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Climate change data dumped!!!!!!!!
Times Online (UK) ^ | November 29, 2009 | Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

Posted on 11/29/2009 7:58:10 AM PST by joinedafterattack

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Breaking News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: climatechangedata; climategate; datadump; democrat; fraud; globalwarming; globalwarminghoax; goregate; hadleycru; hidethedecline; obama; shredders; smokinggun; smokingun
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To: Zhang Fei
You clearly have not been involved in archiving information over the years.

It has been much more difficult than you apparently comprehend to maintain long term data bases. I personally have data on written journals, punched paper tape, punched cards, 9-track (~12”) mag tape, 7-track tape, three different types of data tape cartidges, 8” floppy disk, 5-1/4 floppy (2 formats), 3 1/2 floppy, 100M zip drive, 50Mb hard drive “cartridge”, dozens of Winchester hard drives ranging from 10Mb to 500Gb, CD (3 formats), DVD (2 formats), several “solid state” formats. This does not by any means exhaust the possible formats.

The lab I last worked at has a large warehouse in which data from the past 25 years is stored on at least 8 of these types of formats. The manpower has never been available to transfer the older data to newer formats. Fortunately, people seldom ask for the older datasets since the new experimental results supersede older results in my field, and they are not dependent on those older results.

I AM NOT ABSOLVING CRU for dumping the tapes and records. What they have done here is unforgivable scientifically. They were given an international trust to maintain historical records of temperature, and were funded to do this. They should never have dumped this data, because they KNEW they were manipulating it in various ways for publication. They were TASKED to maintain this data! Many countries completely turned over all sorts of historical data they had collected trusting that CRU could and would do a better job of maintaining it than they could! That trust has been violated.

The preservation of historical data is a huge huge problem in science. The formats change so rapidly. Many are fairly volatile, especially those that depend on magnetics. The databases really ought to be rewritten periodically, but manpower is seldom available.

Consider the problem that Hubble researchers have: 5years, or 50 years, or possibly even 250 years from now, there is a supernova 20,000 light years from Earth. That star had never gained attention. However, over the years, that section of sky has been imaged thousands of times. Suddenly, astronomers want to look at its history. Very important questions depend on this type of history! There have been millions and millions of terabytes of information gathered, but now we want to sort through it to look at how a few dozen pixels have changed from time to time. What format is it being kept in? How do we maintain the data in reliable archives? How do we index it and find it and read it when needed? The money has been spent to do the research over the years. Has it all been wasted? Yes- if those archives are not available. However, good choices of assembling and maintaining that data is a very tricky problem, and I don't believe that problem has been adequately solved.

Your saying “that 20Tb of data would only take up one cu.ft.” is a horrible simplification of the problems we have with data storage.

Again: CRU grievously violated a trust they were tasked with, and I'll never forgive their horrible judgment. The FACT that they manipulated that data in ways that have never been well vetted or understood by the science and mathematics community SHOULD have made saving the raw historical data infinitely more important, and GOOD SCIENTISTS in charge at CRU would have made it clear how critical it was to save it.

AS SOON as good scientists had realized that raw data was gone, they would have NOTIFIED THE WORLD it had been lost. Efforts would immediately have been made to gather as primitive data as was still available. ALL papers that depend on manipulated data would contain cautionary notes of the uncertainty built in as a result of the data loss.

The way that Bible Scholars have had to work over the years is a good example of the way GOOD scholars would work when they KNOW that the original manuscripts are not available.

Dumping the data is unforgivable, but hiding that it was dumped, and pretending that loss of the original data is unimportant and the massaged data has higher intrinsic value is even worse.

121 posted on 11/29/2009 11:09:27 AM PST by AFPhys ((Praying for our troops, our citizens, that the Bible and Freedom become basis of the US law again))
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To: InterceptPoint
My search for "Climategate" produced one major result from the media and it is the Toronto Sun and it's quite a column. Says it all with nothing held back:

Why 'climategate' won't stop greens

This is very surprising because Canadians are total moonbats where GW and man killing "nature" is concerned. I know people whose kids are so gone on the notion (thanks to brain washing in school) that they cry when someone steps on a bug. One neighbor's 11 yr. old daughter made her father participate in a funeral for a bug he stepped on 2 summers ago. And he went along with it. So the fact that this is in a Canadian newspaper is amazing. I am going to go read some of the comments and see what the reactions have been.

122 posted on 11/29/2009 11:18:34 AM PST by Natural Born 54
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To: Gondring
So where are your original data files from 25 years ago?

Mine are in a rented storage building because the IRS will demand proof of your investments from the date of purchase if they ever audit you.

I guess the IRS requirements are more strict than science which will change our lives forever?

123 posted on 11/29/2009 11:18:55 AM PST by kcvl
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To: Gondring

About 13 years ago I worked on a study involving data from the late 70s that was on tapes. There was extensive data on about 20,000 individuals. The guy who authored the study kept the original tapes in his basement all that time and called in a favor to have it converted into ascii data. It was relatively trivial for me to convert it and load it up for comparison to a more recent data set.

It can be done if you’re even remotely responsible, let alone a government agency.


124 posted on 11/29/2009 11:21:34 AM PST by GEC (We're not drilling in ANWR because....)
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To: Natural Born 54

I can’t get into the comment section. Either the paper has disabled it or my refusal to accept cookies is the problem. If anyone can see them, please let me know.


125 posted on 11/29/2009 11:26:50 AM PST by Natural Born 54
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To: AFPhys

Has anyone seen where it was mentioned how many sites and for how long data was collected?


126 posted on 11/29/2009 11:36:27 AM PST by Errant (`)
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To: joinedafterattack

This story just keeps gettin’ better and better...LOL!

And yet, the elitist smarter-than-us-average-bears POTUS still plans to participate in this foolishness in Europe...
< scoffs >


127 posted on 11/29/2009 11:41:47 AM PST by pillut48 (CJ in TX --"God help us all, and God help America!!" --my new mantra for the next 4 years)
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To: joinedafterattack
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

128 posted on 11/29/2009 11:46:42 AM PST by jd777
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To: InterceptPoint
Meanwhile, there has been a data dump in the print MSM over the past week dealing with issues about climate change. It is as if one oracle is spewing this crap and all its acolytes are parroting it as incontrovertible truth. Obviously this has been orchestrated over the lead up to the conference. I guess the other product of the media, der leader, will be speaking to the conferees this coming week. It takes a fraud to know a fraud.
129 posted on 11/29/2009 11:51:22 AM PST by Mouton
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To: Gondring
Over the years I've saved most on an external hard drive and duplicate DVDs. The stuff is pretty useful and I don't see any reason to destroy it. Of course I'm pretty certain that I'm not the target of a FOIA request or lawsuit, unlike...oh say CRU or Mr. Mann.
130 posted on 11/29/2009 11:52:05 AM PST by Red Dog #1
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To: hoosier hick; Errant; Incorrigible; ODDITHER; SteamShovel; F. dAnconia; Excuse_My_Bellicosity; ...
You also may be interested at least 1-2 paragraphs of my post #121 this thread.

Maintaining databases of information during the last 30 years has been incredibly difficult, and often requires reformatting the data and re-saving to a different media every 5 years or so at great expense.

Some here have said “it's not expensive to store 20Tb of info.” Well, not today, but no more than 20 years ago, it cost $10/Mb for Disk Storage - so $2Million/20Tb - and that does not include the space for the 200,000 Winchester drives, the air conditioning to keep them running, cost of translating the paper, paper tape and mag tape records to format for the drives, or maintaining the indexing to keep it from being useless. It isn't the case that this wasn't ever converted to digital, either, but that much of that conversion would have been originally put on paper-tape or 9-track or 7-track mag tapes, and may never have been put on hard drives after that.

Again - I'm not forgiving the CRU people on this basis- I've addressed what I think of them in post#121.

131 posted on 11/29/2009 11:54:49 AM PST by AFPhys ((Praying for our troops, our citizens, that the Bible and Freedom become basis of the US law again))
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To: pillut48
"the elitist smarter-than-us-average-bears POTUS"

I've often wondered why Harvard is so expensive if only smart people to go there. Logically it should be less expensive to train someone as smart as our POTUS.

132 posted on 11/29/2009 11:55:08 AM PST by Errant (`)
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To: SeattleBruce

“Doesn’t matter that they’ve violated every part of the scientific method.”
****

And how ironic is it that these “secular progressives” rely on science in order to reject religious morality and education.

They are completely shameful. If they had a conscience, they’d never show their face in public again. All of ‘em.


133 posted on 11/29/2009 11:56:19 AM PST by Canedawg (Bring lawyers, guns and money.)
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To: sonic109

It is very suspicious, because Jones himself, in one of the released emails, said that he would destroy the data rather than release it on an FOI request. He should be in Jail.


134 posted on 11/29/2009 11:57:03 AM PST by expatpat
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To: Errant

Thanks for the reminder. I have to double check this: I believe that East Anglia (CRU) was tasked by the international community to gather and archive ALL country’s climate data, and that many of those countries turned all their raw records to CRU. IF this understanding of mine is correct, the raw data is gone gone gone, and can not be recovered, unless somebody somewhere has a 9-track or disk file that they copied a particular country or data station to while they were examining that particular part of the data.


135 posted on 11/29/2009 11:58:22 AM PST by AFPhys ((Praying for our troops, our citizens, that the Bible and Freedom become basis of the US law again))
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To: joinedafterattack

Charlatans!


136 posted on 11/29/2009 11:59:29 AM PST by americanophile (Sarcasm: satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language.)
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To: AFPhys

Estimated number of sites and data collected please. Then we can argue storage requirements. Strange it isn’t mentioned. It may not justify their claims.


137 posted on 11/29/2009 12:02:06 PM PST by Errant (`)
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To: joinedafterattack


“The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.”

How hard would it have been to record the original values right next to the revised values? If these were “inputs” to some process of revision then they certainly could have been recorded as easily as the outputs which we have now.

These folks at the CRU need to get into vote counting or something where their methods would be more respected.


138 posted on 11/29/2009 12:11:42 PM PST by Religion and Politics
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To: Religion and Politics

lol


139 posted on 11/29/2009 12:13:52 PM PST by Errant (`)
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To: AFPhys

I understand the issues. I worked at a university where my duties included capital equipment inventory. I had regular conversations with researchers on why they were keeping equipment that was no longer actively in use - & it was usually because of compatibility issues & ability to retrieve old data.

CRU should certainly have put a call out to other researchers for assistance in maintaining this data. It should be treated as a scientific crime & every one of them should lose their positions!


140 posted on 11/29/2009 12:18:09 PM PST by Twotone
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