at SkS didn't agree, and ignored your input on ethics. Isn't this just a kind way of saying that they're unethical?
You're hanging around with...and believing...people you believe to be unethical.
Why?
RDCII, they are not unethical. Quite the contrary, they are very ethical people. However, like all people (even the best) they have occasional ethical lapses, and (what is more relevant here) they also disagree with me about what is ethical or not in particular situations. In this case they made an error or ethical judgement and hence a particular one of their actions was unethical, IMO. I am not going to turn my back on people who I respect very highly based on just one lapse. I am certainly not going to do so when (so far as I can tell) the entire anti-climate science world including the Heartland Institute commit the same ethical lapse completely without remorse with regard to the Heartland Institute.
(Nor, as a side note, am I hypocritical enough to think that I am without ethical lapses, either in judgement or in deed.)
Correction, the remorseless lapse by the anti-climate science world was with regard to the UEA.
@Tom Curtis
What does "anti-climate" mean? Who on earth is "anti-climate"? Personally, I'm pro-climate, especially the warm kind.
As for "the science", being sceptical of CO2 induced cAGW isn't "anti-climate" science, it isn't "anti" anything", it's simply doubt, which used to be a good thing, before the climate scientologists hijacked the term "denial" to infer people who are sceptical of the CO2 meme are in league with the devil
Tom Curtis
There you go again deciding that ethics is a undeniable USP of your site like you think we should accept your impecccable honesty . Like Hengist above you seem to have a tendency into lapsing into assuming that charactersistics that are earned can be blankly self described as an unarguable attribute.
This is the problem with the mighty anti-denier knights. Their inneffable self decribed image allows them to do things that are plain, er unethical.
Like my first in-depth introduction to SkS I found myself arguing with - I assume from his arrogant self described sciencey demeanour- another regular of SkS about the fabricated quote from Michaels that headed the Ice article. He thought he could always justify it on some science ground and I said you can't start from a position of fabricating quotes and then work from there. This I can say even if I was the most basest lowliest layman peasant. But to the self-described science knights this becomes a minor quibble, the ethics have been "redefined" ;)
"And there’s Rob Painting’s remark about WUWT commenters: “Shame we'll never know who many of those people were, so that they can be dealt with appropriately in the future”.
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Does anyone really think that the backroom chat at this blog, or WUWT, or Climate Audit, or Pierre Gosselin's, Tallbloke's, Jo Nova's, EcoTretas' places, etc, is conducted in these terms? It's like the prelude to a Communist/Fascist takeover - collect the names of your enemies so that they can be dealt with later.
Tom Curtis said:
"RDCII, they are not unethical. Quite the contrary, they are very ethical people. However, like all people (even the best) they have occasional ethical lapses, and (what is more relevant here) they also disagree with me about what is ethical or not in particular situations. In this case they made an error or ethical judgement and hence a particular one of their actions was unethical, IMO. I am not going to turn my back on people who I respect very highly based on just one lapse. I am certainly not going to do so when (so far as I can tell) the entire anti-climate science world including the Heartland Institute commit the same ethical lapse completely without remorse with regard to the Heartland Institute."
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I hope I correctly construe your jumbled grammar as meaning that in your view, the Heartland Institute committed the same ethical lapse as Gleick, without remorse. If that is not what you meant, I apologise, but seek clarification. If it is, please explain - it doesn't make sense at all in relation to the undisputed facts.
My personal view is that taking advantage of security breaches (like personal records accidentally being left on the street) is bad form. However, when the breachee - my neologism of the week - has gloatingly broken the same rules in the recent past, they are not in a position to complain from the standpoint of moral superiority.
johanna seizes on Rob Painting's remark and tries to beat it up into something sinister. In the meantime she and the climate "skeptic" world appear to find nothing sinister in Monckton saying:
"So to the bogus scientists who have produced the bogus science that invented this bogus scare I say, we are coming after you. We are going to prosecute you, and we are going to lock you up."
(My emphasis, recorded on ABC Australia, bacground briefing, broadcast on July 17, 2011)
Nor do they find anything sinister about the cheers that suggestion got from the crowd, Cuccinnelli's attempts to put Monckton's program into action, or even in the continuous abuse, threats and death threats to which climate scientists are subject.
Nor yet do they find anything sinister in Lubos Motl informing us that what Breivik's mass murder got wrong was not the action, but the timing:
"At any rate, I don't think that today, in 2011, there exists a problem in Europe that could even remotely justify the killing of dozens of this young people who attend a summer camp. Sorry but this looks unforgivable to me - unforgivable at the level of a death penalty which doesn't exist in Norway. I may speculate and I often speculate about the future in which tough decisions may have to be made to avert threats that are worse than anything we are seeing today, but this mass murder didn't occur in the future. It occurred a few days ago and given this fact, it's unforgivable."
(My emphasis)
(The Reference Frame, July 25, 2011)
But the possibility of a name and shame campaign (and Rob Painting has not been shown to have called for anything more) is intolerable.
*********************
There is nothing wrong with my grammar beyond precision.
It was quite plain that the ethical lapse I was discussing was publishing stolen private information; just as the HL institute, WUWT etc have published stolen private information from the UEA.
Tom, Monckton's comments were made in the context of an open prosecution using the legal system for, IIRC, deliberate misrepresentation of facts. It was not about 'dealing with people appropriately in the future' if and when their names could be discovered. In any event, my point was that reputable blogs all over the world whose views differ from SkS (and each other) do not operate in this paranoid and vindictive mindset. The recent Bloggies awards to several of them and their traffic figures perhaps indicate that the punters are voting with their clicks as to which they find more reliable.
Please identify when the Heartland Institute has published stolen personal information. We all know that SkS published stolen personal information about staff members at HI, including their addresses and private information from their personnel files.
I am not bothering to go over the arguments about whether the Climategate emails were 'stolen' or 'personal' again; it has been done to death. But, nobody has published Phil Jones's address or details from his personnel files at UEA. Unfortunately, he and his pals are not subject to performance review by their employers in the way that mere mortals in the rest of the workforce are, either.
Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest
H/T GWPF http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/5300-how-green-gullibility-hyperpartisanship-are-wrecking-the-climate-movement.html
One of the biggest intellectual failures of the global green movement against climate change is the persistent failure of its leaders and spokespeople to grasp the way their own advocacy fatally undermines their credibility. They blame cunning, unscrupulous and well funded enemies for disasters that their own inaccuracies, overstatements and disingenuous advocacy have brought on their movement.
Mar 27, 2012 at 7:44 AM mangochutney
I think that the phrase "anti-climate science" is a Gleickism. I think it was one of the unusual wordings in the forged document that lead Mosher to speculate on who was its author.
Don't look for rationality.
Tom Curtis, another tu quoque logical fallacy, but one that falls even harder on its face because, contrary to your belief system, there is no organised Big Oil-funded "denier machine" to which you can issue your counter-arguments. What Monckton says represents what Monckton believes, not what the mythological "denier machine" collectively believes. If we were discussing this on Monckton's site, there might be a modicum of rationality from which to issue your logical fallacy, but we're not. And it would still be a logical fallacy.
I cannot see how you are going to be able to form a coherent argument until you stop believing in your own "denier" myths. Sceptics are not all right-wing, they do not have a wilful disregard or contempt for the environment, and they are not connected to, or funded by, Big Oil. I still laugh at this.
We are described by Oreskes as "Merchants of Doubt". A rather satanic sounding descriptor, for sure In context, however, what we do is expose the "Concealers of Uncertainty". They would be you. Arguably few instances exemplify this meticulous and egregious practice better than the SkS effort revealed by your own website negligence recently, which is summarised by Tom Nelson's exposé of "The Consensus Project". And you would have the audacity to describe your efforts as "science". No, sir, your purpose and practice at SkS is without question the antithesis of science. Schneider said:
SkS illustrates perfectly that, in the pursuit of your ideological goals, you cannot be both. What SkS demonstrates is that you can either be effective - which is what SkS is clearly working towards in "The Consensus Project", or alternatively you can be honest - which is what we sceptics are working towards. This is the true division between us. Not Big Oil vs Big Government, but effective manipulation by concealment of uncertainty versus the truth; coercion vs honesty.
I choose scientific integrity, the disclosure of uncertainties, and the honest pursuit of scientific advancement. And I reject the practices at SkS because they amount to precisely the opposite.
..."punters are voting with their clicks..."
Nice one, jonanna.
johanna, of course.
BTW, who was that Penn State colleague of Mann who suggested a new category of crime out to be created to prosecute those making extraordinary scientific claims? It seems to me Monckton has taken his clue about prosecuting climate scientists from that Penn State Law Prof.
'T was Donald Brown, of course:
Perhaps Monckton is in favour of enactment of such a law in order to make it easy to prosecute James Hansens, Mike Manns and Phil Joneses of this world, but that would make him as cranky as Donald Brown.
Prosecuting climate scientists for unknowingly spreading falsehoods would be wrong. They ought to be dismissed for incompetence, not prosecuted for malice.
John Hartz (2011-12-03-An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign_ Is This A New Kind of Assault on Humanity_ .html):
When Tom's doomsday cult mates do it, Tom cooperates and moves on to moralise in 'denier' websites.
That's five in a row for me. Sorry for the pepper.
“They ought to be dismissed for incompetence”
If only - but as I recall, even when Hansen’s old boss laid into him, nothing happened.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/nasa_climate_theon/
Some people have so little self-doubt that criticism just bounces off. One T Blair comes to mind...
@Tom Curtis 7:05
"RDCII, they are not unethical. Quite the contrary, they are very ethical people."
There's a theme to this insanity across a broad swathe of the Green agenda - a squalid redefinition of morality which justifies anything by the application of very warped values. A prime example caused the outbreak of E. coli O104:H4 which killed 50 people in Europe in 2011 and destroyed the internal organs of several hundreds of others. The 'ethics' in question were the application of Organic food standards in the production of bean sprouts. These 'ethical' standards ensured that surface sterilisation of the seeds was not carried out, because to do so would have been 'unethical' and would have ensured that the beans could not be sold as Organic. This was an entirely predictable outbreak and the negligence of the certification system beyond any doubt.
As screwed-up ethics go, this is beyond repulsive. We also had a near miss in the UK last year because of the use of infected animal manures in organic vegetable production. Search the FSA for leeks and potatoes if you want confirmation - the organism in question, E. coli O157:H7 does not infect conventional production because the risk of using animal manures in such systems is considered too high - and the genuinely ethical decision is taken to use SAFE alternatives. But the Organic producers still claim the ethical high ground despite knowingly serving you faeces.
@Tom Curtis,
We are going to prosecute you, and we are going to lock you up
In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to break the law at some time in the future. The *published* Climategate emails clearly demonstrate such activity.
The tide is turning against the Green movement's licence to operate above the law (Google 'Queensland election' if you don't believe me), and when the time is right, there will be a price to pay for the wasted resources and enormous opportunity costs of this episode of pseudoscientific lunacy.