Hadley/CRU files: Follow the money

The files leaked from the Hadley Centre contain a number of documents that show funding received, and a number more dealing with grant proposals:

defra.pdf: A grant request asking for £902,213 from the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (2007/8)

"tims contracts.xls": 14 contracts between 1994 and 2003, totalling £937,936.

"Adam budget.doc": a 2004 document for the ADAM Consortium, with a budget of £12M.

I'm still going through the thousands of files and emails, so there may be others, but this is around £14M so far.

My point here is that there is a motivation for Dr. Jones and company to want to publicize the most sensational (if unlikely) results and suppress conflicting or banal (although more likely) results, as the more press attention for the CRU, the easier to obtain new grants.

The file "A Report of the Successful Grant Writing Meeting 22 Nov 2000.doc" shows an (unsurprising) interest in attracting funding:

Research contract income is very important to the School, representing approximately half our total income. It supports the contract researchers in the School and generates the overheads that support many of the technical and administrative staff. This research activity also generates the publications that form the basis of the RAE assessment which controls the level of the other main component of the School’s income from the government. The component of the research income also controls our PhD studentship allocation from NERC and EPSRC.

Note that I am NOT accusing the staff of Hadley/CRU of suppressing scientific results. I am saying that sensational results would have a likely positive effect on their organization: finding levels, staffing levels, students, etc.

Where this meets the road is with their refusal to release the data they hold. Their attitude is essentially "trust us not to hype extreme but unlikely scenarios".

Professionalism

The CRU documents contain this. Irrelevant to the whole scientific debate, but interesting. The people in the picture are presumably Deniers.


Stay classy, scientists.

OK, OK, you got me

Yes I am. It's good, too.

Johnny Paycheck - Take This Job And Shove It

Johnny Paycheck was part of the Outlaw Country movement, along with Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. Only he took it to the extreme.

To jail, actually.

Attitude wasn't hard to find in his music, with songs like Me And The IRS, I'm The Only Hell (Mama Ever Raised), and Take This Job And Shove It, which went platinum in Paycheck's only crossover hit.

But he was a hard living man, always one step away from trouble with the law. Famous for his drinking and drug use, almost convicted for sex with an under age girl, he shot a man with a .22 in 1985 - serving 22 months in prison. Pardoned by the Ohio Governor, he ended bankrupt from tax trouble. I guess the IRS came out topside on that one.

It's often said that one of the things about Country music is that if the song hasn't happened to you, it's happened to someone you know. The attitude in this song is familiar to everyone.



Take This Job And Shove It (Songwriter: David Allan Coe)

Take this job and shove it I ain't workin' here no more
My woman done left and took all the reason I was working for
Ya, better not try and stand in my way
Cause I'm walkin', out the door
Take this job and shove it I ain't working here no more

Well, I been working in this factory for now on fifteen years
All this time, I watched my woman drownin' in a pool of tears
And I've seen a lot of good folks die who had a lot of bills to pay
I'd give the shirt right off of my back if I had the guts to say...

Take this job and shove it I ain't workin' here no more
My woman done left and took all the reason I was working for
Ya, better not try and stand in my way
Cause I'm walkin', out the door
Take this job and shove it I ain't working here no more

The foreman, he's a regular dog the line boss, he's a fool
Got a brand new flat top haircut Lord, he thinks he's cool
One of these days I'm gonna blow my top and that sucker, he's gonna pay
I can't wait to see their faces when I get the nerve to say...

Take this job and shove it I ain't workin' here no more
My woman done left and took all the reason I was working for
Ya, better not try and stand in my way
Cause I'm walkin', out the door
Take this job and shove it I ain't working here no more

Take this job and shove it

The Science Story of the Century?

I've spent quite some time looking over the chatter about the Hadley Centre's data disclosure, and have a high-level overview of what seems likely so far. While I've downloaded the data, I haven't gone through it yet. I plan to over the weekend, but this is all background on what is a terrifically interesting science story.

What is the Hadley Centre and what happened to it?

The University of East Anglia (UK) hosts the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, one of the three most influential climate research organizations in the UK. The Hadley Centre is part of the UK Met (Meteorological) Office, the UK's national weather office. Hadley develops computer climate models and provides one of the most influential temperature data sets (CRUTEM3). Earlier this year, the Hadley Centre controversially refused a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request for the CRUTEM3 raw (uncorrected) data.

Phil Jones is the current director of the Hadley Centre.

Last night someone posted 61 MB of emails, computer program code, and climate data from Hadley servers to an FTP server on the Internet. While the data has been removed from the original FTP server, it has been replicated to a number of filesharing networks, including Bittorrent. Antivirus messages that the master ZIP archive contains the virus Win32.Agent.wsg are a false positive (some antivirus scanners look for how files are compressed as a sign of being malware, and are a rich source of false alarms; that's the case here).

Hadley has confirmed the data breach.

Did they get hacked?

Nobody knows. Based on many years in Internet security, I am skeptical that this was the work of outsiders. This is speculation, but the following seems significant:

1. Email was exposed as a series of 1073 discrete files. If an external attacker were after email, he would target the email server, which keeps emails in a very small number of files. You'd have a big blob containing many emails, rather than many small blobs containing a few (or only a single) email.

2. The information looks very damaging to Dr. Jones and proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming (more on this in a bit). An external attacker will generally not know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. A disgruntled insider, on the other hand, will have much more knowledge of where the most significant data is to be found.

What is in the information that has been disclosed?

There are lots of emails, ranging from scientific discussions to catty name calling to what may constitute a conspiracy to avoid the FOIA. Here is a sample of the most interesting emails:

On potential data manipulation (of a very warm period that makes the AGW hypothesis less compelling):
(file 1257874826.txt)

Phil Jones writes:
“One final thing – don’t worry too much about the 1940-60 period, as I think we’ll be changing the SSTs there for 1945-60 and with more digitized data for 1940-45.”

And the sausage being made here:

At 06:25 28/09/2009, Tom Wigley wrote: Phil, Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip. If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.

That 0.15 degree adjustment to the data was not just pulled out of the air; rather, it was carefully chosen to get the "right" results.

On not complying with FOIA requests:

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxx xxxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx xxxxxx
University of East Anglia

Note: “Michael E. Mann” refers to Dr. Michael Mann, who popularized the Hockey Stick temperature graph.

Other information is also very interesting. There is a spreadsheet showing how much grant money Dr. Jones has received since 1990: £13.7M. An email shows that there was big money flowing around:

At 11:31 13/10/2008, Tim Osb*rn wrote:
>Hi CRU Board,
>
>I just had an interesting chat with Jack Newnham
>from the International Development Team at Price
>Waterhouse Cooper. They get lots of DfID
>(Douglas: DfID is the UK Government Department
>for International Development) funding.
>
>They’ve heard that DfID are likely to call for
>expressions of interest for a new centre
>focussing on international climate
>change. Their idea is to fund a centre that
>would be the first point of call for advice and
>for commissioning research related to climate
>change and development or to climate change in countries where DfID operate.
>
>He was talking about £15 million per year for 5
>years! Not sure how much would be from DfID and
>how much raised from other donors (and hence
>uncertain), nor how much would be given up-front
>versus how much spent later on specific research
>projects organised via this centre.
>
>Nevertheless, sounds big enough to be worth getting involved in.

That's £75M in one shot right there. Adding in Dr. Jone's funding, and you have about £100M identified in just these two files.

Lastly, source code and what appears to be raw data sets appear to be in the released data.

What is the likely short-term impact of the disclosure?

The most significant impact is probably in the public debate. While the public has a very low appetite for esoteric scientific arguments, personal conflict is a very different matter. Given that more than a little of this looks dodgy (just why are they trying to get around FOIA requests), and since this is the first whiff of just how much money is floating around the Climate Research community, and you have the making of a story that the general public might be able to sink its teeth into.

Given that the general public doesn't believe the Anthropogenic Global Warming hype anyway, this seems like the most significant short term impact - the narrative becomes not "dodgy science", but rather "dodgy scientists".

We'll have to wait and see how the press plays this. The interest is ramping up all over. Follow the money, indeed.

What is the likely long-term impact of the disclosure?

Just what's in the source code and data? It will take a week or a month for skeptical scientists to start really examining these, but we'll soon start seeing every mistake, every computer programming error, every hard to justify model assumption publicized. We'll also see any data errors or inconsistencies, as well as divergence between the models as run my the skeptics and model results as published in the peer-reviewed literature.

In other words, scientists will do what scientists normally do, and try to recreate published results.

Again, this is not based on my own examination of the data. I'll post on the data tomorrow.

UPDATE 23 November 2009 10:22: JayG linked, from a very interesting post about how the MSM is playing this. Cliff's Notes version (cue Mark Twain): If you don't read the newspaper you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.

UPDATE 23 November 2009 23:16: Paul The Pirate linked, with the logical question:

To me, this has little to do with science, and everything to do with the horrific results of politicization of virtually anything. Science, medicine, ethics, whatever. The same people who gave us eugenics, social Darwinism and the other bastard children of science are at work again. Last time, it was 'only' minorities and the handicapped who suffered when smart people used fake science to fool the not-so-smart. Who's going to be on the shit end of the stick here?

Sadly, we know the answer.

Day Zero vulnerabilities in Firefox Extensions

"Day Zero" means there's a vulnerability, but no fix. The workaround is to disable the extensions. Browser extensions are generally bad security juju because there's little or no security checking on what the extension does. The code is essentially allowed to do anything the browser can do.

Three extensions are vulnerable:

• Sage version 1.4.3
• InfoRSS 1.1.4.2
• Yoono 6.1.1 (and earlier versions)

Go to Tools -> Add Ons -> Extensions to see if you have any of these.

Microsoft: No NSA "back door" in Windows 7

Really:

Microsoft has once again denied rumours that it built a backdoor into Windows 7.

Long standing conspiracy theories that Redmond outfits Windows with a covert entry point for law enforcement resurfaced after a senior National Security Agency (NSA) official told Congress it had worked with Redmond on the operating system.

...

Microsoft categorically denied this on Thursday. 'Microsoft has not and will not put 'backdoors' into Windows 7," a spokeswoman told Computerworld. "The work being discussed here is purely in conjunction with our Security Compliance Management Toolkit."

A Windows 7 version of the Toolkit, which provides a guide to hardening Windows-based networks, was released last month.

This keeps coming up, every time that there's a new OS. It actually hearkens back to one of the Ancient Scrolls of the computer security field, Ken Thompson's Turing Award speech Reflections On Trusting Trust.

Is there a backdoor in Windows, so that NSA can spy on you? Eric Raymond gave the definitive reply, in a different context:

I would love to be able to echo Charles Babbage and say that I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I find it all too comprehensible, and not in a way that’s very flattering to John Perry Barlow or others like him. It’s a form of posturing by anticipatory martyrdom, simultaneously demonizing Barlow’s enemies and inflating his own importance.

“Oh, look at me!” it says. “I’m a brave speaker of truth to power, so brave that I’m going to say bad things about Republicans despite the fact that they will certainly throw me in the gulags as soon as they think they can get away with it.” I’ve been around long enough to know that this is a line lefties of Barlow’s and my age originally learned in order to pick up women back in those halcyon radical-chic days of forty years ago. It gets a bit old after your third decade of waiting for the Man to bust your door down.

If you really think that the NSA is out to get you, you need to ask yourself a serious question: do you really think that you have the ninja skillz to protect yourself?

Me, I think that NSA has better things to do than sniff around my files. Maybe that's just me. And to Microsoft and "there is absolutely no back door in Windows"? Don't go there:

"you get to see ... how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy"

Long time readers will remember how the UK's Hadley Centre has refused to release their climate data, even under a Freedom of Information Act request. Well, there's a saying on the Internet, that "information wants to be free."

The Hadley Centre has been hacked by persons unknown, who posted thousands of data files to an Anonymous FTP server in Russia. Since this happened last night, the files have been uploaded to at least three file sharing systems, including Bittorrent.

This is very likely to be explosive, because in the thousands of files are email archives, including emails between the most prominent proponents of Global Warming. What I find most interesting is that people initially seem to be focusing not on the data, but on the emails. And they look like they're already finding things:

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Emphasis added by the blogger at the link.

I plan on digging into this today, as I have some time on my hands. Initial thoughts:

1. Climate Science has become so politicized and contentious that there are a lot of people who very strongly dislike the chief proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming. There will be many eyeballs on the email archives over the next several days.

2. Anything that comes out over the next few days will be contents from emails. This is likely what the press will pick up on, since it will be a story they understand (the title of the post comes from the Examiner article, and deals with the politics of the science). It will be interesting indeed to see how the press plays this out.

3. The most interesting bits will take longer. Remember, Hadley didn't want to release their data. The implication is that they knew that something wasn't kosher with it, and that implies they were knowingly publishing misleading results (otherwise, why not release the data?). Someone will examine that data, and announce their results.

Stay tuned. We may have the modern Piltdown Man here.

UPDATE 20 November 2009 18:20: Welcome visitors from The Gormogons. There's a much more detailed update here.

Custom (Gunblogger?) Action Figures

ThatsMyFace will create a custom action figure that looks like you. All you have to do is send in a couple of photos, and they'll craft your visage in plastic, suitable to top a normal G.I. Joe or Barbie.


Now when I saw this, the word "Gunbloggers" ran through my head. I'd sure like to see a JayG model, and maybe Tam could buy a new Zed 3 if she sold the Snark Of Death/Sunday Smith model.

So who'd you want to see as an Action Figure?

UPDATE 20 November 2009 14:40: Welcome folks from JayG's place! Take a look around while you're here. I agree with Lissa's comment on who would be teh awesome as an action figure.

Climate Models and Glitches

Climate is pretty complicated. Unsurprisingly, the computer programs that model them are complex, too. Some of the models have many man-years of development effort that have gone into their creation, and many, many lines of source code.

Of course, any model will imperfectly map to what is being modeled. Video games model a three dimensional world, and even something as simple and straight forward as walls can be tricky:



With a video game, it's easy to see the glitch - where the model does not actually model the subject. With climate models, we don't have the luxury of seeing the obvious - people walking through walls. The glitches are more subtle, meaning harder to find.

But glitches are there, because all software has bugs. This is why it's important that climate scientists make their source code available for other people to examine for bugs. It's also why we need to take the model's output with a grain of salt. Otherwise, you see things like this:

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

...

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

Just because we can't see the temperature walking through walls doesn't mean that it doesn't.

Hat tip: Bob S.

Safari Browser users, get patching

Apple has fixed seven security bugs in an update for the Safari web browser on both OS X and Windows versions. It's the typical cornucopia of web-delivered exploit opportunity, so if you use Safari, you won't want to dawdle.

Info and updates available here.

Everyone with a blog or Twitter account leave the room now

This is simply outstanding. Background here.

This is almost as useful as Duct Tape

Squeezable bacon in a bottle. Shelf life is 12 years.

Come the Zombiepocalypse, a dozen cases of this in your bunker is just what you'll want.

Will all you Texans please stop living in sin?

From the Department of Unintended Consequences, via the Bureau of Poetic Justice:

Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.

The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that "marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:

"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively "eliminates marriage in Texas," including common-law marriages.

She calls it a "massive mistake" and blames the current attorney general, Republican Greg Abbott, for allowing the language to become part of the Texas Constitution. Radnofsky called on Abbott to acknowledge the wording as an error and consider an apology. She also said that another constitutional amendment may be necessary to reverse the problem.

That's some righteous morality on display, right there.

Via Rick in email, who tartly adds "Mistake my ass. Personally it sounds like a good idea to me." His lovely bride could not be reached for comment.

Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law

So, Attorney General Holder is unsure whether Osama bin Laden is entitled to a Miranda warning, should he be captured on the field of battle. Here's another question: are his captors subject to penalty under 18 U.S.C., Section 242, for that failure?

This statute makes it a crime for any person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom to willfully deprive or cause to be deprived from any person those rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the U.S.

This law further prohibits a person acting under color of law, statute, ordinance, regulation or custom to willfully subject or cause to be subjected any person to different punishments, pains, or penalties, than those prescribed for punishment of citizens on account of such person being an alien or by reason of his/her color or race.

If not, why? It seems to me that if you're going to treat terrorism as a criminal act (as opposed to an act of war), that you have to follow criminal law procedure. For example, it seems pretty clear that waterboarding becomes a violation of the 5th Amendment (and possibly the 4th as well). Doesn't that make everyone involved in waterboarding in violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 242?

Me, I think these guys don't know what they're doing; that they're making it up as they go; and that the country will be much, much less safe as a result.

Most effective technology service commercial, ever

Of course, they're a little behind the Northeast Gunbloggers.

And yes, backing up your data is a really important part of security. You do back up your data, right?

Just in from the Accounting Department on Fantasy Island ...

The gubmint is totally lying to us about what health care will cost:

Which accounts for another important finding: the bill is not going to control national health care expenditures. In fact, it's going to slightly increase them. Under current law, the CMS has a projection of 20.8% of GDP going to health care in 2019. The new bill will bring that up to 21.1%. That's not particularly surprising, since they think the bill will cover 34 million new people. Unless those new people weren't planning on actually consuming any health care--in which case, why are we bothering?--spending was bound to go up.

Let's see now: add another 15% to the list of folks who will receive health care, but assume that costs will only go up 1%. Yup, that sounds about right. And for this additional 1% coverage (in services delivered), Speaker Pelosi will throw her party under the bus of the 2010 elections? But wait, there's more!

When you increase the demand for something without increasing the supply, you either get price increases, or shortages. Neither is what the authors are promising for their bills.

...

Controlling costs means consuming less health care. There is no magic pot of money waiting to be painlessly seized from some undeserving wretch, preferably one that voters already hate. The only way we are going to cut costs is by cutting someone's benefits.

Perhaps we'd be better off, in some metaphysical sense, if we did. But no one wants to. That's why politicians are speaking euphemistically about Medicare Advantage "overpayments" and frantically promising that no way, no how, will they damage anyone's Medicare benefits. The CMS report says what Doug Elmendorf, the head of the CBO, hinted at in his letters to Congress: cost control will be painful, and Congress will almost certainly undo it.

Maybe the American Public didn't just fall off the turnip truck from Chattanooga. Perhaps there's a reason that people don't trust the government. Crazy idea, I know, but maybe they think the gubmint isn't being straight with them or something. Like about the cost of new social programs?

Jobs created in non-existent Congressional Districts

The debacle that is recovery.gov:

That whole thing has been a debacle of the first order. From the people who were supposed to return competence and transparency to the federal government.

What I can't figure out is why they only list districts from 50 states. Didn't Obama campaign in all 57? There have to be a ton of uncounted jobs created or saved in those seven.

Écraser les bourgeois

Usually I don't have much truck with that, but every now and then getting your Redneck on here in the Boston suburbs is the categorical imperative.

Security Smorgasbord, Vol 1, No. 7

WaPo: Bad Guys targeting Law Firms

Actually, it was the FBI who said it; the Washington Post just reported it:

Hackers are increasingly targeting law firms and public relations companies with a sophisticated e-mail scheme that breaks into their computer networks to steal sensitive data, often linked to large corporate clients doing business overseas.

The FBI has issued an advisory that warns companies of "noticeable increases" in efforts to hack into the law firms' computer systems - a trend that cyber experts say began as far back as two years ago but has grown dramatically.

...

"Law firms have a tremendous concentration of really critical, private information," said Bradford Bleier, unit chief with the FBI's cyber division. Infiltrating those computer systems, he said, "is a really optimal way to obtain economic, personal and personal security related information."

There's no question that Law Firms have some really valuable information. It's also undeniable that the Bad Guys have been increasingly targeting information for profit. So is this just Fed.Gov hype, or is it really happening? Dunno. As the Mythbusters might say, "plausible".

Airport facial recognition technology can't tell the difference between Winona Ryder and Osama bin Laden

You really can't make this sort of thing up, you know:

Except the gates in Manchester [UK] were throwing up so many false results that staff effectively turned them off. Previously matches had to be 80 per cent the same - this was quickly changed to 30 per cent.

This means the machines are unable to distinguish between the faces of Winona Ryder and Osama bin Laden. Even more worryingly, the adjusted gates failed to distinguish between renownded pseudo-Scot Mel Gibson and actual Scot [UK Prime Minister] Gordon Brown.

Fake Verizon "Balance checker" installs malware

People are getting emails saying that their account balance is overdue. The helpful "balance checker application" is - of course - malware:

Cyber-criminals have started preying on Verizon Wireless customers, sending out spam e-mail messages that say their accounts are over the limit and offering them a "balance checker" program to review their payments.

The e-mail messages, which look like they come from Verizon Wireless, are fakes; the balance checker is actually a malicious Trojan horse program.

"If you run the tool, obviously, your computer is toast," said Nick Bilogorskiy, manager of antivirus research at SonicWall. "You get infected with a Trojan that SonicWall catches under the name Regrun."

Common sense says that yur cell phone company knows how to send you a bill in the (snail) mail. That's not (yet) a way to get malware.