Saturday, December 05, 2009

I did it

It is only a matter of time before this surfaces in the hacked email archive, so I figured I might as well fess up now.

From: lab_lemming@geemail.com
To: Phil Jones The.Dark.Lord@climatelord.ac.uk
Date: March 15, 2008 8:34 pm EST
Subject: The deed is done.

Hi Phil,
Mission accomplished.
Crichton drank the whole glass. If this thing works as promised, that denialist scumbag will be dead in six months, and they’ll see nothing but natural causes. It won't solve our problems, but we gotta start somewhere.
Thanks for the bug; the stem cell ban here means that we can’t weaponize cancer like you Brits do.
You’re buying Christmas drinks at AGU this year.
Cheers,
The Lord’s Lemming

6 comments:

Lockwood said...

I have never read a book that made me angrier with its author than "State of Fear." I presume this is intended to be funny... I laughed.

C W Magee said...

What!?
How can you laugh at cancer?
That's so politically incorrect!
They'll never let you on television...
:P

Mike said...

I was once asked to falsify data for my lead Engineer. I was still on new-hire probation. I was terrified. Fortunately she was not my supervisor. I went directly to my supervisor, and was still terrified. He assured me that I had done the right thing. I was still terrified. The lead engineer went on sabbatical and did not return. We had bad test conditions, and knew what we were doing, but we had problems with noise. But faking the data is still faking the data.

Dr. Lemming said...

So should you be fired if you ever used a properly labeled and commented synthetic data set to calibrate your software?

'Cause some political hack might steal your internal files a decade from now, and having no clue as to how science works, use that as evidence that all of engineering is a hoax.

Mike said...

Imagine your outrage if this email had been stolen from an oil company.


Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !
Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better
this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is
trawling
them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear
there
is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than
send
to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within
20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.
We also
have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried
email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He
has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant
here,
but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere
to it !

C W Magee said...

Dude, I used to work for a resource company. My contempt for hippie left-wing obstructionists is just as great as for right-wing denialists.