There is chatter in the blogosphere about a break in the Climategate leak/hack at Lucia's and Bishop Hill. Sounds like news about to break. Update: Steve McIntyre has a very useful timeline here.
As I have asked elsewhere, how come it is taking so long for a computer forensics team to identify the individual or individuals responsible for releasing the cache of CRU emails and files? My interpretation is that they already know, it has significant political ramifications and politicians are waiting for things to cool down or for the equivalent of 5pm on a Friday before a long weekend or for some startling confirmation of CAGW. Releasing the identity now during a very cold winter could be a PR nightmare.
new to blogging, not certain where to post this but I have a question:
Given that various atmospheric and ocean processes redistribute heat from the equator to the poles, and we can infer from recent data that this results in global temperature increases being most pronounced at the poles, would this not result in earth radiation to space increasing at a far greater pace at the poles than the over all temperature increase at the global level? As an example, using NASA's estimate of north pole temps increasing by a factor of 8 versus equatorial temperatures we could infer the following using degrees K:
Mean temp at equator 300 K Mean temp at pole 200 K
global temperature increase results in:
Mean temp at equator 300.25 (+0.08%) Mean temp at pole 202 (plus 2.00%)
This effect would be further skewed by a deficit of greenhouse gases such as water vapour and ozone at the poles. In brief, any warming regardless of specific forcing would result in increase cooling at the poles. As my expectation is that this would be a response where the mitigation effect lags the forcing by about 150 years (based on solar forcing versus global on a millennial time scale) this would be outside of the window of data consideration for most climate models and would result in them over estimating any given forcing.
Harrywr2, what peril or perils are those insurance companies worried about? Flood - usually excluded. Wind - coastal sublimits and exclusions available to limit risk. In the reinsurance arena risks tend to become somewhat murky as the LMX spiral revealed.
Question: Are these insurance companies invested in green solutions?
Harry #6 I would not use the actions of insurance companies as an indicator of very much. It is heightened and misplaced fear of future rare events that make insurance companies rich by enabling them to garner unjustified risk premiums - as long as a functioning secondary insurance market exists.
"It would appear that the major insurnance companies are taking climategate seriously. . . As they are the ones that pay the price of 'climate catastrophies' they have the most to lose."
I am not sure this follows. They are raising their premiums now to cover eventualities. Their profits will go up (I think) whether or not those eventualities occur because the total volume of their business will be higher. They might have an incentive to over-estimate the risk?
The key to discovering if the files were leaked or hacked is out in the open. Anyone who wants to look at all the files that made it into the public can find it. Metadata regarding the file folder and its contents were changed prior to the release so that investigators would not be able to identify an internal profile based on who was in the building at the time the folder was captured.
Mean temp at equator 300.25 (+0.08%) Mean temp at pole 202 (plus 2.00%)
of course I meant 1%, not 2.
although if i change the original model such that the temp at the north pole was 100 K... yes that's it, not bad math on my part, just original data was wrong... :-)
Am I right that the released files were selective? If so it strongly suggests someone with prior knowledge of their content. I can't imagine a hacker spending hours going through 1000's of emails.
Here is the NAIC disclosure questions for insurance companies. The questions strike me more as policy/political rather than having any bearing on measuring or disclosing real insured risk.
The insurance companies are essentially being tasked to define how high is up...after questions one and two. Without definition of the peril, that is rather meaningless. Climate change is not a peril. Wind, fire, flood, quake etc. are.
Tony Blair now sells global warming insurance. Quite a step up for him.
Tony Blair has taken a second big job with a leading financial player, attracted by the prospect of working on its climate-change initiative.
The former Prime Minister has joined Zurich, the Swiss company, as an adviser. The appointment, thought to be worth at least £500,000 a year, comes less than three weeks after he took a similar role with J P Morgan Chase, one of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street. That was believed to be a package worth about £2 million a year.
He will assist Zurich on “developments and trends in the international political environment”. His key interest, according to friends, was in its climate initiative, announced last week, developing products and research to combat global warming.
Mike -13 The emails seem to have been selected using a search algorithm to find mails to: from: cc: Phil Jones. There are 1074 files and the email prefix p.jones@ appears 1144 times. A quick content analysis of the most frequent content words shows the following words: data 4000 paper 2417 climate 2264 temperature 1839
These are the most frequent names (lower and upper case are distinguished): Phil 2242 Mann 1688 mann 1710 Briffa 1153 briffa 1025 Keith 1985 Jones 1631 jones 1110 Michael 985 Mike 927 Tom 1137 Tim 1090 There was a social network visualization on Ben Hale's blog, can't find it right now
I agree. The form is practically meaningless for other than political objectives. The respondant could write anything and have it be valid or acceptable. Even snide replies would do fine, reading the requirements.
I think it is a good bet that insurers are going to be thoughtful and cautious in raising rates due to climate-change speculation: it is not as if there isn't a lot of competition out there for the insured's policy.
Otimo #22 My first instinct in this case was an unhappy grad student or post doc. It has all the elements of execution by a younger generation. Older generations are notoriously sloppy on PC security. All he or she would need is a few minutes at Jones PC with a memory stick. If Jones was using Outlook you would only need to copy the PST file and load it on your own PC. You then in secrecy edit down the file.
23 comments:
AHA! You said leak before hack, futher proof that you are a right wing fossil fuel climate denier tool of Bush and other evil cronies!
Well, you've seen how some of such stripes react to you! ;)
Steve Mosher seems to be enjoying his moment :)
This is my current understanding of his chronology:
1. The File (or a link to it) was posted to an unnamed moderated blog
2. The unnamed Blog moderator held the comment in moderation, and sent the file to Steve on CD for authentication.
3. On November 19th, UEA tells employees about the leak and Mosher finds out about this.
4. Mosher realizes that this means that the file has been posted somewhere else. He goes looking and finds it on Jeff's blog.
Even supposing that:
A. I have understood correctly and
B. All this is true and
C. The blog moderator is about to be named
would this actually tell us anything meaningful about who the leaker or hacker was?
Does Roger know something beyond what has appeared in those blogs?
Pretty sure it's a false alarm.
So the blog moderator is just CTM at Anthony Watts site. This still doesn't tell us anything terribly interesting.
As I have asked elsewhere, how come it is taking so long for a computer forensics team to identify the individual or individuals responsible for releasing the cache of CRU emails and files? My interpretation is that they already know, it has significant political ramifications and politicians are waiting for things to cool down or for the equivalent of 5pm on a Friday before a long weekend or for some startling confirmation of CAGW. Releasing the identity now during a very cold winter could be a PR nightmare.
It would appear that the major insurnance companies are taking climategate seriously.
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/01/13/13climatewire-insurance-group-says-stolen-e-mails-show-ris-91554.html
As they are the ones that pay the price of 'climate catastrophies' they have the most to lose.
new to blogging, not certain where to post this but I have a question:
Given that various atmospheric and ocean processes redistribute heat from the equator to the poles, and we can infer from recent data that this results in global temperature increases being most pronounced at the poles, would this not result in earth radiation to space increasing at a far greater pace at the poles than the over all temperature increase at the global level? As an example, using NASA's estimate of north pole temps increasing by a factor of 8 versus equatorial temperatures we could infer the following using degrees K:
Mean temp at equator 300 K
Mean temp at pole 200 K
global temperature increase results in:
Mean temp at equator 300.25 (+0.08%)
Mean temp at pole 202 (plus 2.00%)
This effect would be further skewed by a deficit of greenhouse gases such as water vapour and ozone at the poles. In brief, any warming regardless of specific forcing would result in increase cooling at the poles. As my expectation is that this would be a response where the mitigation effect lags the forcing by about 150 years (based on solar forcing versus global on a millennial time scale) this would be outside of the window of data consideration for most climate models and would result in them over estimating any given forcing.
Would appreciate your comments.
Harrywr2, what peril or perils are those insurance companies worried about? Flood - usually excluded. Wind - coastal sublimits and exclusions available to limit risk. In the reinsurance arena risks tend to become somewhat murky as the LMX spiral revealed.
Question: Are these insurance companies invested in green solutions?
Harry #6
I would not use the actions of insurance companies as an indicator of very much. It is heightened and misplaced fear of future rare events that make insurance companies rich by enabling them to garner unjustified risk premiums - as long as a functioning secondary insurance market exists.
Harrywr2 said...
"It would appear that the major insurnance companies are taking climategate seriously. . . As they are the ones that pay the price of 'climate catastrophies' they have the most to lose."
I am not sure this follows. They are raising their premiums now to cover eventualities. Their profits will go up (I think) whether or not those eventualities occur because the total volume of their business will be higher. They might have an incentive to over-estimate the risk?
The key to discovering if the files were leaked or hacked is out in the open. Anyone who wants to look at all the files that made it into the public can find it. Metadata regarding the file folder and its contents were changed prior to the release so that investigators would not be able to identify an internal profile based on who was in the building at the time the folder was captured.
Mean temp at equator 300.25 (+0.08%)
Mean temp at pole 202 (plus 2.00%)
of course I meant 1%, not 2.
although if i change the original model such that the temp at the north pole was 100 K... yes that's it, not bad math on my part, just original data was wrong... :-)
Am I right that the released files were selective? If so it strongly suggests someone with prior knowledge of their content. I can't imagine a hacker spending hours going through 1000's of emails.
Here is the NAIC disclosure questions for insurance companies. The questions strike me more as policy/political rather than having any bearing on measuring or disclosing real insured risk.
http://www.naic.org/documents/committees_ex_climate_risk_disclosure_survey_prototype.pdf
Having worked in the insurance industry as a computer analyst.
Insurance companies generally welcome requirements to increase their 'loss reserves'.
States require X amount of dollars for loss reserves, and the more that is required means the less tax insurance companies pay.
The insurance business is the greatest tax avoidance scheme of all time.
So the insurances companies pushing back against an invitation to hide even more money from the tax man is indeed an interesting story.
@ Harrywr2
The insurance companies are essentially being tasked to define how high is up...after questions one and two. Without definition of the peril, that is rather meaningless. Climate change is not a peril. Wind, fire, flood, quake etc. are.
Tom @ #11
very interesting. I recall this date/time stamp change coming out early on.
The thinking at that time was that the change may have been made to hide evidence that the files had been edited.
Tony Blair now sells global warming insurance. Quite a step up for him.
Tony Blair has taken a second big job with a leading financial player, attracted by the prospect of working on its climate-change initiative.
The former Prime Minister has joined Zurich, the Swiss company, as an adviser. The appointment, thought to be worth at least £500,000 a year, comes less than three weeks after he took a similar role with J P Morgan Chase, one of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street. That was believed to be a package worth about £2 million a year.
He will assist Zurich on “developments and trends in the international political environment”. His key interest, according to friends, was in its climate initiative, announced last week, developing products and research to combat global warming.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article3266329.ece
Mike -13
The emails seem to have been selected using a search algorithm to find mails to: from: cc: Phil Jones. There are 1074 files and the email prefix p.jones@ appears 1144 times.
A quick content analysis of the most frequent content words shows the following words:
data 4000
paper 2417
climate 2264
temperature 1839
These are the most frequent names (lower and upper case are distinguished):
Phil 2242
Mann 1688
mann 1710
Briffa 1153
briffa 1025
Keith 1985
Jones 1631
jones 1110
Michael 985
Mike 927
Tom 1137
Tim 1090
There was a social network visualization on Ben Hale's blog, can't find it right now
Re: Craig at 14,
I agree. The form is practically meaningless for other than political objectives. The respondant could write anything and have it be valid or acceptable. Even snide replies would do fine, reading the requirements.
I think it is a good bet that insurers are going to be thoughtful and cautious in raising rates due to climate-change speculation: it is not as if there isn't a lot of competition out there for the insured's policy.
Reiner #19
They sure knew the right target.
Mike, could that mean that they just took the email from Phil's computer?
--t
Otimo #22
My first instinct in this case was an unhappy grad student or post doc. It has all the elements of execution by a younger generation. Older generations are notoriously sloppy on PC security. All he or she would need is a few minutes at Jones PC with a memory stick. If Jones was using Outlook you would only need to copy the PST file and load it on your own PC. You then in secrecy edit down the file.
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