Police Close Climategate Hacking/Leaking Investigation

Three years ago someone hacked or leaked a cache of embarrassing emails and other documents from climate researchers associated with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Angiia. The leaked documents exposed less-than-scientifically-objective efforts by like-minded researchers to avoid compliance with freedom-of-information inquiries and to prevent rival researchers who were less-than-convinced of imminent climate catastrophe from getting published in scientific journals. Dubbed "Climategate," the leaks revealed a seemy side of climate reaserch to the public. Now the BBC is reporting:

A police inquiry into the "ClimateGate" affair did not identify any suspects and cost more than £84,000 in expenses and overtime, police have said.

Norfolk Police announced on Tuesday they had stopped a probe into the theft of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

They have now revealed the "complex" inquiry spread to "most continents", but has not identified a suspect.

Under law, police have until November to bring criminal proceedings….

Under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, police had a three-year time limit in which to investigate the offence.

Senior investigating officer Det Ch Supt Julian Gregory said, regardless of this legislation, police would have ended the investigation because they had no "real prospect of finding the culprit".

Police said the theft was "sophisticated and orchestrated" and the offender had used a method common in unlawful activity of creating a false trail and using proxy servers throughout the world….

[Gregory] said there was no evidence the offence was committed by a government, an individual or an organisation with commercial interests.

The chief fallout from this fiasco, as I noted back in 2009: 

In their zeal to marginalize and stifle their critics, this insular band of climate researchers has damaged the very science they sought to defend. We all now are the losers.

Unfortunately, that remains true.

Comments

[T o n y]

You left off the part about how the scientists and science were all vindicated by later inquiries of any implications of the so-called embarrassing contents of their hacked communications.

[Heroic Mulatto]

So when revealed to be a intellectually dishonest piece of shit on one thread, you hop over to another just to mindlessly parrot half-remembered DailyKos talking-points?

[SugarFree]

Please don't feed the troll. It doesn't get you anything but a fat and happy troll.

[Old Mexican]

Government scientists were cleared of any wrong doing by a government panel made of government scientists. In the end, government was vindicated. We can now all move on - Tony said.

[tarran]

I loved the investigations too.

They didn't look at the actual emails. They never interviewed people like McIntryre. The papers they reviewed were selected by the people they were investigating.

One good way of figuring out if a person is clueless/misinformed about the state of climate science is to ask them if the CRU scientists were "exonerated" in the post-climategate inquiries.

If the person says "No!" they're well informed.

If the person says "Yes!" they're either misinformed, or lying mendaciously.

Here's a great example - the chair of the comittee that 'exonerated' the science says, "the science was not the subject of our study."

[T o n y]

It's none of my business if you want to discredit everything you ever say by being an antiscience crazy person.

[Old Mexican]

Re: Tony,

It's none of my business if you want to discredit everything you ever say by being an antiscience crazy person.

It's none of my business if you want to discredit everything you say by making Ad Hominem arguments.

By the way, being skeptical of shoddy science that is loaded with politics is not being anti-science.

[T o n y]

Blahdeblahblahblah. Science is transparent, and you are free to wander into its realm and discover. Only a mind that has made itself up to a dogmatic degree wouldn't be able to find out what current science is on climate change.

[ant1sthenes]

You're the fucking dunphy of technocrats.

[joshua corning]

Nah

dunphy would protect police regardless of their political ideology.

If a technocrat says something that criticizes Team Blue Tony abandons them in a heart beat.

[T o n y]

Do you think I like living in a time in which the preeminent social necessity is the total and eternal defeat of an American political party? Makes social philosophical debate rather trying for others, I imagine.

[DesigNate]

I wonder if I will ever see a working model in my lifetime that can accurately predict...well anything really?

[joshua corning]

There are pretty good models for predicting sun rises and sun sets and even solar eclipses.

But yeah the motion of astronomical bodies are not chaotic systems in which we have no idea how most of the key elements work.

[Episiarch]

The verdict on "Climategate" was in five minutes after the lying shits were exposed. Sorry, cultists: you're done.

[SugarFree]

Bullshit. All those brave climate scientists were completely vindicated by their colleagues and co-conspirators!

[Episiarch]

Listen, NutraSweet, the science is settled. Because, as you well know, science works that way. I mean, we know that, for instance, Newtonian physics are absolutely settled. Right?

[SugarFree]

Of course the science is settled. That's why I heat my house in the winter with phlogiston. Big barrels of it.

[Jerry on the road]

Produced by angels, I reckon.

[Whiterun Guard]

PI IS EXACTLY THREE.

[sarcasmic]

Look. The cool kids came to a consensus.
You want to be one of the cool kids, don't you?

[WTF]

Hey, that's how we can settle the string theory issue! Physicists all take a vote, and the overall consensus must be true. We'll save millions on particle accelerators.

[Pro Libertate]

They did. String theory.

[Old Mexican]

"In their zeal to marginalize and stifle their critics, this insular band of climate researchers has damaged the very science they sought to defend. We all now are the losers."

No, Ron. I beg to differ. We ended up being the winners: Science once more prevailed over the prevarications of a few zealots who used science to further their own collectivist agenda. We got rid of eugenics, and now we can move away from this sham like if it were a bad acid trip.

[sarcasmic]

The only reason we got rid of eugenics is because some German dude (I can't recall his name off hand) took the idea to its logical extreme.
Climate "science" is alive and well. Just look at all the government money being funneled into ethanol subsidies, the Chevy Volt, wind farms...
They banned the international symbol for a good idea for fuck's sake!
In fifty years from now kids will watch old cartoons and ask "Daddy? Why does he have one of those planet killing light bulbs over his head? Is he evil?"

[Old Mexican]

Re: sarcasmic,

The only reason we got rid of eugenics is because some German dude (I can't recall his name off hand) took the idea to its logical extreme.

Well, now we had an American dude taking AGW to its logical extreme - he also invented the Internet, by the way.

Just look at all the government money being funneled into ethanol subsidies, the Chevy Volt, wind farms...

Which will in the end become sad monuments to people's folly, like those worker and farmer statues that dot so many Eastern European countries.

[sarcasmic]

Well, now we had an American dude taking AGW to its logical extreme

Not even. AGW taken to its logical extreme would be reversing the Industrial Revolution.

Which will in the end become sad monuments to people's folly

Like the drug war, farm subsidies, multiple government run Ponzi schemes....

[joshua corning]

US emission of CO2 have dropped and set to drop further.

The logical extreme of man made global warming is a trade war with the developing world.

So as we go forward the message of alarmists will be that we need to use the might of the American economy and military to keep poor brown people poor...

Everything being equal I think the Alarmists have lost.

[Auric Demonocles]

A police inquiry into the "ClimateGate" affair did not identify any suspects and cost more than ?84,000 in expenses and overtime, police have said.

What about this would have required overtime? I mean, other than dunphy buying a new yacht.

[Res Publica Americana]

Contrary to the banal romanticism of many Americans, Limetree Island and its closest neighbors are considerably more fucked up than we are. Cops get overtime whenever they're assigned tasks considered "special", basically, if we're talking about Britain specifically.

[Auric Demonocles]

Wait, what? They get overtime for working a regular amount of time?

[Whiterun Guard]

They needed dog-piercing bullets.

[Old Mexican]

Police said the theft was "sophisticated and orchestrated" and the offender had used a method common in unlawful activity of creating a false trail and using proxy servers throughout the world...

The trademark MO of one Howard Wolowitz.

[tarran]

It couldn't be Howard; they were released at a time Mrs. Wollowitz gets her callouses ground.

[Auric Demonocles]

He's even more brilliant than we thought. The perfect alibi!

[Coeus]

Police said the theft was "sophisticated and orchestrated" and the offender had used a method common in unlawful activity of creating a false trail and using proxy servers throughout the world....

7 proxies, bitch.

[Scruffy Nerfherder]

You know who else used 7 proxies?

[BakedPenguin]

"It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory ? if we look for confirmations.
1) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory ? an event which would have refuted the theory.
2) Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
3) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
4) Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")
...One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability."

(emphasis added.) Karl Popper, 1920.

[Sam Grove]

In their zeal to marginalize and stifle their critics, this insular band of climate researchers has damaged the very science they sought to defend. We all now are the losers

I think it's an actual boon to us for people to become more skeptical of the science establishment.

Maybe science can be rescued from the science establishment.

[ant1sthenes]

The only way to do that is to get large numbers of people doing good science again (even just as a hobby).

[T o n y]

What do you propose to replace science with?

[TindWeee]

These guys know exactly what is going on man. Wow.

http://www.New-Anon.tk

[0x90]

Screw the emails, they are for the tabloids. So yeah, scientists, who are people, are sometimes conniving assholes, just like other people. Big deal. The emails are a distraction. What's unfortunate is that most do not understand the story that was told in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file; when you have bad data, you do not continue, you stop. Then you reflect on exactly how it was that things ever got into such a state. Then you throw away what you have and start over, after instituting rules designed to make such lapses impossible in the future. To do otherwise would constitute criminal negligence in many sectors -- of which this should be one. I cannot fathom any software engineer who has read that file, and still believes in the integrity of anything that ever came out of the CRU.

[jdgalt]

What imbecile decided that the leaker, rather than the fraudsters, deserved prosecution? He and the fraudsters should be in jail. Today.

The University and the other institutions who have whitewashed the real scandal only discredited themselves, and will stay that way until heads roll at the top.