[The base image of a half-eaten computer is Copyright © 2007 Petr Sládek. It is reproduced here under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 and the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License] As the world and her mouse now know, a server used by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has been hacked into, and many files, including personal e-mail messages, published on a Russian web site on Thursday [see: here; and here;; and here; and here; and here; and here; and here; and here; among many other media outlets and blogs]. The story, and some of the key details, have travelled around the world’s blogosphere quicker than Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ("I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes"), leading to much febrile, and often ill-judged, hysteria from both sides of the more puerile end of the ‘global warming’ debate. My own observations about this internet ‘event’ are as follows: (a)First, hacking into a University server to seek institutional and personal data and material is illegal, especially when it involves the details of many third-party people. It is theft, and the fraud police should be brought in immediately. Whatever one’s position on climate change, this action cannot be condoned, and remember that what is sauce for the goose can all too easily become sauce for the gander. The University is thus right to have taken immediate action to remove the server in question from operation, to undertake “a thorough internal investigation”, and to “have involved the police in this inquiry"; (b)Secondly, the amount of data released is very large (160MbB), and, although the hack has been confirmed in general terms by the University, and by some of the e-mailers concerned, there is no way that we can yet know whether all the material posted is accurate, and that it has not been doctored to some degree. Caution is thus required in taking what is presented at face value; (c)Thirdly, caution should further be exercised because e-mails, and other such data, are often difficult to interpret fairly out-of-context and historical contingency. Furthermore, professions employ in-house jargon which does not always mean precisely the same as it does in common parlance, and, in the academic world, such banter is part of the norm; (d) Nevertheless, all this being said, it does appear, superficially at least, that some of the leaked material may prove to be a tad embarrassing for some of the folk involved. Following a quick perusal of what has currently been circulated widely, and, assuming, of course, that the alleged documents are both accurate and undoctored by the hacker(s), the following issues could well raise serious concerns: ill-judged comments about other scientists; the reluctance to share data; the deletion of selected information and e-mails; the manipulation of data to produce a certain ‘scientific’ outcome; and attempts to change peer-review teams and journal status. If any of these alleged concerns do prove to have a foundation in fact, then answers will most certainly be demanded and required; (e)Above all, however, this episode has demonstrated, yet again, that ‘global warming’ exhibits all the characteristics of a classic post-modern grand narrative, a narrative that increasingly seems to have little to do with science. This should not surprise us. The rise of the grand narrative, as many readers will know, has been littered with deeply worrying statements, of which the following are perhaps some of the more notorious: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen” (Sir John Houghton); “To capture the public imagination we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to strike the right balance between being effective and being honest” (Dr. Stephen Schneider); and, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” (Professor John Overpeck). Sadly, it is not impossible that the newly-hacked material may add to this litany. In the end, I fear that, if and when the ‘global warming’ grand narrative collapses, as I judge it surely must, it could well seriously damage trust in science itself, and that would be a most dreadful tragedy for all of us. Those Hacked E-mails Saturday, 21 November 2009
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Posts
