Climate-Gate Is The Work Of A Whistle-blower

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Lila

Excellent demonstration by Lance Levson, a system and networks administrator with fifteen years experience, that the climate-gate data could not have been the work of a random hacker but was most likely that of a whistle-blower publishing documents previously collected pursuant to a freedom of information act (foia) request- After a lengthy technical analysis of the sources of the email and data, he concludes:

“I suggest that the contents of ./documents didn’t originate from a single monolithic share, but from a compendium of various sources.

For the hacker to have collected all of this information s/he would have required extraordinary capabilities. The hacker would have to crack an Administrative file server to get to the emails and crack numerous workstations, desktops, and servers to get the documents. The hacker would have to map the complete UEA network to find out who was at what station and what services that station offered. S/he would have had to develop or implement exploits for each machine and operating system without knowing beforehand whether there was anything good on the machine worth collecting.

The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn’t be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip.

It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.

If as some say, this was a targeted crack, then the cracker would have had to have back-doors and access to every machine at UEA and not just the CRU. It simply isn’t reasonable for the FOI Officer to have kept the collection on a CRU system where CRU people had access, but rather used a UEA system.

Occam’s razor concludes that “the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one”. The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn’t because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples.”

Open Letter To The Secretary-General Of UN

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Lila

Open Letter to Secretary-General of United Nations

Wednesday, December 9th 2009, 2:07 AM EST

Co2sceptic (Site Admin)

Dear Secretary-General,

Climate change science is in a period of ‘negative discovery’ – the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly, the science is NOT settled.

Therefore, there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes. Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data demonstrating that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters and other natural phenomena.

We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.
Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:

Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;

Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;

Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate…”

For the rest of the post and the complete list of signatories, see Climate realists.

Hedge-Fund Pays Naked Shorting Critic Byrne $5 Million

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Lila

Copper River Partners (formerly Rocker Partners), the short-selling hedge-fund of David Rocker and Marc Cohodes, and associated entities have settled a case brought against them in 2005 by Patrick Byrne, CEO of embattled internet retailer Overstock, according to The Register.

Note: The suit doesn´t charge naked shorting, but defamation and illegal collusion with research analysts.

Copper River worked with a research firm, Gradient Analytics, that employed well-known financial journalist Herb Greenberg, one of the central figures in the story of the “capture” (corruption) of Wall Street journalists by speculators. Hedge funds stand accused of engaging in illegal collusion with journalists to drive down stock-prices of companies.

Last year, Gradient settled for a figure between $1.5-$2 million and issued an apology. Now comes this further vindication.

Despite the relatively trivial amount won in the Rocker case, $5 million, it´s noteworthy that the settlement does all the things victory in an actual court trial does, without the risk of losing on a technicality.

It also underscores something I´ve been suggesting for a while.

That public interest blogging and journalism alone isn´t enough.

It´s necessary to actually sue or inflict damage of some kind to score victories in these things.

Unfortunately, that´s usually not worth doing for people who aren´t wealthy. Vicariously, however, we “little people” can at least relish the spectacle of the behemoths of finance getting it in the rump.

And this case could prove to be a model for similar lawsuits by other embattled companies.

Still to come is Overstock´s suit against 12 prime broker-dealers (including Goldman Sachs), which will go to trial in late 2010. The suit charges an illegal stock market manipulation scheme.

Also in the works, the SEC, which dropped its investigation of Gradient in 2007, has now turned its sights on Byrne. Given Byrne´s charge of regulatory and media capture, there are some who see this as retaliatory.

Death Penalty for Chinese Embezzler

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Lila

“China on Tuesday executed a former securities trader for embezzlement, the first person in the industry to be put to death, but millions of yuan are still missing, a state newspaper said.

Yang Yanming was sentenced to death in late 2005 and took the secret of the whereabouts of 65 million yuan ($9.52 million) of the misappropriated funds to his grave, the Beijing Evening News said.

The report added that Yang was the first person working in China’s securities sector to be executed.”

More here at News Daily.

Stories like these should alert us to the possibility that there may very well be mini-Madoffs (mini in absolute money terms only) all over the world, on which this recovery rests flimsily.

Danish Climate-Gate

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Lila

From the Washington Examiner:

“Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.

“Denmark’s quota register, which the Energy Agency within the Climate and Energy Ministry administers, is the largest in the world in terms of personal quota registrations. It is much easier to register here than in other countries, where it can take up to three months to be approved.

“Ekstra Bladet reporters have found examples of people using false addresses and companies that are in liquidation, which haven’t been removed from the register.

“One of the cases, which stems from the Danish register, involves fraud of more than 8 billion kroner. This case, in which nine people have been arrested, is being investigated in England.

“The market for CO2 trade has exploded in recent years and is worth an estimated 675 billion kroner globally.”

Climategate: Wiki Distortion and Censorship?

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Lila

Check the wiki entry for climategate.

Notice that editing is now blocked until the end middle of the month, which means for the whole period in which Copenhagen convenes, this entry will be the popular take on Climategate and will set the parameters of what can be debated and how:

Type in “climate gate and wiki” into google and you get an entry titled

“Climatic Research Unit email hacking incident”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident

Then check the revision history

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident&action=history

(Update, Dec 9, 11.20 PM) I notice that this has become considerably longer than when I saw it this morning December 9. A number of the revisions appear to have taken place since I posted, and hopefully address the issues I commented on here).

***************************************************

Editing of this article by new or unregistered users is currently disabled until December 23, 2009.
See the protection policy and protection log for more details. If you cannot edit this article and you wish to make a change, you can request an edit, discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.

*********************************************************

Update: December 9, 11: 23

Notice the change in the notice on top of the page.

It now has the following added:

This article may be inaccurate in or unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2009)

This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page.

****************************************************

Here is the link to the log of the change in protection level on this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=protect&page=Climatic_Research_Unit_e-mail_hacking_incident

*******************************************

Now look at the article itself:

Note the distortions:

1. The title focuses on the email “hacking” and calls it an “incident.” — trivializing the affair and placing a misleading emphasis on the outing rather than on the scientific crimes revealed.

2. The article doesn´t mention that there is good evidence to show that the emails were outed because of stonewalling of a freedom of information act (foia) request (correction: foia requests) that no personal messages were taken, and that the emails and data were originally sent to media outlets like the BBC, which refused to publish them.

In other words, this was clearly a responsible attempt at whistle-blowing not a malicious hack.

3. The scientists who committed the wrong-doing are quoted extensively, while scores of independent scientists who have criticized the research manipulation are not quoted.

4. The wrong-doers and the comments from media sources and experts who support climate change are given far more prominence than the actual substance of wrong-doing.

5. The main critics quoted are people whom the culpable scientists had previously tried to trash. This makes it look as if the only people objecting to the cooking of data are people who were in personal conflict with the data-cookers anyway. It becomes a question of “he said, she said.”

6. Lengthy exculpatory statements by the guilty scientists are prominent. Testimony of scores of disinterested scientists and journalists who have reacted negatively to the revelations have been ignored.

Medicine And Disease

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Lila

“But what does it mean when we’re in a world that’s on fire? What kind of perfection is this? It’s the perfection of medicine and disease subduing each other, where completeness and brokenness are not in conflict.”

— “The Whole Earth Is Medicine,” Zen Mountain Monastery

Climate-Gate: Summary

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Lila

I found this excellent summary posted by a contributor to the New York Times blog of the evidence of manipulation of data in the outed emails:

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)

• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709).

Analysis of impact here. Wow!

• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news“.
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)

• Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series “…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)

• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)

• Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)

• Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)

• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)

• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)

• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)

• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)

• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)

• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)

• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)

• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)

• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)

• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)

• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)

• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)

• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)

• Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)

• Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)

• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

Finished in next post …

November 21st, 2009
11:29 am
Continued from previous:

• Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460)
[Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]

• Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)

• Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)

• Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)

• Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)

• Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)

• Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)

• Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)

• Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)

• Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)

• Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)

• Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)

• Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
• Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)

• Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)

• Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)

• David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)

• Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)

• Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)

• Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306

Checking Back On Old Posts

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Lila

Delving into the archives is a lot of fun. It´s uncanny, how things turned out…

Check this post from October 9, 2008:

(Mind you, I hadn´t come across Deep Capture at that point. I started reading it in the spring of this year. I think I came across a link to it on Doug Boggs´blog – The Banterer)

October, 2009 2008

Do Statistics Back Claims of Complete Credit Freeze?

“Many commentators claim, however, that virtually no transactions are occurring in this market. These claims are completely false. For the week that ended October 1, which is the most recent week currently reported, total commercial paper outstanding amounted to $1,607 billion. Yes, this amount was down from the $1,702 billion reported for the previous week, but is a 5.6 percent drop a good reason to panic? If we go back to March 2008, when nobody was talking excitedly about the commercial market’s “freezing up,” we find that the total amount outstanding, on average, was $1,822 billion, or only 13 percent more than last week. In March, the market was working fine; now it’s “locked up.” This sort of hyperbole, with which we are being bombarded hourly around the clock, is totally without a basis in the facts…..”

Robert Higgs, suggesting that some people are fomenting panic. He asks why.

Comment:

The answer lies in asking yourself:

Who has benefited so far? How? What do they want to happen?

Paulson Plan Premeditated?

Here’s Bill Engdahl tying up the loose ends of my piece on Paulson on how Paulson’s plan benefits the three new super banks, Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi and how they would be used to dominate global, especially European, banking.

Interbank Wars – Latest

The latest in Citi’s fight with Wells Fargo is that Citi has terminated negotiations and is planning to pursue breach of contract against Wells, so Wells is going ahead with its deal. Citi has Goldman Sachs connections: Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and a former Goldman chief is a director.

Meanwhile, with regard to Bear’s demise, here is a piece arguing that JPMorgan was involved in gold price manipulation under cover of their bail out of Bear this spring. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon sits on the Board of the NY Federal Reserve and as such was privy to the NY Fed’s actions re Bear Stearns.

Media Trix

Bill O’Reilly, not usually my favorite person, has been pretty good on standing up to the bail-out. This evening, he had a clip from an NBC skit on the sale of subprime mortgages to Wachovia by a couple, the Sandlers. It mocks Barney Frank’s role in eliminating oversight of Fannie and Freddie. Apparently the video was edited to remove the reference to Frank. The Sandlers had a long list of progressive groups they donated to (including Move On.org).

O’Reilly’s tack seems to be that the positions of those groups is undermined by the funding. That part is far-fetched, but it is time someone pointed out that not everyone affected by the decline in housing prices is an innocent. Many people made fortunes during the boom and are making more money from the bust.

Update – Market Moves Or CyberWars?

Another amazing day. I walked out of the house for 2 hours to buy a laptop for traveling, since my old one had mysteriously lost its internet connectivity. When I came back, the market was closing with a sell off, down 7% (679 points).

It began in the morning when
Paulson announced that insurance companies were in for trouble. That set off the selling in the bank and insurance stocks, including regional bank funds.

The whole thing was compounded by the fact that today was the day the ban on short-selling around 1000 financial and finance related stocks was lifted, so short-sellers were pouncing.

[Companies on the SEC’s list slid 18 percent on average during the ban, compared with 24 percent drop for all financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index].

Then, General Motors had a bad day: Standard &Poor threatened to downgrade it (as well as Ford) to junk. GM shares got beaten down under $5; Ford was down over 20% too.

You had to wonder at the timing.

1) It’s the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, today. Recall that the selling began the evening of Rosh Hashanah. Remember that old saw – sell Rosh Hashanah, buy Yom Kippur? Markets are weaker at the time…

2) The declines came on the one-year anniversary of the closing highs of the Dow and the S&P. The Dow has lost 5,585 points, or 39.4 percent, since closing at 14,164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007. It’s the worst run for the Dow since the nearly two-year bear market that ended in December 1974 when the Dow lost 45 percent.

3) The decline is 7 years from 9/11

Anyway, when I got back the damage had been done.

[I ended up buying my computer at a shop that sold refurbished electronics in a rather shady side of town. A cop car was pulling away just as I walked in. But having just been a spectator to one of the biggest bank heists in history, I suddenly found the grungy looking characters hanging around rather harmless].

James Altucher, a trader, has this to say at The Street:

“The single biggest reason the stock market has fallen in the past five days is hedge fund liquidations. Of the top 20 hedge funds in the world, something like 18 are down 20% or more this year. They are getting redemptions, they are liquidating, they are selling stocks with reckless abandon to raise cash. Our job as good investors is to give them liquidity and take their bargain-basement merchandise off of their hands. Let’s get their selling over with so we can make money.”

Well, that’s evident. There was big selling, especially at the end, the kind from sell signals going off in program trading.

Morton Kondracke on FOX News in the evening was telling us sagely that it’s not a liquidity issue, it’s a confidence issue, and (get this) the answer is to create a global central bank. Right. The solution to a confidence problem is to give the markets to the confidence-men.

A note on cyberwarfare might be apposite hear [sic]. I dig it up from an old article I wrote that references Laurent Murawiec’s now notorious power-point presentation in 2002 advocating seizing Saudi oil fields. Murawiec is connected to Donald Rumsfeld’s Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) which makes InfoWars central to the battle ground.

“In all these cases, IW involves creating phantom cyber-images, which can include phantasms of nonexistent trains, airplanes, stock market orders, and bank transfers; false impressions of the enemy’s troop strength and one’s own, of supplies and movements, of fake attacks and all-too-real defenses; and phantom images of the enemy’s leaders doing evil things on screen because one has video-morphed images of them doing them so.

“Information warfare is not about machines or even electrons. It is about people’s minds, society’s functions, and armies’ strategies. Cyberspace endows us — and our enemies — with new and extraordinary means with which to achieve our respective aims. “We have only begun to cyber-fight….”

More at “Tom Tancredo Takes Out Mecca: The Cyber Wars Playing Near You” (Dissident Voice, August 8, 2007)