For those of you who don’t know of the blog Bishop Hill, let me say that he is a succinct and careful writer who has earned praise from many (including myself and Steve McIntyre) in taking a difficult niche subject such as the Hockey Stick and paleoclimatology and condensed into into a readable form for the layman. He’s also writing a book about it called: The Hockey Stick Illusion
In his latest post, Climate Cuttings 33, he gives a list of interesting issues he’s identified. I’ve reproduced it below for WUWT readers to consider. Be sure to visit his blog and have a look and drop an encouraging word. – Anthony
If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.
General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.
In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I’ll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.
- Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
- Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
- Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
- Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.(1075403821)
- Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
- Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
- Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
- Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
- Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)
- Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)
- Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
- Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
- Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)
- Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
- Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
- Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
- Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
- Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
- Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)
- Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
- Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
- Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
- Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
- Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
- Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
- Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
- Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
- Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]
- Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
- Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
- Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
- Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
- Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
- Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
- Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
- Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
- Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
- Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
- Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
- Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
- Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
- Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
- Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
- David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)
- Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
- Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)
- Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)
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Folks, hit the donate button if you have a little to spare. Sites like this don’t just create themselves out of thin air and I believe Anthony also helps with the administration of CA.
If information such as this has value to you, take a moment and consider a donation.
NOTE: I have absolutely nothing to do with this site and have no economic interest in it whatsoever. It is simply a valuable information source that I find worth more than what I pay for an annual subscription to my local newspaper.
The Wegman report hit the nail on the head. This clique has gone far beyond the bounds of acceptability, beyond the bounds of academic protections for opinions, beyond the bounds of fiducial responsibility.
By actively attempting to suppress, and successfully removing people from boards they have created a monoculture that has reinforced specific political movements. While they have a right to do so as citizens of the UK and US, they do not have the right to use their positions to do so. These people have moved from academia to the political realm and in doing so have violated a number of US and I suspect UK laws.
When do they get called to account for their behavior… or is breaking the law ok if you support the right cause?
“Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)”
I’m thinking that’s right, Jones would like to discredit Christiansen, but not only for the reasons intimated in the emails. Christiansen is dangerous to Jones, not only as editor of Energy and Environment, but perhaps more as a scientist who has published in many major journals, one at least on the topic of MBH98:
“The inadequacy of the MBH98 methodology for climate reconstructions was later independently confirmed in other publications, for instance by Lee, Zwiers and Tsao in the August 2008 issue of the journal Climate Dynamics or by Christiansen et al. in the Journal of Climate. Since 1999, the MBH98 method has never again been applied for climate reconstructions.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Storch
“A Surrogate Ensemble Study of Climate Reconstruction Methods : Stochasticity and Robustness” Journal of Climate
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=21289329
It’s great someone is doing this filtering and summarization. I suggest the addition of the collection of Ben Santer’s bullying remarks that was posted in one of the earlier threads. (Whoever posted it there should repost it here.) Also, suggested additions to the list above, in the same style, should be posted.
Keep the pressure on! Hopefully these revelations will inspire many good scientists who’ve kept quiet about the AGW fraud to speak up.
At the very least there looks to be plenty of evidence to bring prosecutions for misappropriation of grant funds and possibly tax evasion, going by the list above and excerpts in other threads on here of discussions on how to keep funding for trips not taken and other things they begged money for but didn’t do.
This is a damning litany.
All real scientists and honest intelligent people can have nothing but contempt for this behaviour and a profound distrust of everything this mob have claimed and done.
As with other posters, my instinct is that the e-mails are only the beginning; that there will be more bombshells once the likes of Steve McIntyre get through the data.
When do they get called to account for their behavior… or is breaking the law ok if you support the right cause?
The UK is responsible for most of that.
I learned of Bishop Hill from Jeff Id (The Air Vent). The Bish did a great primer called Casper and the Jesus Paper for those interested.
Emails in chronological order (in blocks of 10) here:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/cruemails2.php
In response to a comment at Bishop Hill’s blog about a cover up, I posted something like this:
The BBC is hard at it. Richard Black’s blog has shut up shop. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack . That doyen of investigative journalism [sark – he toes the BBC line], Roger Harrabin has a deep throat at CRU to provide the truth. He also relies on RealClimate and Gavin for the real outside view on events! See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8371597.stm for the dismissive cover-up.
Cover up = damage control
Still no MSM coverage here in Australia. Me thinks they are keeping it quiet asthe Govn’t and opposition have to come to an agreement on the CPRS (ETS) on Tuesday, just before their long Chrissy break!
“Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. ”
And as it happens, for some reason it apparently disappeared. Interesting.
The idea that he would delete it seems to imply that it existed up to that point.
…and in doing so have violated a number of US and I suspect UK laws.
Correct. If all those e-mails are genuine, each recipient and respondent is also liable for prosecution under the all-encompassing RICO law. But, absent a complaint, I doubt that will occur.
Personally, I think they should all be given an auger and a yardstick, then sent to measure the Arctic ice cap in January, clad in nothing but walking shorts and “Save the Planet” T-shirts…
I was reading the Guardian online yesterday(british newspaper) concerning this subject and I made a comment with a link to this website about the 450 sceptical papers ,it was ok for a while then 20 minutes later it was deleted ,nuff said.
BTW Piers Corbyn must be a time traveller the weather over here is exactly as predicted.
The one of most concern to me is the above 1228330629.txt
To my simple mind, this could be seen as a wilful attempt to conspire to avoid compliance with a legitimate Act of Parliament. That’s against the law, if it is so.
For extras, there’s a section on deletion of data.
1228330629.txt
From: Phil Jones
To: santer, Tom Wigley
Subject: Re: Schles suggestion
Date: Wed Dec 3 13:57:09 2008
Cc: mann , Gavin Schmidt , Karl Taylor , peter gleckler
Ben,
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals. The VC is also aware of what is going on – at least for one of the requests, but probably doesn’t know the number we’re dealing with. We are in double figures.
One issue is that these requests aren’t that widely known within the School. So I don’t know who else at UEA may be getting them. CRU is moving up the ladder of requests at UEA though – we’re way behind computing though. We’re away of
requests going to others in the UK – MOHC, Reading, DEFRA and Imperial College.
So spelling out all the detail to the LLNL management should be the first thing you do. I hope that Dave is being supportive at PCMDI.
The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data Protection Act request sent by a certain Canadian, saying that the email maligned his scientific credibility with his peers! If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn’t yet) I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I’ve written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all. This legislation is different from the FOI – it is supposed to be used to find put why you might have a poor credit rating !
In response to FOI and EIR requests, we’ve put up some data – mainly paleo data.
Each request generally leads to more – to explain what we’ve put up. Every time, so far, that hasn’t led to anything being added – instead just statements saying read what is in the papers and what is on the web site! Tim Osborn sent one such response (via the FOI person) earlier this week. We’ve never sent programs, any codes and manuals.
In the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise results will be out in 2 weeks time.
These are expensive to produce and take too much time, so from next year we’ll be moving onto a metric based system. The metrics will be # and amounts of grants, papers and citations etc. I did flippantly suggest that the # of FOI requests you get should be another.
When you look at CA, they only look papers from a handful of people. They will start on another coming out in The Holocene early next year. Gavin and Mike are on this with loads of others. I’ve told both exactly what will appear on CA once they get access to it!
Cheers
Phil
At 01:17 03/12/2008, Ben Santer wrote:
Dear Tom,
I think that the idea of a Commentary in Science or Nature is a good one. Steve Sherwood made a similar suggestion. I’d be perfectly happy NOT to be involved in such a Commentary. My involvement would look too self-serving.
One of the problems is that I’m caught in a real Catch-22 situation. At present, I’m damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre’s initial request for climate model data, I’m
convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations, additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: “You see – he’s guilty as charged!” on his website.
You and I have spent over a decade of our scientific careers on the MSU issue, Tom.
During much of that time, we’ve had to do science in “reactive mode”, responding to the latest outrageous claims and inept science by John Christy, David Douglass, or S. Fred Singer. For the remainder of my scientific career, I’d like to dictate my own research agenda. I don’t want that agenda driven by the constant need to respond to Christy, Douglass, and Singer. And I certainly don’t want to spend years of my life interacting with the likes of Steven McIntyre.
I hope LLNL management will provide me with their full support. If they do not, I’m fully prepared to seek employment elsewhere.
With best regards,
Ben
Tom Wigley wrote:
Ben,
Re the idea Michael sent around (to Revkin et al.)
this is something that Nature or Science might like
as a Commentary. It might even be possible to include
some indirect reference to the Mc audit issue. The
notes I sent could be a starting point. One problem
is that you could not be first author as this would
look like garnering publicity for your own work (as
the 2 key papers are both Santer et al.) Even having
me as the first author may not work. An ideal person
would be Tom Karl, who sent me a response saying “nice
summary”.
What do you think?
Tom.
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-
Re: Crosspatch (#1)
Absolutely agreed regarding donations to WUWT, and CA as well, but don’t forget Bishop Hill, who created this post, and has contributed quite a bit in the past…
He doesn’t seem to have any ads to follow or donation box on his site, but he does have a book coming out soon, with an Amazon pre-order link on his site…
From: mann
To: p.jones
Subject: Re: Something far more interesting
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 12:03:13 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: t.osborn
Dear Phil,
Of course I’ll be happy to be on board. I think the opportunity for some direct collaboration between us (me, and you/tim/keith) is ripe, and the plan to compare and contrast different approaches and data and synthesize the different results is a good one. Though sidetracked by other projects recently, I remain committed to doing this with you guys, and to explore applications to synthetic datasets with manufactured biases/etc remains high priority. It sounds like it would all fit into the proposal you mention. There may be some overlap w/proposals we will eventually submit to NSF (renewal of our present funding), etc. by I don’t see a problem with that in the least.
Once the collaboration is officially in place, I think that sharing of codes, data, etc. should not be a problem. I would be happy to make mine available, though can’t promise its the most user friendly thing in the world.
In short, I like the idea. INclude me in, and let me know what you need from me (cv, etc.).
cheers,
mike
____________________________________________________________________
Michael E. Mann
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Geosciences
Morrill Science Center
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
____________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann
Web: http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/mike
Phone: (413) FAX: (413)
– Mods, please delete the previous one
PS, and I still havent seen it on british news channels yet.
Nice job from Bishop Hill. Getting a digestible summary to the MSM is a priority at this point. Plaster the link everywhere.
But we have Dateline, an ABC program in Australia, all out pro-AGW stories tonight. WOW! Staggering. River deltas being washed away because of AGW. Forget the cyclones and increased shipping.
An entry from Christopher Booker’s Blogg, “Van Rompuy wants the EU to run on CO2”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6623665/Van-Rompuy-wants-the-EU-to-run-on-CO2.html
I am a long time AGW supporter.
But the latest revelations from Hadley CRU emails left me sick to my stomach.
At this point I don’t know what the believe anymore. What I do know is that this is no way to conduct science.
I am sick to my stomach. I know there are so many other hard working scientists that have not tainted themselves. But this group � Phil Jones, Ken Briffa, Mike Man, Gavin Schmidt have casted a huge shadow of doubt over the entire field and caused a huge damage to the green movement.
I talked with many of my friends who, like most of us, continue to believe in AGW, and we think that as long as these guys continue to lead the science and the IPCC assessments they will continue to taint all of the good work done by thousands of other scientists.
We need to acknowledge that wrong was done. We need to replace the tainted leadership and continue the research without the air of doubt.
And we need to reassess where the climate science really stand after remove these rotten apples and reassess the policy.
JohnS
on November 22, 2009
at 06:19 AM
@Mark Hind.
re: the Guardian
Dear Mark, as the Hadley story broke, there was no reference or post regarding it, just a story about flying polar bears. Many used that post to break the Hadley Story. Though off topic, this was the only possible sounding board that day. All posts re Hadley were deleted. Many including two of mine just disappeared completely.
I complained by email that the Guardian was effectively shutting down debate. Later a piece making light of the Hadley story came out with no comments. I complained again. Comments were finally allowed and then shut down quicker than is usual.
The Guardian has a problem with this story, but so it seems has quite a few broad-sheets.
Dellingpole in the Telegraph has run with it and quite well. But it generally appears to be an embarrasment to MSM hacks – many who have been spoon-fed propaganda by the same crew involved in these emails.
Patrick Davis (01:15:43) :
Still no MSM coverage here in Australia. Me thinks they are keeping it quiet asthe Govn’t and opposition have to come to an agreement on the CPRS (ETS) on Tuesday, just before their long Chrissy break
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26384297-952,00.html
Story has been on the front page (although you have to scroll down a bit) of the Courier Mall for a few hours now. Only 7 comments.
Phillip Bratby (01:10:19) :
“The BBC is hard at it. Richard Black’s blog has shut up shop. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack . That doyen of investigative journalism [sark – he toes the BBC line], Roger Harrabin has a deep throat at CRU to provide the truth. He also relies on RealClimate and Gavin for the real outside view on events! See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8371597.stm for the dismissive cover-up.”
For those who have something to say to the BBC about this episode you may like to look at these two sites
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/feedback/contact/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbpointsofview
Feedback radio, Points of view TV.
Many of the ‘data manipulation’ emails can be ‘explained away’ by claiming that all we are seeing here is ‘robust scientific criticism’. Though they indicate the closed mindset of the Team, they may not be obviously illegal.
Where the Team ARE vulnerable is with the emails which indicate that they are working to stop publication of papers which do not support Global Warming, and that they are working to remove people who do not support their views from IPCC working parties and other official posts.
All that will cause a major scandal if exposed, and will certainly strike a chord with other scientists. Few scientists would mind someone trying to ‘prove their theory’, but all of them would be very unhappy to learn that, if they do not hold the right views, they are barred from career advancement….
There is indeed lock-down going on over at the BBC, as this impacts them also with their solid promotion of AGW. However, it’s still not being reported over here either on TV or radio news. There’s hardly anything about it even on newspaper web sites. It’s like being in China!
I love the internet – you can find out what’s going on and by-pass the TV stations like the BBC (where once you would have gone to!) and the newspapers and find out for yourself thanks to people like McIntyre, Watts and Bishop Hill – amongst many, many others. Seriously (and I wouldn’t have thought I would ever say this) where would we be without the internet now? In the dark!
My comment on a BBC forum has been removed before it even got on the page! This despite the fact I was very careful not to break any forum rules. Like I said, China!
If these e-mails are genuine, it is appalling to think that the UK Climate Change Act rests upon the deliberations of this devious bunch.
Perhaps Ed Miliband our Energy Minister would care to comment?
Dr Tim Ball discusses the implications of the leaked files on YouTube (and they’re pretty damning). 10 minutes of enlightenment. Go to the Corbett Report on YouTube.
Seems that the way Gavin runs his blog is completely in line with the way Mann, Briffa & Jones do their science…. Maximise the signal to noise ratio…. LMAO
That’s really easy to do when you simply make up the signal and reject the noise you don’t like….
_______________________________________________________________________
[Response: This is a moderated site, and always has been. We do screen out a lot of the random squawk of the blogosphere and the baseless accusations of malfeasance that are commonplace on open forums. We do that unapologetically in order to maximise the signal-to-noise ratio in threads……… – gavin]
Surely there is more than enough here to demand the surrender of passports by this “team” and for them to be told to not leave town !
Proceedings need to begin before there is further destruction of evidence. Lock the offices and forbid any further inter-communication.
A Royal Commission, followed by any prosecutions, must follow.
And let’s hear Prince Charles lead the call for the honourable course of action!
Nice job from Bishop Hill. Getting a digestible summary to the MSM is a priority at this point. Plaster the link everywhere.
Make sure Christopher Booker (the UK journalist) is aware of the situation. He probably has the best understanding of the issues.
The UK press have been a bit low key, but this might be for legal reasons. Hopefully the big splash will come.
Has Daily Telegraph removed James Delingpole’s blog?
Casched version
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:5-QpZoXmFjwJ:blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/+climategate&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
the original
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/
Re donations to WUWT ( kmye (01:45:17) and Crosspatch (#1) ) I did so yesterday. I have been coming here regularly for 2 years and have been much informed as I believe many of us have. Not forgetting CA and the likes of Bishop Hill. I suggest that when the history of (the collapse of) AGW comes to be written the important part played by sites such as these will be fully acknowledged.
The dailies are reporting…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6619796/Climate-scientists-accused-of-manipulating-global-warming-data.html
How many have actually read the text on which these one-line summaries are based? I did so for the first 15 and almost without exception it does not support the claims the Bishop makes. In some cases the scientists are saying the opposite of what is implied, e.g. ‘contain’ the MWP is actually used in the sense of ‘include’ the MWP, Tom Wigley did not say that the truth of his claim didn’t matter, and so on.
I posted supporting quotes in the ‘CRU hacked’ thread.
GERMAN READERS:
Dirk Maxeiner:
http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.php/dadgd/article/watergate_der_klimaforschung/
Dirk Maxeiner:
http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.php/author/dmaxeiner
Die Welt:
http://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article5288571/Hacker-knacken-Rechner-von-Klima-Institut.html
klimakatastrope.de:
http://klimakatastrophe.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/cru-klimawissenschaftler-gehackt-ipcc-schwindel-weltweit-entlarvt/
EIKE:
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/news-anzeige/hackerangriff-auf-die-britischen-climate-research-unit-cru-hunderte-mails-merkwuerdigen-inhaltes-fuehrender-ipcc-forscher-veroeffentlicht/
MM News
http://www.mmnews.de/index.php/200911224284/MM-News/Klima-Luge-entlarvt.html
Viel Spass beim Lesen!
I sent an e-mail asking the Landmark Legal Foundation to look into this.
Maybe they’ll take this up if they get more requests to do so.
“The VC is also aware of what is going on”: “VC” = Vice Chancellor i.e. the head of the University. He’ll be just delighted to be mentioned in the context of what might conceivably prove to be criminal action. Just delighted.
google
Results 61 – 70 of about 53,600 for climategate
This is just one more fine example of how these people hold themselves above the law(s):
“Ben,
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals. The VC is also aware of what is going on – at least for one of the requests, but probably doesn’t know the number we’re dealing with. We are in double figures.”
I’m sorry…YOU don’t get to decide when/where the LAW applies. YOU don’t get to decide WHICH FOI requests you honor, based on who originated the request. And the fact that YOU showed others in your organization a few posts from CA and then they all supported you, simply makes them accomplices and lemmings.
I’d like to be able to say that the arrogance is amazing…but sadly, it actually is right in line with what we’ve all come to expect.
JimB
someone shoul organise a big DEMO at Copenhagen!
Mark Hind (01:45:56) :
PS, and I still havent seen it on british news channels yet.
BBC don’t want to spoil their party…………..
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229695/BBC-dispatches-35-staff-climate-talks–creating-carbon-African-village-does-year.html
HAts off to Bishop Hill, Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre etc as well as many others, Thankyou for your ongoing work over the years keeping us updated and informed!
Robert van der Veeke (01:45:31) :
Yes its an important email you present there.
And this might be the core of it all:
From this and other mails its so obvious that we have this little group of scientist that cooperates very very close. “Include me in” etc.
They have a common strategy, a plan , a goal.
FACT: IPCC is OVERREPRESENTING RESULTS FROM THIS GROUP.
Again and again IPCC chooses specifically historical temperature data from this specific group. There are SO many other scientists in the field.
So what to do:
Create 2 graphs of historical temperatures.
1) result from this group
2) result from ALL other scientists in the field.
The difference here will show if IPCC has chosen a balanced view of the MWP or not.
I will myself start soon to make such a graph, but hope others will examine this too.
It will take time for this thing to go through the system. First off the strategy will be no comment. No comment means no cross examination. Then they will say these are interpersonal e-mails taken out of context. The politicians, with the exception of Inhofe, and Smokin’ Joe Barton in the US will remain silent because they are all now on board the AGW train and plans are being made to spend the carbon taxes. As well as this they aren’t likely to want things investigated too thoroughly because they will look foolish for being taken in.
On top of this the whole Green movement isn’t going to be swayed either, they believe humans are ruining the planet and won’t be disturbed by people lying and plotting to get that top of the political agenda. It’s going to take a long time.
The really scary bit is that Phil Jones is saying he went to the UK Information Commissioner to get advice on how NOT to provide information under the FOIA and GOT the advice.
It will be an uphill struggle.
An important addition to this one!!!!!
“Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122) ”
It is not just the Phil requests information be deleted, it is also that Mann acted on the request [“I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP.]
The Sqeuence:
From: Phil Jones p.jones@xxx
To: “Michael E. Mann” mann@xxx, “raymond s. bradley” rbradley@xxxx
Subject: A couple of things
Date: Fri May 9 09:53:41 2008
Cc: “Caspar Ammann” ammann@xxxx
Mike, Ray, Caspar,
2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we’ve found a way around this.
………………………………………………
From: Phil Jones p.jones@xxx
To: t.osborn@xxxx “Palmer Dave Mr (LIB)” David.Palmer@xxxx
Subject: Re: FW: Your Ref: FOI_08-23 – IPCC, 2007 WGI Chapter 6 Assessment Process [FOI_08-23]
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 17:13:35 +0100
Cc: “Briffa Keith Prof ” k.briffa@xxxx, “Mcgarvie Michael Mr ” m.mcgarvie@xxx
Dave,
Although requests (1) and (2) are for the IPCC, so irrelevant to UEA, Keith (or you Dave) could say that for (1) Keith didn’t get any additional comments in the drafts other than those supplied by IPCC. On (2) Keith should say that he didn’t get any papers through the IPCC process.either.
I was doing a different chapter from Keith and I didn’t get any. What we did get were papers sent to us directly – so not through IPCC, asking us to refer to them in the IPCC chapters. If only Holland knew how the process really worked!! Every faculty member in ENV and all the post docs and most PhDs do, but seemingly not Holland.
So the answers to both (1) and (2) should be directed to IPCC, but Keith should say that he didn’t get anything extra that wasn’t in the IPCC comments.
As for (3) Tim has asked Caspar, but Caspar is one of the worse responders to emails known. I doubt either he emailed Keith or Keith emailed him related to IPCC.
…………………………………………….
From: Phil Jones p.jones@x
To: “Michael E. Mann” mann@xxx
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
…………
From: Michael Mann mann@xxx
To: Phil Jones p.jones@xx
Subject: Re: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 08:12:02 -0400
Reply-to: mann@xxx
Hi Phil,
laughable that CA would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true.
I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxx
talk to you later,
mike
…………………
I have heard that Phil Jones is resigning his post. Can anyone verify that?
Let’s not call it CRUgate; too obscure. Climategate is better.
I don’t think it will be on British news channels, it’s not really a story unless you’re a sceptic, and even if you were it’s illegal to use stolen e-mails in the media. The same will apply for the Information Commissioner, although prime facie evidence exists that the UAE up to the Vice Chancellor were complicit in avoiding providing information under the FOIA they cannot act upon it on the basis of the stolen e-mails. In any event it there has to be some doubt about the role of the Information Commissioner as Jones says he, the IC, provided advice on how to avoid providing the data requested. That may be the scandal that unravels it, if indeed it’s true, but you need a senior politician to challenge the IC, very difficult.
It looks like the only honest scientist was Briffa – who wielded to the pressure of the agenda in the end. Otherwise, those “leading scientists” , particularly Jones write with the worst parlance of activists than scientists.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/11/an-anonymous-hacker-has-broken.html
“The emails could prove to be extremely damaging to the reputation of the scientists and the robustness of their research if they are revealed to be authentic. “
Reading these e-mail exchanges, like those celebrating the death of John Daly, makes me want to vomit.
Surely the law is being broken somewhere – big time – in all of this.
Also are not the bona fides and integrity of McIntyre et al all being traduced as an excuse for withholding FoI requests?
These lists are very important, so journalists can pick up quickly. I’ve made one similar, with some new messages at http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2009/11/rolo-compressor-de-verdades.html
More would be welcome, especially considering legal aspects, which at least Jones and Mann have clearly broken.
Ecotretas
The only downside to all this is Dear Leader’s apparatchiks will take the lesson as ‘destroy the evidence’.
M White: Feedback and Points of View are a waste of time. The BBC tells you thet the BBC is always right. Complaints to the BBC about bias go unheaded. That’s based on my own and experience and that of friends and colleagues. The BBC is effectively run by government lackeys. The DG gets paid a fortune (and don’t forget those big bonuses and expense accounts) for being no more than a tame bureaucrat. Nobody at the BBC will rock the boat yet.
Re: JASmith (02:52:40) :
What statistical methods does Gavin use to determine if a post is signal or noise? Where is the code? Does he use similar methods to the hockey stick production line?
Interested readers would like know 😉
This is my open statement to the climate swindlers at CRUGATE:
WE’RE COMING AFTER YOU!
YOU CAN RUN, DUCK, & HIDE ALL YOU WANT.
BUT WE WILL NOT STOP. WE’RE CHARGING HARDER THAN EVER BEFORE NOW. OUR NUMBERS ARE HUGE AND THEY ARE GROWING. YOU’RE ON THE RUN, AND WE WILL DO WHAT ARMIES DO WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OPPONENTS ON THE RUN. THAT’S RIGHT – IT’S GONNA BE REAL MESSY FOR YOU.
AND LAWSUITS ARE ON THE WAY.
YOU’RE GONNA BE ANSWERING SO MANY QUESTIONS ON THE HOT SEAT THAT YOU’RE GONNA THINK FOR ONCE THAT MANN’S BS HS IS ACTUALLY REAL. WE’RE GONNA DEMAND ACTION FROM POLITICIANS, THE MEDIA IS CATCHING ON TO WHAT YOU REALLY ARE. WE WILL NOT STOP. THIS IS GROWING EXPONENTIALLY. YOU LIKE HOCKEY STICKS? HOW DO YOU LIKE THIS ONE? HAVE YOU SEEN THE TRAFFIC ON OUR BLOGS?
WELL, YOU AINT SEEN NOTHING YET.
THEM TIP JARS ARE ABOUT TO GROW INTO WAR CHESTS.
YOU DREW FIRST BLOOD – NOT US.
LET’S GET IT ON!
Below is an attempt to find out who is reviewing a Science paper- so that a coordinated reply can be sent. this is a no no.
Filename: 1077829152.txt
From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: Crap Papers
Date: Thu Feb 26 15:59:xxx xxxx xxxx
Mike,
Just agreed to review a paper for GRL – it is absolute rubbish. It is having a go at the CRU temperature data – not the latest vesion, but the one you used in MBH98 !! We added lots of data in for the region this person says has Urban Warming ! So easy review to do.
Sent Ben the Soon et al. paper and he wonders who reviews these sorts of things. Says GRL hasn’t a clue with editors or reviewers. By chance they seem to have got the right person with the one just received.
Can I ask you something in CONFIDENCE – don’t email around, especially not to Keith and Tim here. Have you reviewed any papers recently for Science that say that MBH98 and MJ03 have underestimated variability in the millennial record – from models or from some low-freq proxy data. Just a yes or no will do. Tim is reviewing them – I want to make sure he takes my comments on board, but he wants to be squeaky clean with discussing them with others. So forget this email when you reply.
Cheers
Phil
“under the FOIA they cannot act upon it on the basis of the stolen e-mails”
Which isn’t a problem. Once you know what emails you’re looking for, you submit an FOI request to obtain them legitimately.
The potential for litigation concerning CRUGate is considerable. I seriously doubt with Reid and Pelosi running things that Congress will investigate potential fraud; but if any scientists involced in the ongoing “debates” suffered loss of positions (income), funding (again income), or reputation, I can see cause for civil litigation. And since, these people used public emails, public file servers, etc… destroying documents or “hiding” them is a felony.
“Which isn’t a problem. Once you know what emails you’re looking for, you submit an FOI request to obtain them legitimately.”
Infact, the MSM might be holding back to do just that. The real story might properly hit in a few months time.
The one thing that I haven’t seen discussed is the potential impact that these revelations will have on the stock markets around the world, once the high roller investors begin to rethink those billions of dollars of “green” investments that have sprouted up since the release of IPCC AR4 and related. Most of those investments have explicitly or implicitly relied on the “truthiness” of AGW. If that is now potentially in the dumper those investments won’t be worth a dead polar bear.
Should be an interesting week on the street.
List of climate change scientists and their citations.
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/
Noticed this on http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/11/20/lawrence-solomon-what-she-didn-t-ask.aspx
And still the scandals keep on coming! Very interesting piece here by American Thinker about what the e-mails reveal about the CRU attitude to funding.
scahttp://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/cru_files_betray_climate_alarm.html
I just did a google search for “CRU climate fraud” after checking the foxnews web site, also NYT and the WAPost without seeing much of any of this in any of these places.
This is not going to have an affect until this makes regular play in the MSM. Most people do not frequent such sites as this and only get their news from the alphabet networks or the newspapers. As long as those sources keep quiet, this will all blow over. I’ll be impressed when a friend who has no connection with science in general comments about this case to me; then I’ll know this has truly seeped out into where it needs to be.
CRU emails are but the tip of a deep-seated and cancerous tumor that has been silently growing on the scientific community at least since the time of the Apollo Mission to the Moon in 1969.
Success at using dishonest means to feed greed only increased the appetite for more grant funds. Over my research career, which began in 1960, I have personally seen:
1. NASA and its underlings pretend ignorance of mass fractionation in the Sun – a natural process that selectively moves lightweight elements like H and He into a thin veneer covering its surface. H is element #1; He is element #2; The solar surface is 91% H and 9% He.
2. Directors of the Lunar Science Institute deny clear empirical evidence that the Sun sorts neon isotopes by mass and changes the Ne-20/Ne-22 ratio from 15 to 14 to 13 to 12, to 11, to . . . . 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and then claim to have discovered primordial neon components (Ne-A, Ne-B, Ne-C, Ne-D, Ne-E, etc.) with Ne-20/Ne-22 = 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, . . . . 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
3. A current Secretary of the Department of Energy that pretends to be unaware of repulsive interactions between neutrons – the primary energy source of the Sun and the cosmos.
I certainly would not like to be in President Obama’s place and realize today that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has been in bed with self-serving politicians and totally destroyed the reliability of the scientific community that the government and the American people fund to protect our national security.
That’s my opinion,
Oliver K. Manuel
Re: geronimo (04:46:38) :
Whats makes you think it is illegal for a journalist to use stolen emails? I haven’t read of a single case of a journalist being taken to court for using the contents of a stolen email. I have read of journalists being prosecuted for stealing media content, but not for using it.
There is also no evidence that the emails were stolen as opposed to leaked and there are laws in the UK that might actually protect the person who leaked the emails (SM did a post on the CA mirror about it).
You are thinking of “Fruit of the poison tree” whereby authorities cant use evidence obtained illegally. This is true but only applies to illegal acts the authorities commit. This means that, for example, the authorities can not break into your house and prosecute you for anything illegal they find there. If a burglar breaks in, finds something and reports it then they can prosecute you because it was not the authorities who committed the burglary
All Your Emails Are Belong To Us
I should have added to the above post that I vaguely remember an incident in the early 80s where a burglar stole a video recorder and tapes. He found child porn on the tapes and was so disgusted he went to the police with the evidence. The householder was successfully prosecuted.
Phil Clarke:
There you wrote:
From the dictionary:
and:
Given this, the fact that the 1K record does include the MWP, as well as the the fact that they put both “contain” and “MWP” in quotes, I am left in no doubt as to the true meaning of that statement.
On the issue of Mike M. in congress claiming he never fused real and proxy data, there is very clear evidence he lied in his congressional testimony.
Kudos to Bishop Hill for his work and excellent summary presentation of the key CRU emails. It makes it much easier for casual readers to get to and focus on the most egregious cases.
And I agree with previous comments:
”Climategate” says it best.
More fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Some years ago I wrote that I trust Vince, the Sham Wow guy, more than I trust the preeminent IPCC scientists that are supposed to be guarding our truth.
Since that time Vince has retained his superior position even though he has apparently engaged in a Hannibal Lecter exchange with a hooker.
Could the bar be set any lower?
Let the Climategate tricksters, frauds, and liars reap the whirlwind.
Phil Jones would be wise to resign, though I haven’t seen any confirmation that he is.
Science is supposed to be about furthering truth, not twisting and suppressing it. The e-mails released read like they were written by organized crime figures, not by scientists.
Maybe the tabloids could have some fun, e.g:
CLIMATE GHOUL GORGES ON PUBLIC FUNDS
Leaked correspondence suggests that a prominent climate scientist who found the death of an opponent ‘cheering’ has received more than £13 Million of taxpayers cash.
While UK residents are being urged to give up their cars to save the planet, scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have been jetting off to exotic locations for conferences.
The leaked correspondence indicates that travel schedules have been arranged to allow ‘quality time’ for CRU scientists and that UK taxpayers’ money has been given to Russian colleagues in a manner that allowed them to benefit from tax avoidance.
One important way skeptics can help in making sure this scandal is properly treated is to participate at major media comment sites.
Here is one for the Boston Globe:
http://www.bostonherald.com/business/general/view.bg?articleid=1213483&srvc=business&position=recent
What an excellent summary of the problematical emails. I had not realized the pervasive pattern of cover up of diverse scientific opinion untill I read Bishop Hill’s summary. This should get forwarded to the last surviving print media.
Bullying thrives in sneaky and clandestine moves. I suspect some of the listed parties are in great fear of confrontation at Copenhagen.
This will be discussed at copenhagen whether they like it or not.
A good summary of the findings from the emails and data (taken from elsewhere from “Just an Engineer” post on theairvent) is below. I thought it an excellent summary of what has been revealed.
These E-mails suggest – not prove, but suggest:
1) efforts to manipulate data to conform to a certain viewpoint
2) efforts to hide data from those who would review their work critically
3) a conspiracy to dodge freedom of information requests and a conspiracy to delete data that would be so requested
4) a conspiracy to prevent publication of contrasting view points and a conspiracy to punish those who don’t play along
5) an unseemly PR effort via elements of the press and certain websites.
Here in England, the BBC that I fund via a compulsary tax (which if I don’t pay I face imprisonment) are refusing to allow people to post on their environment / climate change blogs. Surprise surprise, as they are fully in the tank in terms of supporting man made global warming.
Phil Clarke (03:47:06) :
I did so for the first 15 and almost without exception it does not support the claims the Bishop makes.
I absolutely agree. The intro says that Hill is a careful and succinct writer, but much of this is just sloppy. There’s too much to fisk in total but just starting at the top:
1. Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation.
No, he didn’t. He wrote to complain that SBC was circulating an email making allegations about a member of his staff, which seems quite appropriate. In his final sentence he wrote that while he realised SBC had retired, he was directing his complaint to UH because she was using that affiliation. He nowhere says that she should be stopped from using that affiliation.
2. Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers. No, he doesn’t. He says “Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this?”. Well, he may have been wrong about the takeover. But his proposed response is to urge people not to send papers to it, and to complain to the editors. Is that a sinister “discussion of how to destroy a journal”?
3. Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709).
He didn’t say that at all. He said “They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use.” If there is evidence of such a signal, that’s an entirely reasonable thing to do. Does BH have any evidence that there is no such signal? He says he “usually” stops there – is there any indication that he failed to explain why in his publications?
And so on. This is not “careful and succinct writing”. It is succinct only because it omits to quote what the email authors actually said.
Two things stand out in my mind.
1. What a debt we owe to people like Anthony, Bishop Hill, and many others, but most especially Steve McIntyre, for the work they’ve done. McIntyre especially because of his perseverance in pushing for the data through FoI even when the “team” was trying to thwart him.
2. The silence of the media is amazing. This would not be happening without the freedom of the internet. Don’t ever let them take away that freedom. Americans, write your Congresscritters. Europeans, you are on the front line of the effort to control the internet and you must resist.
The first freedom is the freedom of speech, without it there are no others.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out in Copenhagen. The 2nd world countries will have a field day with the knowledge that the climate data has been faked.
It seems that each web site that has this info on it has a supporter for the hockey stick crowed trying to do damage control.
Look, they just haven’t had time to get the right spin on it. Clintonistas kept saying “it’s just about sex” when the real issue was perjury during a civil trial over sexual harassment. They just haven’t found the right catch phrase to use. The MSM will pick it up like a shot when they do.
Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”
I have no recollection, sir…I have no recollection, ma’am…I have no recollection, Senator…..
Here’s a Q for Phil clarke:
What did Keith Briffa mean when he wrote with some scepticism that temperatures 1000 years ago were probably as warm as today? He expresses grave doubts about the reliability of tree rings as a temperature proxy.
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt
and what does he really mean when he writes that he is “sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces.”
and what does Mann really mean when he writes “manufactured biases/etc remains high priority”?
PS. Make it good!
Good stuff so far. It’s going to take a while to fully get our hands around all this. But so far, it is obviously very damning stuff. People will lose jobs over this. And, IMO, it won’t be too soon….
At least one honest AGW scientist
From: Keith Briffa To: frank.oldfield@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Frank I do not recall what Kyrdianov has worked on – sorry. However, ………
………………. Yes I know I’m a *anker!
Keith
Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.
It’s just robust discussion between scientists that’s been taken out of context.
Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.
Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick…
Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.
Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’.
Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.
Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.
Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann….
Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?].
Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged
Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.
Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.
Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.
Robust scientific work being done by Michael Mann.
Phillip Bratby (01:11:27) :
Cover up = damage control
-But the Cat Box is very full…
From Roger Harrabin yesterday:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8371597.stm
“The scientific establishment is likely to support the CRU. Despite continuing uncertainties in some areas of climate science, they say officially that their overall confidence that humans are warming the climate is now more than 90%.
One leading figure told me unofficially that confidence was now at 99%.”
_______________________
Since there is no “comments” section associated with this article from the Ministry of Global Warming Propaganda and Taxation a.k.a. the BBC, I’ll ask the question here:
“One leading figure”, if you’re not a figment of Harrabin’s imagination, please post all the links to data from which you have derived your 99% confidence level, along with the mathematical derivation of this figure.
Please feel free to remain anonymous or non-existent.
Dr. Hans von Storch comments on his webpage.
“… I would assume that more interesting issues will be found in the files, and that a useful debate about the degree of politicization of climate science will emerge. A conclusion could be that the principle, according to which data must be made public, so that also adversaries may check the analysis, must be really enforced. Another conclusion could be that scientists like Mike Mann, Phil Jones and others should no longer participate in the peer-review process or assessment activities like IPCC.
For an account of our role in the hockey-stick deconstruction, refer to our 2007-article on the nature blog. An account on the problem around “Climate Research” is provided on this web-page of mine from 2003. ”
http://coast.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/
What a pity that MIchael Crichton did not live a couple of more years. He would have died a much happier man, if one can die happy.
American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/warmings_pentagon_papers_conti.html
links to:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/global-warminggate-what-does-it-mean/comment-page-1/#comment-450199
It is amazing how a few immoral and unethical individuals can corrupt an entire field of science. The worst suspicions of the climate skeptics have been proved to be true. We have wasted billions on research for results that now have no credibility at all.
Fore those who do not fully can connect the dots here all these e-mail are much more easier to understand if you have watched this documentary first.
Then the picture and timeline becomes much more clearer.
http://dotsub.com/view/19f9c335-b023-4a40-9453-a98477314bf2
Note. Available with english subs.
I also see in the email correspondense between the Norwegian “Bjerknes Center” with their leader Eystein Jansen and key players in the “Hockey Team”. The few i have read are about funding ad lobbying for it. A quite fasinating web this is..
The CRUtape Letters.
As steven mosher has named them.
REPLY: Too late. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climategate
-A
Geoff Sherrington (01:43:33) :
The one of most concern to me is the above 1228330629.txt
————–
Here they are also conspiring to fake the true author(s) of a comment to a major journal to avoid obvious conflict of interest.
What I am truly amazed with is that fact that their institutions appear to be supporting them in these conspiratorial acts which will not only drag them into it if civil suits for damages are filed, but will provide bigger targets for class action lawsuits. I wonder what kind of litigation and Directors and Officers insurance these institutions have??
Good post.
A particular email I’d like to highlight is from Briffa discussing how statistically derived uncertainty swamps the delta Ts associated with long term global changes. Its one of many emails that show efforts to make the pictures show the message they want to give. I realize its ok to show data in ways that are clear to a broader audience, but it can be a fine line between that and data manipulation. I think a conclusion one can make from the below email is that the temperature estimations based on tree rings and other methods they used are not accurate enough to make any conclusion about global temperature trends.
From: Keith Briffa
To: Jonathan Overpeck ,Eystein.Jansen@xxxx
Subject: Fwd: new fig
Date: Fri Feb 3 14:31:09 2006
Peck and Eystein
we are having trouble to express the real message of the reconstructions – being scientifically sound in representing uncertainty , while still getting the crux of the information across clearly. It is not right to ignore uncertainty, but expressing this merely in an arbitrary way (and as a total range as before) allows the uncertainty to swamp the magnitude of the changes through time . We have settled on this version (attached) of the Figure which we hoe you will agree gets the message over but with the rigor required for such an important document. We have added a box to show the “probability surface” for the most likely estimate of past temperatures based on all published data. By overlapping all reconstructions and giving a score of 2 to all areas within the 1 standard error range of the estimates for each reconstruction , and a score of 1 for the area between 1 and 2 standard errors, you build up a composite picture of the most likely or “concensus” path that temperatures took over the last 1200 years (note – now with a linear time axis). This still shows the outlier ranges , preserving all the information, but you see the central most likely area well , and the comparison of past and recent temperature levels is not as influenced by the outlier estimates. What do you think? We have experimented with different versions of the shading and this one shows up quite well – but we may have to use some all grey version as the background to the overlay of the model results. We have also experimented with changing the normalisation base for the model/reconstruction Figure , but using the same short modern period as for the first Figure is not satisfactory
– more on this later. We have added in Oerlemans curve as many insisted – but we only have the GLOBAL curve – can you get the separate North and Southern Hemisphere curves (with uncertainty) . I do not see that the new model runs from Germany/Switzerland will fit easily in the existing Figure and need to be separate! I am really struggling with the text also – really need more time!!!! More later
Keith
Some overall observations from someone who has watched this phenomenom since the early 1980s — the emails don’t surprise me at all. In fact, given that near the present there are requests to start deleting emails, I’d speculate that some or even most of the damning ones were already deleted and the mole/hacker was aware of this and had to act before they were all gone, therefore the timing.
The emails just confirm what was already obvious — the “team” members have considerable if not complete control of a number of publishers, and used the usual post-modern strong-arm tactics to quell dissenters — blackmail, blacklisting, firing, character-asassination, etc, etc (in the Soviet days they would just be sent off to the “gulag”, or disappear). Of course they have the complete cooperation of the MSM, the new form of the old Soviet Pravda, which was just another arm of the ruling elites.
One thing that should’ve been obvious to me but is still angering is the extravagent spending of public funds for traveling all over the world constantly for this or that conference. Using their own definitions, I wonder what their “carbon-footprints” are? Certainly hundreds of tons per person/yr. Hypocrites much? Don’t do what I do, do what I say.
These are not “scientists”, they’re a post-modern form of the old elitist “political officers” of the Communist nations.
Peter (06:25:12) :
Given this, the fact that the 1K record does include the MWP, as well as the the fact that they put both “contain” and “MWP” in quotes, I am left in no doubt as to the true meaning of that statement.
Well, I wish you’d say what that “true meaning” is. But you’re wrong about 1K including (or containing) the MWP. Wiki defines it as from 800-1300. Some authors set the peak in the 900’s. Mann says that he’s extending the analysis from 1000 yrs to 2000 to “contain” the “MWP”. As PC says, the obvious meaning is to make sure that the period in question is included. I can’t see your sinister version. The fact that Mann is sceptical about the MWP (as is well known) is irrelevant.
Following my earlier comment (07:17:30) about Tim Osborn’s 1960 truncation (Bishop’s item 3) – I now see that what he said was just a paraphrase of what is said in Briffa 2001:
“The period after 1960 was not used to avoid bias in the regression coefficients that could be generated by an anomalous decline in tree density measurements over recent decades that is not forced by temperature”
You don’t have to hack into emails to find that.
Cast your eyes upon P. Jones and decide if what you see is the face of an honest, straight forward, decent sort of chap, or what?
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/pjones/
[snip]
Thanks to Bishop Hill, we now have the beginnings of a Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) that we can start to believe in.
I suspect this whole story will get more coverage at:
1. Fox News / Beck / Hannity/ O’Reilly
2. WSJ
3. Talk Radio / Rush / Levin / Hannity etc.
4. Lord Monckton
5. The rest of the blogs
6. US Senators Like Inhofe
7. Congress
8. Libertarian think tanks, publications etc.
Which means there will be a lot mounting pressure to conduct an investigation.
Phil Jones has lost control of the PR, and the CRU unit. His days are numbered.
A bit OT, but have you noticed that RC are now allowing all sorts of comments in?
Are they trying to appear open and transparent, or are they trying to convey the impression that nobody seriously questioned the ‘science’ before this story broke?
Yes, knowledgable commentary is needed. For example, a new model result showing a 6C rise in temperature is getting play at Slashdot. I do hope people join me there in pointing out just how these models have little predictive power.
I also think there are a lot of scientists who can claim they’ve been unfairly damaged by the bias against them, and have had their reputations illegally riuned by the underhandedness of Jones and Co.
Lawsuits are brewing…
A few general points that occur to me here in Blighty re climate science:
1. peer review in the traditional sense has gone. The only effective peer review that takes place is on the internet at sites like this and CA
2. the traditional sources of news – the BBC, the Times and the other MSM outlets are no longer trustworthy. As the public realises this, more and more people will find their news on the web. This is bad news for MSM who (apart from the BBC) are funded by advertising and need to sell copy. When the tide turns you just watch them jump on board.
3. the CRU revelations will not of themselves stop the AGW bandwagon. One of the major weaknesses of the anti AGW camp is that it is not organised. A lot of disparate voices calling out in the wilderness. You need an international voice. This has never been about the science. It is about politics. I hate to say this but you need to be a political force.
4. there are still far too many ill-informed believers in the world. You need to find a way of getting to them in the absence of MSM coverage. Maybe email can help. Hence the need for some kind of organisation/framework
5. little point in wasting time arguing the toss with true believers. They will never be converted. The arguments should always be aimed at the floating voters.
and remember ‘in carbon we trust’
here ends this mornings sermon
Bishop Hills compendium is an excellent place to start with academic/legal sanctions against the motley criminal crew. Pierre Goslin expresses the rage I feel and am reading about on the part of others in a rational and realistic way.
P Gosselin (05:24:43) :
This is my open statement to the climate swindlers at CRUGATE:
WE’RE COMING AFTER YOU!
YOU CAN RUN, DUCK, & HIDE ALL YOU WANT.
BUT WE WILL NOT STOP. WE’RE CHARGING HARDER THAN EVER BEFORE NOW. OUR NUMBERS ARE HUGE AND THEY ARE GROWING. YOU’RE ON THE RUN, AND WE WILL DO WHAT ARMIES DO WHEN THEY HAVE THEIR OPPONENTS ON THE RUN. THAT’S RIGHT – IT’S GONNA BE REAL MESSY FOR YOU.
AND LAWSUITS ARE ON THE WAY.
Ecotretas (05:15:23) and Plato Says (5:52:56) have both linked to a list of the 619 contributing authors of Working Group I of the IPCC Fourth assessment Report, Annex 2 (from 2007) compiled by Jim Prall, who though not an academic considers himself “scientifically literate” — minored in math; read the Sci Am cover to cover. He is on the computer support staff at University of Toronto.
Mr. Prall who is aggressively GREEN might just have given real scientists and fellow sceptics an excellent list for investigation of use of fraudulent data in their research and whether or not they provided their data and mehods in their cited research papers. Prall gives year of Ph.D. and how many citations in so-called-climate-science they have.
What might happen to these pseudo-scientists (religiously green)? Someone suggested their Ph.D.s could be withdrawn by their academic institutions? Financial penalties perhaps — returning all that grant money used to falsify science while becoming part of the jet set (wow! pseudo-scientists with money to jet around the world to fantastic tourist places in style, with a retinue and warm-welcoming colleages)? A little time in jail so they can do penance for committing crimes while confusing green-climate-change-CO-evil-AGW-religion with science?
BRING IT ON!
these so called awg scientists sound like the german doctors writing research papers about the how healthy diets in concentration camps are reducing the rate of heart attacks and obesity.
It goes on, the Copenhagen shebang.
Merkel and Sarkozy still pushing for binding agreement, blah blah.
Heads in the sand, singing lalala.
But then again it was never about real science was it?
Realists/Deniers are supposed to be backed by big oil………..AGW mongers get real big government grants – so we can put that argument to bed.
It was never about a grown up attitude, cos if you were grown up, then you can suffer criticism and still smile, content in the knowledge that your data is sound and tested, open to public scrutiny……….or not it seems.
Post similar updates to your local blogs. Ask your local media to cover this story. Call your reps and senators, etc. This is the opportunity to spread the story of bias and lack of science behind AGW, far and wide.
Let’s stop this agenda driven cadre before they do any more economic damage.
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geronimo (04:39:16) :
The politicians, with the exception of Inhofe, and Smokin’ Joe Barton in the US will remain silent because they are all now on board the AGW train and plans are being made to spend the carbon taxes.
*************
It is not correct that all US politicians are “on board.” I have already sent this information to my Congressmen. The sooner we start and the more persistent we are, the better.
We all know the MSM won’t get the word out – not anytime soon. But there is greater power to disseminate info on the internet than the MSM. Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc…
There are also still active university online communities using other types of feeds – anyone using these get this on the feeds. The wider this gets using networking techniques, the sooner the MSM won;t be able to ignore it any longer. How many university scientists are really going to defend the kinds of behavior in this?
Anyone who has accounts on any of the social networking sites – get the word out there. I have posted the link to this articles summarizing Bishop Hill’s compendium with a comment about the incredible dishonesty involved.
Anyone who follows the link will see the quite compelling summary sentences in this article – and that will prompt them to want to read more (unfortunately, sizzle sells – and those summary lines definitely sizzle.)
I believe that honesty and transparency are important. Accordingly, I must reveal that I have sent a letter to various Federal agencies charged with investigating drug abuse to determine if the leaders and commenters on this blog are consuming illegal psychotropic drugs. There is clearly no other explanation for the elaborate and quite fanciful alternative realities that you continue to construct here.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but how do we fix this? You know that come Monday Jones, Mann, and compatriots will be in the office preparing their next doctored climate series, plotting retribution, smooth talking the FOI people, and generally whining they look bad. Meanwhile they show commercials in Britain that scare the H**l out of children. Any Idea how to reform the ssystem so that the conversation that is science can resume?
Patrick Davis (01:15:43) :
Still no MSM coverage here in Australia.
I think one reason this story isn’t all across the mainstream media is because they don’t understand what has happened. We who understand the global warming issue know how unbelievable this story is. But everyone else can’t see it.
What the media needs is someone to break it down in to such simple terms that even a 3rd grader would easily understand.
Then the MSM will be just as amazed as we are.
WaPo!
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/11/22/wapo-reports-on-hadley-e-mails-global-warming-controversy/
This story is growing legs.
The media tried to ignore Acorn-prostitute story, and looked stupid not doing so.
They aint gonna repeat that mistake.
Thomas J Arnold
They can’t keep that up without soon looking stupid and dettached.
The German public media is criminal in its refusal to cover this story. They’ve shirked their responsibility to cover the story in a balanced manner. It’s BBC / NYT.
Yet, it would be hard to imagine modern day Germany without the saintly endeavour and mission of protecting the climate.
The German media and politics run a big risk of looking totally foolish.
“Still no MSM coverage here in Australia.”
Is the new australian climate sceptic party aware of this???????/
http://www.climatesceptics.com.au/
A goldmine for them.
Interesting to see a few AGWers that frequent this site picking low hanging fruit. How about Phil and Nick try and spin the emails about deleting previous emails for FOI requests? How about you two spin doctors try and spin the obvious conversations about getting around FOI requests using inside information from the government.
How about you two …PRATS…try and spin that these are scientists OPENLY discussing their confirmation bias?? How about you two discussing the open discussion about media manipulation? How about the emails to known activist groups and media? Are you going to spin this as science??? Where is your own conscience! SHAME on you both! Shame on you for defending individuals that have made a mockery of the founding principals of science. That scientists keep an open mind. That scientist do not act as activists! That science is reproducible…meaning that all code and data HAS to be released. Where is your OUTRAGE that there are emails specifically talking about doing the opposite.
FREE THE DATA, FREE THE CODE, FREE THE DEBATE.
You two especially have now lost 100% of any credibility now on this site or any other. You are shills. You don’t defend a rapist by pointing out that he didn’t kill the woman! What we DO have absolute evidence of is activist science…confirmation bias….non reproducible results…efforts to conceal code and data….we have the rapist with his thing in the woman…and you want to argue that he used a knife instead of a gun…so we should ignore the whole affair? SHAME ON YOU
E.M. Smith has an observation on CRUTAPES on chiefio.com 11/21/09:
“So here we [see] evidence for ‘inbreeding’ between NCAR and CRU. That GIStemp uses “NCAR” format data files about STEP2 – STEP3 then merges with HADLEY CRU SST in STEP4_5 continues to argue for excessive “group think” and shared design / code between the temperature series. So when folks point out that Hadley CRUt and GIStemp agree, maybe it’s because they have extensive overlap in design goals, frequent exchange of “ideas” and common input data, internal work files, and processes… ”
I apologize for including for the third time this quote in Science Mag from Eric J. Barron, Director of NCAR (UCAR, Colorado), but it gives the plot away:
“Will US cities or states simply pick one climate model as a basis for decisions? Will the information be defensible AS THE BEST AVAILABLE? THE LEVEL OF AUTHORITY REQUIRED DICTATES THAT A NATIONAL CLIMATE SERVICE BE ESTABLISHED.” (My emphasis — 30 Oct 2009, p. 643)
Most religions in their heyday desire global/cosmic domination and some still do (Islam, marxism). The Warmists claim everything for their GreenGod ClimateChange and are into massive excommunitions. The Inquisition was being established by the likes of Hadley-CRU, NASA-GISSTemp, UCAR-NCAR and its global domination was to be headquartered in/at UN-IPCC. Obama has been doing his duty to the believers through of his cabinet and agency appointments. Fraud put him in office.
How many others have been piggy-backing on this religious aggression?
Certainly global corporations who are having trouble making profits from traditional manufacturing and services (regular, disciplined free-market capitalism) and so have turned to the Warming Scam and Government Graft to line their (upper maagement) pockets. Note what they have done to the media through their ownership.
SHOW ME one iota of science and the scientific method in all this fraudulent research. Astounding. Abominable.
mike roddy (09:15:02),
When you made your diagnosis, you forgot to add “M.D.” to your name.
Here is how Mann justifies “hide the decline”:
“Mann said the “trick” Jones referred to was placing a chart of proxy temperature records, which ended in 1980, next to a line showing the temperature record collected by instruments from that time onward. “It’s hardly anything you would call a trick,” Mann said, adding that both charts were differentiated and clearly marked.”
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112004093_pf.html
This explanation is in disagreement with the explanation posted by Jean S at CA. To say the least. Do we know for sure that Mann used instrumental values to pad the series?
Gavin is up to his old ways at RC. Screening posts to craft the debate to appear heavily favoring the AGW-CRU/hack email/Team message.Once again to mislead visitors into presuming there’s no “charts, graphs, raw data” in the skeptic’s critiqiing.
I’ve had multiple germane and cogent posts obstructed just as the e-mails reveal is their standard operating procedure for the advancement of robust science.
The despicable abuse of science and corrupting of open public debate observed in the CRUhack continues at RC.
Jim (09:09:39) :
I have already sent this information to my Congressmen. The sooner we start and the more persistent we are, the better.
*********************************
Me too. If anyone out there knows somebody on a Congressman’s staff, try there. This would seem a perfect opportunity for a more conservative legislator to get some ink.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
Peter (08:34:37) :
A bit OT, but have you noticed that RC are now allowing all sorts of comments in?
Are they trying to appear open and transparent, or are they trying to convey the impression that nobody seriously questioned the ’science’ before this story broke?
I’d sincerely like to see what they have excluded. Succinct archetypical statements of common sense that cannot be rebutted with bs are never allowed.
“So Foxy Loxy led Chicken Little, Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, and Turkey Lurkey across a field and through the woods. He led them straight to his den, and they never saw the king to tell him that the sky is falling.”
At about 17.50 London time, BBC regional news ‘Look East’ has just shown a piece bout the CRU hack-in and interviewed local AGW demonstrators who thought it was ‘disgusting’ etc, etc. The slant was generally pro-CRU and its staff were said to be shocked by the affair.
P Wilson: Here’s a Q for Phil clarke:
What did Keith Briffa mean when he wrote with some scepticism that temperatures 1000 years ago were probably as warm as today? He expresses grave doubts about the reliability of tree rings as a temperature proxy
I would speculate that 10 years ago, when the mail was written, that was his opinion. There has been a lot more research published in the intervening decade. As facts change, so do opinions.
I cannot find your other quotes in the file linked to, so I cannot tell the context, if you could point me at the file(s) so I can read round the very few words you’ve reproduced I may be able to respond adequately.
The term ‘manufactured bias’ is most probably being used in its mathematical of engineering definition of ‘a systematic deviation of a value from a reference value’, used in statistical testing. Again, without the context I cannot be sure, but it seems a good example of an attempt to imbue a perfectly legitimate and innocent phrase with a sinister interpretation.
One final thought for the true sceptics. The thief who stole these emails says he has released a ‘random selection’. Gavin Schmidt, who is in a position to know, says that the unreleased mail contains much good scientific discussion.
So whatever conclusions are drawn, are drawn from the subset of the mail that the thief wants you to see, not ‘the whole truth’. That’s a REAL ‘manufactured bias’ for you.
The trolls are marching in Norwich,UK today against the theft. The BBC says that Jones et al could have had their bank account details stolen and the MP says that it is 99.99999% certain that man is causing climate change.
They are not going to let go of their funding this easy.!!
Steamboat Jack,
Can’t we send this information even to liberal legislators? Shouldn’t we assume that even liberal legislators are interested in the truth?
Bill Illis (07:51:36) :
Dr. Hans von Storch comments on his webpage.
http://coast.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/
Doesn’t sound very sympathetic to his peers, does he?
It is a criminal act to destroy requested data after receiving a UK Freedom Information Request unless you would normally destroy it before the 20-day deadline for response. See here (pdf):
http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/freedom_of_information/practical_application/fep004practicalguidancedestructionv1.pdf
So if Phil Jones’ statement in 1212063122.txt refers to deletion of emails requested by a specific FoI, then he broke the law.
The proper course of action would then be for the requester to refer the matter to the Information Commissioner, who in my experience is honest. If that fails for non-obvious reasons, then there’s the option of a private prosecution.
Jones may argue that stolen emails are tainted, but there are precedents for such material being allowable as evidence. For example in a recent case the German FSB (Secret Service) bribed an ex-employee of a Lichtenstein bank to steal a list of the bank’s foreign clients. The Germans then used the list to prosecute German nationals for tax evasion, and (it is reported) sold it to the UK tax authorities to use it for the same purpose.
It’s not clear from the Jones emails if he was destroying information against a specific request. Does anybody here know?
Date: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:25:45 -0400
From: Thomas C Peterson To: jim.obrien@coaps.fsu.edu
…….No one has proven models are capable of long-range forecasting. Modelers write and review their own literature – there are millions of dollars going into these enterprises, so what would you expect?
Publication volume shouldn’t impress anyone. The simple fact is we demonstrated in a straightforward and reproducible way that the actual trends over the past 30, 20, and 10 years are outside of the envelop of model predictions … no one has disputed that finding with an alternative analysis – even when presented before congressional hearings where the opportunity for disagreement was openly available. I hope this helps relieve some of your concerns. Regards, Tom Peterson
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Nick Stokes (08:24:06) :
The fact that Mann is sceptical about the MWP (as is well known) is irrelevant.
**********************
In court this would be termed a “corroboration,” not “irrelevant.”
I cannot get my head round the idea that a section of the public service seems to think that communications between publicly funded colleagues in relation to matters of critical global significance would not be a matter of public record for anyone to pick over in the future. Those emails are of historical significance for heaven’s sake.
If the world is to go down the route of global energy rationing then it is forever going to be important as to how it came about and whether it was the right thing to do.
The disconnect with reality amongst so called professionals is utterly unbelievable.
****************
Phil Clarke (10:13:07) :
P Wilson: Here’s a Q for Phil clarke:
What did Keith Briffa mean when he wrote with some scepticism that temperatures 1000 years ago were probably as warm as today? He expresses grave doubts about the reliability of tree rings as a temperature proxy
I would speculate that 10 years ago, when the mail was written, that was his opinion. There has been a lot more research published in the intervening decade. As facts change, so do opinions.
************************
There are recent, 2009 emails that express skepticism that tree rings are userful temperture proxies. They knew this 10 years ago, and they still know it.
I cannot find your other quotes in the file linked to, so I cannot tell the context, if you could point me at the file(s) so I can read round the very few words you’ve reproduced I may be able to respond adequately.
Peterxema (10:11:38) :
Incredible to watch, the focus was on finding some who would express shock and horror and while the concerns for personal data being distributed is valid the implications were only briefly mentioned while most time was for the “outraged”.
They often put their news items on this page but currently still showing Fridays programme.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/lookeast/latest_stories/
The next bulletin will be at about 10.15pm and will set up to record it in case repeated.
For info, this is the local BBC news for the area where CRU is located.
I posted this question at Gavin regarding the correctness of splicing instrumental data onto proxy data. Unfortunately it did not survive the censorship. The non sequitur posts did though.
Excerpt from Pres. Eisenhower’s Farwell Address:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
And so, it seems, while we have done reasonably well in coping with the military-industrial complex, our public policy has indeed become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. And this elite are destroying us.
Thief = Robinhood. Returning to the people what is rightfully theirs.
why should we be surprised that climate scientists manipulate the data. It happens all the time in numerous scientific disciplines. The only difference is that until now scientists wrote letters instead of sending emails. It is the use of computers that have caught them out but it is obvious the same sought of thing happens and has happened since science as a job was invented. Take one example, C14 dating methodology. When this was first introduced 20 to 30 years ago the C14 laboratories had problems in persuading historians and archaeologists to use their services. In particular Egyptologists complained that C14 consistently brought up dates too early for the New Kingdom period. What happened, the lab boys went away and came up with calibration – which effectively made New Kingdom dates, as ascertained by the academic historians, in line with their model. To do this they made use of a C14 plateau in the mid first millennium BC – yet there are numerous plateaus throughout the Holocene. The inference is that the evidence was reframed just as Jones and Mann and others have massaged temperature data. It sticks out like a sore thumb they have manipulated the data precisely because they refuse to release the code to prove their conclusions. If it was in any way genuine they would not be frightened of releasing it and this is precisely what comes across in these emails. They must avoid at all costs in letting other people outside their circle checking up on them. It would be embarrassing. Steve McIntyre has done us all a service by being so dogged in his relentless sifting of the small amount of data he has managed to wring from the climate models. Perhaps after all this subsides we can have some blogs on other scientific fixes
Email transformed litigation utterly. You cannot get rid of this stuff. That fact has been known in the trade for years, and by the public: how many corporate defendants and politicians have been caught by their own cyber-scribbles? Here we have the “best and brightest” of the AGW camp, too stupid or arrogant to note that they were creating a record of their own crimes and immorality, busily feeding one another’s enthusiasm for more and worse behavior.
The plaintiffs and prosecutors are going to have such fun with this.
“Gavin Schmidt, who is in a position to know, says that the unreleased mail contains much good scientific discussion.”
If that is true, then Gavin should have nothing to fear and should immediately release ALL the documents, in their context and entirety.
Phil Clarke (10:13:07)
So whatever conclusions are drawn, are drawn from the subset of the mail that the thief wants you to see, not ‘the whole truth’. That’s a REAL ‘manufactured bias’ for you.
Release the data and methods, Phil. Problem solved/Scientific Method resumed.
Something tells me there is a little detail about why the emails/data were lifted.
Mann, Jones, Wigley, Senter, Trenberth et al are being tossed under the bus, and I think they know it.
I wonder what Monckton thinks of all this.
Andrew Revkin
has been attacked a few times in recent comments.
Reading through emails related to him, I have the impression that his queries are ligitimate though the cordial tone with these individuals is disturbing. However, I would still regard this as a professional attitude to gather information. And. don’t forget, Revkin did also contact McIntyre about his views, though his publishing was far from balanced, but not onesided.
So Revkin is in no way comparable to BBCs Black or even notorious Monbiot or Borenstein.
I don’t know what the outcome of this will be on his opinions but I would wonder if there is no significant change. If not, other poster here are proven right.
In the light of all of this he may be
Very well done Bishop. A summary like this is helpful.
A suggestion – Since this will get wider circulation, would you please
consider adding definitions for your acronyms if you are not going to
write them out. Perhaps adding them in at the top somewhere for people
to reference would be enough, rather than putting them into each summary.
Items like FOI may be clear to many people, but since it is important that
readers understand what they were trying to do, spelling out the definitions somewhere may be helpful. That way those who are not familiar with the alphabet soup will be able to follow along too.
Again, nicely done. Regards
“The period after 1960 was not used to avoid bias in the regression coefficients that could be generated by an anomalous decline in tree density measurements over recent decades that is not forced by temperature” – Nick Stokes quoting Briffa 2001.
In other words, from 1960 onwards their “tree thermometer” embarrassingly insisted on telling them that temperatures were falling. And so rather than reconsider whether their entire method might be critically broken, they just ignored the bits which didn’t work and called them “anomalous”.
I work with models for a living. When I find they produce “anomalous” results in any area, then I go hunting for the cause – I *don’t* just replace them with other data I happen to have lying around. Because a flaw in the output means there must be either a flaw in the inputs or a flaw in the model.
But then I’m a scientist and we do these things because otherwise it wouldn’t be science. These climate “experts” apparently don’t. From which one draws an obvious conclusion…
(I wonder what would have happened if the anomaly had produced temperatures that were *higher* than those observed for post-1960. Somehow I think they’d have kept them then…)
If the media in the US doesn’t run this soon , I think it will be as a result of two problems : 1) They don’t really understand the science behind AGW – they merely regurgitate what they’have been told , the scarier the better . 2) Since Cap and Trade appears to be on the backburner for the immediate future , the story just doesn’t “pop” .
On the other hand , it might just fly on Capitol Hill . Maybe later than sooner , though as health care is the more pressing issue . Remember that a lot of Representatives voted for C&T rather reluctently and subsequently took a shellacking for it back home . Many in the Senate are aware of this , and would hopefully welcome any excuse to run from climate change legislation .
Of course , the best case scenario would be that Congress would start yet another series of investigations into the entire matter . One would hope that they might even call into question the EPA’s endangerment finding , which is based primarily on the IPCC’s assements .
Phil Clarke (10:13:07) :
P Wilson: Here’s a Q for Phil clarke:
What did Keith Briffa mean when he wrote with some scepticism that temperatures 1000 years ago were probably as warm as today? He expresses grave doubts about the reliability of tree rings as a temperature proxy
I would speculate that 10 years ago, when the mail was written, that was his opinion. There has been a lot more research published in the intervening decade. As facts change, so do opinions.”
You don’t get out much, do you. If that had been his opinion then, he would not have written all that he had earlier than 10 years ago.
P Gosselin (09:31:50) :
Is it a deliberate cover up?
Or do they not trust the Germans (or British for that matter) with the bare and ugly truth?
I fear the EU cannot bear to hear what they don’t like.
If the Germans were to become overwhelmingly sceptical, well I can see they (the EU politburo/commission) would truly be angst geritten.
Donald from Australia wrote:
“A Royal Commission, followed by any prosecutions, must follow.”
I suggest that it is normally the other way round.
First an investigation, then – as appropriate (nd I think, looking at this, that here it may be appropriate) – prosecutions. After the court case, and appeals, a Royal Commision [which is what is called for when something needs – for the Establishment – to be kicked into the v e r y long grass]!
The extracts I’ve read look like politics – politics after the fashion of Piltdown.
J. Peden (11:02:37) :
Phil Clarke (10:13:07)
So whatever conclusions are drawn, are drawn from the subset of the mail that the thief wants you to see, not ‘the whole truth’. That’s a REAL ‘manufactured bias’ for you.
“Release the data and methods, Phil. Problem solved/Scientific Method resumed.”
Phil seems a little more dazed than usual. It provides for an opportunity to observe bias in the wild in real time. Not the whole truth?
Does anyone know how to contact Lord Monckton? I tried finding an email online and could not. I intend to urge him to find a way to file a suit against UAE CRU and those who are apparently involved in various frauds.
If the MSM will not cover this story — and it seems as though they are not — then there have to be other ways to bring these people and the incredibly serious issues these revelation raise (the manipulation of public opinion and the political process in many countries and through the UN) into a forum such that there is a chance to get the public to question and doubt AGW such that the wind comes out of the public policy insanity that is currently being considered.
Personally, I can see of no other way of getting at this issue now besides legal action. Who else should we be contacting to urge legal action?
PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT / MANN AND THE 1940-DECLINE:
In file the hacked folder, “documents/Osborn-tree6/mann/oldprog
there is a file “Calibrate_corectmxd” . It was last changed 13 sep 1999.
I have made enlarged red text. SEE WHAT THE CODE COMMENTS SAYS:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/manndeclinecode.jpg
And see the “DECLINESERIES.PDF” under Osborn3:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/manndecline1.jpg
And a CLOSE LOOK – Bravo Mr Mann, no more decline in the red graphs:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/manndeclineall.jpg
Cheers,
Lansner
Here’s the SF Examiner’s Tom Fuller’s excellent latest article, the 6th in a series (links to which are provided in #6), titled “Global Warming ‘Truths’ Were Based on Political Need.”
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-Environmental-Policy-Examiner~y2009m11d22-Global-warming-truths-were-based-on-political-need
Nope, the 2 graphics i showed is already well known! – sorry no news there.
Perhaps the progam code though.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=529
There are times I regret not ‘pressing on’ into being an academic. I had the test scores for it and an offer from a few places (Wharton was one). But I decided to “avoid all the backbiting” and chase money instead. And sometimes I wonder “what if…”
Then things like this come along. The amount of manipulative BS, the attempts to sabotage careers and journals, the cliquish and petty wars against what look like moral people doing a modest bit of questioning… And I’m glad I gave a big “Nah!” to the whole idea of it.
Frankly, if this is what tenured faculty spend their time doing, I’m all for shutting down any and all public funding of universities and research. It’s all just Payton Place, Junkets, and Days Of Our LIves. Let them do it on their own nickel.
Also, given the blatant “Stacking of the Deck”, intimidation, and blackmail, directed at “Peer Reviewed Journals” I’m ever more convinced of the value of “Public Review” over hand picked yes-men. If this is at all “normal” behaviour, then a great deal is explained about the constant din of “Not Peer Reviewed”. It just means “We were not allowed to be the gatekeepers on publishing.”
Folks, I think the future will be dominated by sites like WUWT, CA, and BishopHill. Places where discoveries are “self published” for all to see, with no “Gatekeepers on Publishing”. And with rather stringent “Public Review”.
“Peer Review” is an obsolete concept. Period.
I, for one, will be looking at any “bond issue” for “universities” and asking myself why I ought to let these jokers put that life style on the government credit card.
When it comes to academic truth “Quis custodiet custodiam?” and the answer came back “nobody”…
So my answer is that it’s up to all us “nobodies” to “do the deed”… and sweep this kind of back room manipulation into the dust bin.
Anyone have contemporaneous quotes from Mann contradicting what he wrote in his email re: Where the heck is global warming?
Here’s the Greenfyre blog, another Warmist mouthpiece, plotting strategy. The gist is:
“I suggest that we have change our response to “smoking gun? who cares? show us the “body!” Of course there is no “body”, or even “bullet holes” anywhere … ie no evidence that anything actually happened.”
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/cru-hack-time-to-hit-back-hard/
The medical examiners are still hard at work, but I would expect that we will be wheeling out several stinking corpses in the run up to Copenhagen…
JP Miller
Christopher Monckton [monckton@mail.com]
Seems to me that the Whistle-blower theory makes the most sense. Whoever it was, just decided to refuse the Kool-Aid cup this time around (what is it with guys named Jones, anyhoo?), and timed this release JIT for Copenhagen.
Which, according to my FOAF sources, is fairly much DOA, anyway: watered down and horse-traded away to almost nothing. So causing a mass CYA outbreak amongst those who should have been using their time more gainfully: pushing the AGW line, bullying the bulliable, and keeping the rest of us in the required ‘State of Fear’ (copyright, the much-missed M Crichton).
Interesting times….
Phil Clarke
I’m not so sure.. Certainly, 10 years ago Mann and Jones were at loggerheads with Briffa 10 years ago, that tree rings could be shown as a proxy to demonstrate a cooler MWP – Briffa complains of the pressure he is under to do the same. Looks to me like he finally succumbed.
Its there:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt
at At 04:19 PM 9/22/99 +0100, Keith Briffa
philincalifornia (07:49:08) :
Since there is no “comments” section associated with this article from the Ministry of Global Warming Propaganda and Taxation a.k.a. the BBC, I’ll ask the question here:
Hmm…. WordPress lets you create a site ‘for free’. (Just visit wordpress.com )
And this seems to be a common theme (no comments allowed)… So… perhaps all it would take is for a few individuals to run a couple of wide open comment sites. Say “notthebbc.wordpress.com” and “openrealclimate.wordpress.com”. As a controversial / interesting article appears on the ‘source’ an article linking to it with an open comments section could be created. It ought to take less than 5 minutes per article to set up the “link to foo” with a matching title / URL (modulo the site name) and some keyword text so that the Google search would find both.
I would bet that in “no time flat” the “open sites” would have far more participation in comments than the closed sites.
Nice little “easy project” for just about anybody with a bit of interest. Would take about the same level of technical skill as posting comments (i.e. understanding of URLs and how to use minor HTML tags).
Phil (11:27:04) :
I work with models for a living. When I find they produce “anomalous” results in any area, then I go hunting for the cause – I *don’t* just replace them with other data I happen to have lying around.
Phil, I have also had a long career as a research scientist. It taught me the importance of careful reading. Tim Osborn did not replace the years 1960- with other data. He declared them, in the 2001 paper, to be affected by an external cause, and did not use them at all.
Maybe that was incorrect. It’s been there in the literature for eight years for people to argue with. AFAIK, no-one has. But what has happened here is that a hacked email turned up in which he said just the same thing. And Bishop Hill misrepresented what he said, and listed it as offence #3.
an MP from UK got the news http://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/the-bbcs-obsession-with-anthropogenic-global-warming/
Guardian story with no comments section.
Phil Clarke (03:47:06) :
“How many have actually read the text on which these one-line summaries are based? I did so for the first 15 and almost without exception it does not support the claims the Bishop makes.”
Nick Stokes (07:17:30) :
“I absolutely agree. The intro says that Hill is a careful and succinct writer, but much of this is just sloppy.”
I think it’s very important that our side avoid overstatement and not make mountains out of molehills. If we do, we’re merely build a strawman for the other side to knock down. In particular, in matters where the other side has wiggle room, such as “contain the MWP,” we should acknowledge up front that it’s only a possibility that the suspicious phrase might have an innocent explanation. (For instance, “trick” has an innocent explanation.) Otherwise we’ll come across as untrustworthy–as an intemperate hanging judge. We should temper our prosecutorial zeal with judiciousness.
I suggest that BH should reword some of his points more cautiously, in light of the criticisms made by the two posters above.
“Remember that a lot of Representatives voted for C&T rather reluctantly and subsequently took a shellacking for it back home . Many in the Senate are aware of this , and would hopefully welcome any excuse to run from climate change legislation .”
This scandal will at least give the closet skeptics a justification for asking for a delay in CC legislation. That’s all we need — after a year or two more of flat-to-cooling temperatures, the cc crusade will lose its head of steam. We need to play for time–and now we have a way of doing so.
Remember, all we need to do to justify a delay is to show that there is doubt about the robustness of the IPCC report, and that its findings need another look. There’s no good counter to that claim. But, if we overplay our hand and claim that CAWG has been debunked, we’re open to rebuttals and to a resumption of the confusing dog-fight that’s been going on for ages. And anyway the majority isn’t willing to make such a drastic shift in its position. They need time to ponder and let the dust settle.
=========
” BR (04:45:13) :
Let’s not call it CRUgate; too obscure. Climategate is better.”
I think we’re stuck with Climategate for general use, because it seems to have caught on out there in the real world (53K google hits so far), but we can refer to the e-mails themselves, at least on this site, as “The CRUtape Letters,” which is still a brilliant suggestion.
============
dearieme (04:10:19) :
““The VC is also aware of what is going on”: “VC” = Vice Chancellor i.e. the head of the University. He’ll be just delighted to be mentioned in the context of what might conceivably prove to be criminal action. Just delighted.”
LOL!
JP Miller (11:53:21) :
Contact the highest ranking GOP representative in the area you live in. The Conservative base of the Republican Party is insulted to no end by AGW/Climate Change and it’s End-Justifying-Means tactics.
The UK has Monckton of Benchley.
While he has done so much for us, we have to find someone in the US to do what he does so well: command attention. Gore and the Dems are terrified of him.
Whom in the US do we have of that reputation and standing?
Re my post at 10:26:42, I’ve established that the emails were deleted following a request from David Palmer.
David, if you’re reading this: if you’re not already filing a formal complaint of criminal deletion to the Information Commissioner, I’m happy to help you do that. I’m a Brit and have had several dealings with the FOIA.
“So whatever conclusions are drawn, are drawn from the subset of the mail that the thief wants you to see, not ‘the whole truth’.”
Don’t be pathetic. The entire conversation between these conspirators is about hiding information from outsiders and allowing only one perspective to be publicly visible.
P Wilson (12:35:49) :
Phil Clarke
I’m not so sure.. Certainly, 10 years ago Mann and Jones were at loggerheads with Briffa 10 years ago, that tree rings could be shown as a proxy to demonstrate a cooler MWP – Briffa complains of the pressure he is under to do the same. Looks to me like he finally succumbed.
Its there:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt
Yes, there was some argument in 1999, when MBH was new, and the AR3 was being put together. It was hashed out, and the result is in Sec 2.3.2.2 of the AR3, which seems to fairly represent both viewpoints. Briffa was not steamrolled. Fig 2.21 compares the Mann curve with the higher curves of Jones et al and Briffa. The enail discussion seemed constructive, and the outcome reasonable.
Nick Stokes (12:47:03) :
“Maybe that was incorrect. It’s been there in the literature for eight years for people to argue with. AFAIK, no-one has.”
In that case you don’t know much. “The divergence problem”, and the fact that as long as it isn’t understood treering proxies are essentially useless as climate proxies has been discussed quite a lot.
Here is another one where a tax avoidance scheme is proposed.
They should be reported to the IRS.
Original Filename: 826209667.txt | Return to the index page | Permalink | Later Emails
From: “Tatiana M. Dedkova”
To: K.Briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: schijatov
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 96 09:41:07 +0500
Dear Keith, March 6, 1996
I and Eugene received your E-mail of 04.03.1996. This day I talked
over the telephone with Eugene and he asked me to send an answer from
both of us.
Thank you for the information concerning proposals to the
INCO/COPERNICUS. We agree with your strategy used and we hope
that this proposal will not be rejected.
The results of INTAS-RFBR proposal will be known at the beginning
of May. We know that they received many proposals and a competition
is high (only 1 in 10 proposals might get money). Of course, you
included in as a participant. Fritz is a coordinator from the INTAS
countries.
This year our laboratory received two small grants (approximately
8,000-10,000 USD per year) from the Russian Foundation of Basic
Researches (RFBR) for the next three years: the first one for
developing the Yamal supra-long chronology and the second one for
developing tree-ring chronologies from living trees growing at the
polar timberline in Siberia (together with Vaganov’s laboratory).
These money are very important for us as they will allow to maintain
the staff of our laboratories.
I and Valery Mazepa were in Krasnoyarsk during one month and
together with E.Vaganov wrote the manuscript of book “Dendroclimatic
Studies in the Ural-Siberian Subarctic”. The problem now is to find
money for its publication. If we find enough money soon (20 million
roubles), the book will be published this autumn. We analysed 61 mean
ring-width and 6 cell chronologies which we intend to publish in form
of tables in the Appendix. We can send to you all raw measurements
which were used for developing these chronologies.
Of course, we are in need of additional money, especially for
collecting wood samples at high latitudes and in remote regions.
The cost of field works in these areas is increased many times
during the last some years. That is why it is important for us
to get money from additional sources, in particular from the ADVANCE
and INTAS ones. Also, it is important for us if you can transfer
the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts which we gave you earlier
and the sum for one occasion transfer (for example, during one day)
will not be more than 10,000 USD. Only in this case we can avoid
big taxes and use money for our work as much as possible. Please,
inform us what kind of documents and financial reports we must
represent you and your administration for these money.
I and Eugene have a possibility to participate in the Cambridge
meeteng in July, but we need extra many and special invitations.
If you do not have enough money to invite both of us, Eugene does
not insist upon this visit.
The best wishes to you and Phil.
Yours sincerely Stepan Shiyatov
UKres (12:28:37) :
Christopher Monckton
Thanks! My email has been sent:
“Lord Monkton,
No doubt you are “on this” as I write. In brief, is there some way you can lead the right legal challenge to UAE CRU and related scientists, be it based on collusion to illegally avoid responding to FOI requests or misuse of (UK) public funds?
Please, if you can, do so.
The mainstream media seems to be giving a big yawn to this situation, other than to express sympathy to UAE CRU and outrage that someone would release such “private” information.
If we are going to have any chance of swaying public opinion to be more skeptical about AGW claims, it won’t be as a result of the mass media impacting public opinion from which there might be some chance politicians would change their views.
I believe the “right” kind of court case might garner enough publicity to get the ball rolling in the right direction, but we need someone to lead the fight who knows what they’re doing and can organize the financial and legal resources that will be necessary.
Please make some public statement soon.
Regards,”
Release the data and methods, Phil. Problem solved/Scientific Method resumed.
Not sure what’s meant by this, as far as their published research goes, all methods and all that data thay may be legally released by UEA, has been. Of the rest – that is the raw station data covered by commercial NDAs with third parties, my understanding is that they are negotiating a way round this.
then Gavin should have nothing to fear and should immediately release ALL the documents, in their context and entirety.
It’s not Gavin’s to release. Even so, – absolutely not. Some seem to have lost sight of the fact that there were personal and private communications, some even marked CONFIDENTIAL, that have been distributed after an illegal act. You don’t ameliorate one crime by committing another. These communications were sent with a perfectly legitimate expectation of privacy, and could and should only be reproduced with the permission of the sender.
Let me give you a concrete example: academic journals generally require that articles for publication have not been distributed elsewhere, if this mail archive contained a paper in an attachment that was about to be submitted and it was reposted on a website, it could well be refused for publication. That’s just nuts.
Or are you seriously arguing that we do away with the concept of private communication? Can you name a single organisation that could operate without it? The University should grant the world an unprotected logon to its mail server? Do you have a work mailbox? Would it be OK for me to go and have a root around in there?
OOPs–I’ve corrected two typos in my first paragraph above:
I think it’s very important that our side avoid overstatement and not make mountains out of molehills. If we do, we’re merely building a strawman for the other side to knock down. In particular, in matters where the other side has wiggle room, such as “contain the MWP,” we should acknowledge up front that it’s a possibility that the suspicious phrase might have an innocent explanation. (For instance, “trick” has an innocent explanation.) Otherwise we’ll come across as untrustworthy–as an intemperate hanging judge. We should temper our prosecutorial zeal with judiciousness.
rbateman (13:07:56) :
“JP Miller (11:53:21) :
Contact the highest ranking GOP representative in the area you live in.”
Thanks, but I live 30 miles south of San Francisco — no GOP reps for miles around…
Still, I’ve written to my Senators and Representative as well as to Sen. Jim Inhofe.
The news is spreading into the markets:
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3656847
I’ll be interested to see how the green sector does tomorrow…
I’ve been wondering why the Hadley hacking hasn’t appeared in newpapers here in Oz, apart from isolated columnists such as Andrew Bolt. Perhaps the masses don’t know what Hadley CRU is ?
Heres a PROGRAM THAT CUTS TIMESSERIES AT 1960 as default:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/cutat1960.jpg
Thus Briffas series to 1994 goes only to 1960 in puplic:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/vedhaeftninger/briffaosbornprolonged.jpg
This in connestion with one of the now CLASSIC MAILS:
**************
From: Tim Osborn
To: mann@XXXXXXX.edu,imacadam@XXXXXXXXX.uk
Subject: Briffa et al. series for IPCC figure
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 1999 16:18:29 +0100
Cc: k.briffa@XXXXXX,p.jones@XXXXXX
Dear Mike and Ian
Keith has asked me to send you a timeseries for the IPCC multi-proxy
reconstruction figure, to replace the one you currently have. The data are
attached to this e-mail. They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually
stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that
is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use. I haven’t put a 40-yr
smoothing through them – I thought it best if you were to do this to ensure
the same filter was used for all curves.
**************
vukcevic (12:57:49) :
Two major blogs ‘RealClimate’ and ‘WUWT’ are the most prominent internet discussion platforms currently voicing many views and opinions on the matter of the unauthorized release of emails.
There are scientists of either persuasion attending both blogs. It does not require great deal of courage to express your view publicly to a sympathetic audience. In many authoritarian societies scientists risked frequently not only ‘excommunication’ but personal freedom or even more to stand by their ideas.
Hereby I propose that contributors from both camps ‘RealClimate’ and ‘WUWT’ (using their real names) should be welcomed by moderators to post on the competing blog.
The above will be posted on both ‘RealClimate’ and ‘WUWT’ and I hope the moderators, in the interest of freedom of scientific expression, will publicly issue invitation and welcome the opposition.
Reply: When do we not welcome all views? All we ask is for commenters to behave courteously. ~ ctm
Program i showed was.
\FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\pl_decline_nerc
E.M.Smith (12:36:33) :
“And this seems to be a common theme (no comments allowed)… So… perhaps all it would take is for a few individuals to run a couple of wide open comment sites. Say “notthebbc.wordpress.com” and “openrealclimate.wordpress.com”. As a controversial / interesting article appears on the ’source’ an article linking to it with an open comments section could be created. It ought to take less than 5 minutes per article to set up the “link to foo” with a matching title / URL (modulo the site name) and some keyword text so that the Google search would find both.”
From time to time I’ve read about software that allows the pasting of unauthorized comments onto a blocked-comment target site in a sticky note format. So long as others have the “reader” version of the software (which is free), they can read those comments. If anyone knows more about such programs, he/she should post the info. (This software doesn’t hack into the target site, it just overlays (onscreen) the posts on the comment-software’s comment-mirror site onto the screen of the target site. (I think.))
Here is another interesting email.
Original Filename: 843161829.txt | Return to the index page | Permalink | Later Emails
From: Gary Funkhouser
To: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: kyrgyzstan and siberian data
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 15:37:xxx xxxx xxxx
Keith,
Thanks for your consideration. Once I get a draft of the central
and southern siberian data and talk to Stepan and Eugene I’ll send
it to you.
I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material,
but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk
something out of that. It was pretty funny though – I told Malcolm
what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating
the response functions – he laughed and said that’s what he thought
at first also. The data’s tempting but there’s too much variation
even within stands. I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle
the chronology statistics any more than I already have – they just
are what they are (that does sound Graybillian). I think I’ll have
to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.
Not having seen the sites I can only speculate, but I’d be
optimistic if someone could get back there and spend more time
collecting samples, particularly at the upper elevations.
Yeah, I doubt I’ll be over your way anytime soon. Too bad, I’d like
to get together with you and Ed for a beer or two. Probably
someday though.
Cheers, Gary
Gary Funkhouser
Lab. of Tree-Ring Research
The University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
phone: (5xxx xxxx xxxx
fax: (5xxx xxxx xxxx
e-mail: gary@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Nick Stokes (12:47:03) :
Let me get this straight. Nick says that when a data set showed that there was no warming, but in fact the opposite, it is OK to toss out the data so as to “prove” the hypothesis. This is modern science? If it is, Poppycock!
***************************
Phil Clarke (13:24:56) :
Some seem to have lost sight of the fact that there were personal and private communications, some even marked CONFIDENTIAL, that have been distributed after an illegal act. You don’t ameliorate one crime by committing another. These communications were sent with a perfectly legitimate expectation of privacy, and could and should only be reproduced with the permission of the sender.
Let me give you a concrete example: academic journals generally require that articles for publication have not been distributed elsewhere, if this mail archive contained a paper in an attachment that was about to be submitted and it was reposted on a website, it could well be refused for publication. That’s just nuts.
Or are you seriously arguing that we do away with the concept of private communication? Can you name a single organisation that could operate without it? The University should grant the world an unprotected logon to its mail server? Do you have a work mailbox? Would it be OK for me to go and have a root around in there?
*********************
These communications are owned by the British Government, i.e. The British People. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when one is using government-owned equipment. It is most certainly not private.
tty (13:22:24) :
“The divergence problem”, and the fact that as long as it isn’t understood treering proxies are essentially useless as climate proxies has been discussed quite a lot.
Of course. That’s my point. Osborn was saying that he had a divergence problem affecting post-1960 data, which he therefore didn’t use. And no-one argued that he was wrong.
But my key point is that his email just repeats what he said in his paper, but is here represented as a guilty confession.
I think “contain” the MWP means a period of time long enough to include that time period. Innocent. On the other hand, often it was claimed that reconstructions of 1000 yrs were enough to “contain” it but were not really, since at 1000 yrs ago you may only get to the peak, which makes it look like a 1000 year linear cooling trend. Deceptive, but legal.
For the red line problem (hide the divergence) there are two methods that have been used. One is to overlay the temperature data in thick red line which simply covers up the fact that 1) the reconstructions are truncated and 2) some of them are going down and 3) none of them go dramatically up. The second is the use of padding, either by reflecting the proxy or by using instrumental data to obtain a smooth curve that goes all the way to the end year of the study (the latter used also with instrumental data). The latter issue has been autopsied at length at Climate Audit, and the autopsy was ugly.
Diese E-Mail-Konversationen zeigen eine verabscheuenswürdige Sicht der Welt auf, und sind eine Schande für die gesamte Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Wie kann man sich anmaßen, Meinung über Wissenschaft zu stellen? Wie versuchen, mit den billigsten Tricks wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse so sehr zu verändern, nicht einmal nur zu beschönigen? Statistiken zu fälschen, grundlos Menschen zu ächten, der Lächerlichkeit preiszugeben, obwohl jene es sind, die die Wahrheit sagen.
So weit sind wir gesunken. Scheiße!
Nick Stokes (13:21:15)
judging by corrspondences, nope. Briffa was definately hacked off with Mann, and was highly sceptical at the time, as his correspondence reveals a highly skilled and questioning approach to proxies, the MWP and temperatures.
On the basis of this it looks like he was persuaded and cajoled to sell his integrity for his position.
These communications are owned by the British Government, i.e. The British People. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when one is using government-owned equipment. It is most certainly not private.
I am sorry, but that is simply wrong. Copyright of the mails belonged to the University if they contained intellectual property or with the authors if not. I have worked for a UK University and believe me if you raised the proposal that they were a part of, or owned by the Government you’d get short shrift.
Even if the mails had been lifted from a Government mail server, an offence would still have been committed. However you try and spin it, it was theft, pure and simple. The police are now investigating.
The emails and data are the property of the employer, ie, the people. They are not the property of the employees.
I don’t care how many times they wrote “CONFIDENTIAL”, they have no right to expect that their paid time on government owned computers using government owned email accounts belongs to them.
I also recall that on the bottom of several emails was a disclaimer that all emails were subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Well, now they have been freed.
Craig Loehle (14:15:02) :
……….
Mr. Loehle
It is great to see your contribution. I am not certain I am qualified to comment on your post, however in past I have been critical of some of your work. This is extract from one of my posts on WUWT:
“Reference :http://www.freesundayschoollessons.org/pdfs/climate-history.pdf
‘correction to: a 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-tree ring proxies’(by Craig Loehle)
regarding proxy locations . Out of 15 worldwide locations 8-9 are related to the North Atlantic area. Only 3 are in the Southern Hemisphere, and none in the Western Pacific area. Hardly representative of the world trends. It would be far more useful if Loehle and McCulloch gave data individually for each of 15 locations, then we would have at least a dissent representation of the regional trends. It just shows that producing a global temperature anomaly graph is fraught with danger.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/12/another-parallel-with-the-maunder-minimum/
If you prefer to respond privately my email is: vukcevicu(at)yahoo.co.uk
Lord Lawson of Blaby is wading into this debate through his column in The Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6927598.ece
“I am announcing today the launch of a new high-powered all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org), which I hope may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy. At the very least, open and reasoned debate on this issue cannot be anything but healthy. The absence of debate between political parties at the present time makes our contribution all the more necessary.”
At least he should have some power to raise the issue in UK political circles, at least in the Conservative party.
The main German weekly, “Der Spiegel”, has a piece here:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/0,1518,662673,00.html
Underneath some ostentatious impartiality – it does say that it presents the characters of the individuals involved in a less than positive light – it’s actually rather one-sided: it doesn’t mention at all the issue of FOI requests, and overall it tries to play down the issue even as it reports it.
I spent some of today on a site called liberalconspiracy opposing the justification of the Climategate emails.
My favourites were
People are too badly educated to understand the data.
The data can be protected because it is like the recipe for KFC.
Any other suggestions for best Climategate excuse?
Here’s another recent bit of interesting chit-chat regarding McIntyre, National Review, and a special concern about potential funding requested from a big German company that may be affected by the scandal involving selected tree-ring-data alleged by McIntyre. I wonder what “projections” are being referred to in para. 1. below that are being made with “climate models” rather than “observed data.”
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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From: Phil Jones To: Andrew Manning Subject: Re: Fwd: Co2 Data Date: Tue Oct 6 08:38:04 2009
Andrew,
Getting a bit fed up with these baseless allegations.
You could point out several things to Martin.
1. Projections aren’t made with observed data – instrumental or paleo. They are made with
climate models.
2. The initial seed for all these allegations is made on Climate Audit. Here they are
quite clever and don’t go over the top. They leave it to others like the National Review,
the American Thinker to make the ridiculous ones.
Here is what Stephen McIntyre says on Climate Audit.
“While there is much to criticise in the handling of this data by the authors and the
journals, the results do not in any way show that ‘AGW is a fraud’ nor that this particular
study was a ‘fraud’.
McIntyre has no interest in publishing his results in the peer-review literature. IPCC
won’t be able to assess any of it unless he does.
You dad and Susan Solomon have had runs in with him and others
3. You might like to send him this pdf and its Figure 2. Three different groups get much
the same result.
Here are the two web pages we have put up so far. Keith is working on the tree one and
put much more later in the week.
[1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/availability/
So other groups around the world have also entered into agreements. I know this doesn’t
make it right, but it is the way of the world with both instrumental and paleo data. I
frequently try and get data from other people without success, sometimes from people who
send me the pdf of their paper then tell me they can’t send me the series in their plots.
[2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2000/
It is the right wing web sites doing all this, presumably in the build up to Copenhagen.
At 00:13 06/10/2009, Andrew Manning wrote:
Hi Phil,
is this another witch hunt (like Mann et al.)? How should I respond to the below? (I’m
in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million
employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measurments here
in the UK – looking promising, so the last thing I need is news articles calling into
question (again) observed temperature increases – I thought we’d moved the debate beyond
this, but seems that these sceptics are real die-hards!!).
Kind regards,
Andrew
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 15:50:38 +0100
Subject: Co2 Data
From: Martin Lutyens
To: Andrew Manning
Dear Andrew,
I just came across an article in The Week, called “The case of the vanishing data”. It
writes in a rather wry and sceptical way about your UEA colleagues Phil Jones and Tom
Wigley , saying that only their “homogenised” or “adjusted” historical data is
available, and the original, raw data has gone missing. Apparently some other
environmental gurus now want to look at the original data and were “fobbed off”.
According to the article, the adjusted data forms the basis for much of the climate
change debate and , because others now want to look at the source data, it is “at the
centre of an academic spat that could have major implications for the climate change
debate”. The author of the original article is Patrick Michaels in The National Review,
who may just be stirring it.
The article concludes “In short, the data invoked to verify the most significant
forecasts about the world’s future, have simply vanished.” Could you comment on this
please, as someone (eg Siemens Corp.) may pick this up and I think we should all be
forearmed by knowing what really happened and what to say if asked.
Many thanks, Martin
—
Martin Lutyens
I read here that many commenters doubt that their governmental representation will take action.
My perspective is a bit different. There is blood in the water and substantial doubt on the wind. There is enough info online for governmental review of suspected emails, documents, data and models. In the USA, they won’t play games; they’ll subpeona entire email directories and sources. Woe if any are missing.
What’s to prove? It’s a NO LOSE situation for any government rep. If they prove good intentions, good science and good scientists everyone wins! If they find bad intentions, fraud, consipiracy, racketeering, misuse of official positions, or any of dozens of other possibilities the reps will go for the throat and everyone wins! There are District Attorneys in the USA who are looking to further their political careers who should be salivating at this opportunity (think NewYork).
After all, prove the science and scientists correct and everyone wins; prosecute to the fullest extent any law breaking, remove the guilty and install new people and everyone wins! Either way the government reps look great. Representatives, Senators and prosecutors can go their entire career without such a great opportunity.
Now if someone cracks under prosecution and provides gory details while pleading for a lighter sentence, well who’s to say where this investigation can go.
So write to your government representatives of any party! Mention how good they will look at re-election time when they fix any problems identified.
To follow on to my earlier suggestion that personal letters to Chancellor Gough at University of East Anglia with copies to Charles Clarke MP for Norwich, calling for a full investigation, is a good start.
The University is ultimately responsible to British Parliament and citizens for the behavior of its employees. As Dr. Phil Jones is an employee and the author of many of the most troubling emails – a call for a full, open investigation is prudent. I would suggest that letters insist that the unethical behavior of CRU employees jeopardizes the integrity and prestige of the University in the eyes of the world. Swift action to investigate is in the interest of good science, the University, and the British public.
As the Chancellor and MP Clarke are both public servants I will list their emails here:
clarkec@parliament.uk
Gough’s contacts:
jennifer.jones@uea.ac.uk,
C.Kreetzer@uea.ac.uk
Just The Facts (13:38:34) :
That article should start to sow some seeds of doubt in the money men’s minds and put the cat among the financial pigeons.
Or are you seriously arguing that we do away with the concept of private communication?
Actually, under the Freedom of Information Act, no one working for the government can expect that their communication is private communication. This makes your analogy to a business incorrect.
The emails and data are the property of the employer, ie, the people. They are not the property of the employees.I don’t care how many times they wrote “CONFIDENTIAL”, they have no right to expect that their paid time on government owned computers using government owned email accounts belongs to them.
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property. Accessing any computer system without authorisation is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
just to let you know that the mainstream media in Australia have caught on to the story and it made the front page of our national newspaper The Australian today.
At last, the BBC has broadcast a TV snippet on this, but only on the East Anglian regional news.
It showed a demonstration by the usual crowd of eco warriors demonstrating against the hacker/whistleblower with placards and chanting outside the UEA campus building, today. They had a couple of middle aged protesters, voicing their outrage at this attack against such a great cause. They then produced a disgraced ex MP for Norwich, (he was caught in the MPs expenses scandal and resigned earlier in the year). A well known climate campaigner, he said that the emails proved nothing wrong had been done by the scientists and he believed they were honest men. He added that he totally believed in global warning.
There was no mention of the content of the emails in the broadcast except to say they were on the internet and some people were saying that the scientists had been massaging the data.
I dont think you will convince these people of anything. In this country (UK) the science really is closed.
Well done, your Grace. Dr Slop’s prediction for the revelation with most immediate consequences: http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=903&filename=1213201481.txt
If it’s correct to read the emails as reverse chronological order, then:
Mann wants to propose Jones for an AGU fellowship and solicits data including Jones’ “H-index”, apparently a measure of citation count/impact.
Jones replies that, if you don’t correct for the fact that Jones is a very common surname, the figure is 62. If you do correct (as one obviously should), the figure is 52.
Mann replies (line 83 or thereabouts): “OK–thanks, I’ll just go w/ the H=62. That is an impressive number and almost certainly higher than the vast majority of AGU Fellows.”
Impressive, but wrong. I mean, Old Chap, it’s one thing to try to fool the public, but to try to fool one’s own club …
****************************
Phil Clarke (15:19:42) :
The emails and data are the property of the employer, ie, the people. They are not the property of the employees.I don’t care how many times they wrote “CONFIDENTIAL”, they have no right to expect that their paid time on government owned computers using government owned email accounts belongs to them.
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property. Accessing any computer system without authorisation is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
************************
1. UEA gets the majority of their money from the British Government, i.e. from the Citizens of Britain.
2. There are IT system administrators who have legal access to computer systems and can see emails and data.
3. The is also the FIOA, which certainly the scientists knew about.
Therefore, as I said, they have no reasonable expectation of privacy. UAE and the British Government own the equipment and the data. Of course it is a crime to hack into the system, but that will have to be pursued via legal channels. Also, it does not excuse the behavior of these people one whit.
Phil Clarke (14:41:17) :
These communications are owned by the British Government, i.e. The British People. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when one is using government-owned equipment. It is most certainly not private.
“I am sorry, but that is simply wrong. Copyright of the mails belonged to the University if they contained intellectual property or with the authors if not. I have worked for a UK University and believe me if you raised the proposal that they were a part of, or owned by the Government you’d get short shrift.
Even if the mails had been lifted from a Government mail server, an offence would still have been committed. However you try and spin it, it was theft, pure and simple. The police are now investigating.”
Simply wrong? Instead of using your claim of working for a UK U, why not support that with a real reference? You’d be wrong in the US which laws and policies have came about for good reason.
There’s also the problem with your claim about a “pure and simple” case of theft. No whistle-blowers allowed? That the police are alleged to be investigating does not evidence a plain and simple theft.
http://www.roydens.co.uk/content40.htm
I am getting a lot of laughs out of the rampant denial by the AGW faithful. Just remember this is just stage one. Stage two is anger and when they can no longer deny AGW has a deadly cancer, those most faithful will be leading the charge to have the culprits severely punished.
BTW, it doesn’t matter if various offices try to cover this up. There are millions of skeptics based on the polls. Whenever anyone attempts to claim AGW is still valid, they will be faced with quotes from these emails. They will have no legitimate response. In fact, anyone who attempts to cover this up is just throwing away their own careers.
Time is on the side of the skeptics.
Phil Clarke (15:19:42) :
The emails and data are the property of the employer, ie, the people. They are not the property of the employees.I don’t care how many times they wrote “CONFIDENTIAL”, they have no right to expect that their paid time on government owned computers using government owned email accounts belongs to them.
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property. Accessing any computer system without authorisation is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
Quite right Phil. Whoever put the FOIA zip out into the wild is very very naughty. 🙂
I would expect that if caught, they would attempt a force majeure defense, citing the criminal, unethic and immoral acts they were exposing.
I’m reminded of the Burglar who dobbed in the child pornographer with the video player and recordings he stole.
This whole thing has taught me that there are liars, damn liars, and modern day climatologists.
[REPLY – Liars, damnliars, and outliers. ~ Evan]
From: Phil Jones
To: Gil Compo
Subject: Re: Twentieth Century Reanalysis preliminary version 2 data – One other thing!
Date: Tue Nov 10 12:40:26 2009
Gil,
One other good plot to do is this. Plot land minus ocean. as a time series.
This should stay relatively close until the 1970s. Then the land should start moving away
from the ocean.
This departure is part of AGW. The rest is in your Co2 increases.
Cheers
Phil
Gil,
These will do for my purpose. I won’t pass them on. I am looking forward to the draft
paper. As you’re fully aware you’re going to have to go some ways to figuring out what’s
causing the differences.
You will have to go down the sub-sampling, but I don’t think it is going to make much
difference. [b}The agreement between CRU and GISS is amazing good, as already know.[/b] You ought
to include the NCDC dataset as well.
[1]http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.html the ERSST3b dataset.
In the lower two plots there appear to be two types of differences, clearer in the
NH20-70 land domain.
The first is when reanl20v2 differs for a single year (like a year in the last 1960s, 1967
or 1968) and then when it differs for about 10 years or so. It is good that it keeps coming
back. For individual years there are a couple of years in the first decade of the 20th
century (the 1900s).
The longer periods are those you’ve noticed – the 1920s and the 1890s. There is also
something up with the period 1955-65 and the 1970s. The 1920s seems to get back then go off
again from about 1935 to early 1940s. Best thing to try and isolate some of the reasons
would be maps for decades or individual years. For the 1920s I’d expect the differences to
be coming from Siberia as opposed to Canada. I think the 1890s might be just down to
sparser coverage. The 1890s is the only period where the difference brings your pink line
back towards the long-term zero. All the others have the pink line more extreme than the
HadCRUT3/GISS average.
Rob Allan just called. I briefly mentioned this to him. He suggested maps of data input
during these times. He also suggested looking at the spread of the ensembles. Your grey
spread is sort of this, but this is a different sort of ensemble to what Rob implied you
might have?
[b]One final thing – don’t worry too much about the 1940-60 period, as I think we’ll be
changing the SSTs there for 1945-60 and with more digitized data for 1940-45.[/b] There is also
a tendency for the last 10 years (1996-2005) to drift slightly low – all 3 lines. This may
be down to SST issues.
Once again thanks for these! Hoping you’ll send me a Christmas Present of the draft!
Cheers
Phil
Pragmatic (15:08:49) :
To follow on to my earlier suggestion that personal letters to Chancellor Gough at University of East Anglia with copies to Charles Clarke MP for Norwich, calling for a full investigation, is a good start.
The University is ultimately responsible to British Parliament and citizens for the behavior of its employees. As Dr. Phil Jones is an employee and the author of many of the most troubling emails – a call for a full, open investigation is prudent. I would suggest that letters insist that the unethical behavior of CRU employees jeopardizes the integrity and prestige of the University in the eyes of the world. Swift action to investigate is in the interest of good science, the University, and the British public.
As the Chancellor and MP Clarke are both public servants I will list their emails here:
clarkec@parliament.uk
Gough’s contacts:
jennifer.jones@uea.ac.uk,
C.Kreetzer@uea.ac.uk
Good call. I’d add that contacting the Vice Chancellor of UEA might work well, since Phil Jones implicated him in the FOI stonewalling.
http://www.uea.ac.uk/vco/people/churchill is the VC’s PA.
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=941&filename=1228412429.txt
> When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide
> by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a
> screen, to convince them otherwise
> showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the
> types of people we were
> dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the
> Environmental Sciences school
> – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve
> got to know the FOI
> person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals.
> The VC is also
> aware of what is going on – at least for one of the requests, but
> probably doesn’t know
> the number we’re dealing with. We are in double figures.
>
Nice article by Nigel Lawson in the London Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6927598.ece
Phil Clarke, exposing fraud and political manipulation of government policies and funding is certainly a moral justification for breach of privacy – whether UK law, which notoriously grovels to official secrecy by the bureaucracy and executive, recognizes that or not.
Neil Crafter (15:29:33) :
just to let you know that the mainstream media in Australia have caught on to the story and it made the front page of our national newspaper The Australian today.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/hackers-expose-climate-brawl/story-e6frg6nf-1225801879912
Excellent article!
Now this is very, very, odd
Alleged CRU Email – 1151689605.txt
This is an email from Valérie Masson-Delmotte and contains reviewers comments. no big deal; except that the reviewers names are supplied in the email as well as the ID code.
From: Valérie Masson-Delmotte
To: Keith Briffa
Subject: warning – more reviews for you
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:46:45 +0200
Reply-to: Valerie.Masson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Dear Keith,
I hope that you had a good trip back from Bergen.
Some of the review comments which appeared to be relevant for the
Holocene section are yours. I copy them here so that you can take there
of them.
All the best,
Valérie.
6-687
Replace “limiting the vallue” on line 18 to “review as a” on line 19 by
“which means there is no legitimate”
[VINCENT GRAY (Reviewer�s comment ID #: 88-774)]
Fig. 6.10a. Rather than showing the average of 4 European stations I
suggest to plot the available…………………………………………………
[Jürg Luterbacher (Reviewer�s comment ID #: 151-8)]
Fig 6.10. I here repeat a point made in my comments on the FOD. ………………….
[Ross McKitrick (Reviewer�s comment ID #: 174-35)]
Did the leader of a section of IPCC AR4 supply the names of the reviewers as well as their ID code or was this a normal part of the process?
For Nick Stokes,
We expect you to startapologising and making small corrections, some of which you observe correctly.
However, looking at the braoder picture, you must have some concern about scientific integrity. I have already nominated the email that I found most worying, 1228330629.txt
Why don’t you show us the cut of your jib by nominating the email that you find most worrying to you? In other words, be proactive rather than reactive.
Don’t you know that “beat the crap out of” is a euphemism that scientists often use meaning “to pursuade another to change his opinion by rational argument”?
Sentence? At most the FOIA violation is punishable by fine, I believe.
Every day when I start my computer at work, a warning pops up reminding me all communication done on their computer is owned by them. There is no “private communication” when it comes to using computers on their network. Nor are emails “deleted” just by hitting the delete key.
One wonders if those requesting others delete their emails realize there a always backups and backups of backups on servers. If they also got the IT department to wipe the server drives, well, that’s another problem they have.
If this was just research understanding how climate affects the growth of trees we probably wouldn’t care. But these guys have had millions of public money, tax-payers money, to develop and propagate the very science, the uncertain science that would now change whole economies and all our lives.
Details of the funding to the lead scientist’s group was released and is on the web for all to see:
http://i46.tinypic.com/4uv13n.png
I tell you, whoever hacked this stuff out of the CRU should be given a medal, or something positive. It is frankly the most frightening stuff I’ve read, even though I don’t understand all of it of course. That these guys try to manipulate the data to reach a preconceived conclusion, it shakes my faith in science. Then again, my faith in science has never been that strong, because I know what some modern scientists have been trying to do – acquire a power and influence all out of proportion to its value.
Keep up the good work posting all this stuff, Anthony.
Another fascinating and highly illuminating insight into how this all works. This time from the documents side of the dump. Translation: Shell International has an apparent financial interest in bringing about CDM (carbon offsets from 3rd world countries applied to industries in 1st world countries), and is willing to supply institutional bribes in order to generate research that supports CDMs.
documents\uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc:
Shell International would give serious consideration to what I referred to in the meeting as a ‘strategic partnership’ with the TC…. 2. Shell’s interest is not in basic science. Any work they support must have a clear and immediate relevance to ‘real-world’ activities. They are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.
Nick Stokes (13:21:15) :
i don’t read it like that. Mann is seriously concerned about Briffa’s data, and the serious implications of it being “warmer” than the Mann/Jones series. Everyone in the IPCC room saw this as a problem if it were included – particularly as to why Keith’s series went the opposite direction to Jones’s and Mann’s series over latitudinal samples. The fix was:
“So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case.”
” Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates”
2 years later, Briffa writes:
http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=272&filename=1024334440.txt
“Sick to death of Mann stating……”
To a scientist, one senses advocacy, and I garner that Briffa is (was) more the honest scientist than his colleagues.
The tone of the e-mails makes these scientists act lik a gossip chat room. No wonder they did this. What a shame for the school.
Stock analyst is getting cold feet(sic) on AGW fraud.
Remember the old adage: Money is panic.
These words tell us that the AGW fraud is a false religion, in particular the word “sacrilege”:
“What I am writing here may be sacrilege to some people.”
More: “but what happens if Mr. Market decides to price in the possibility of global cooling?”
…-
“Global Cooling?
I woke up on Saturday to see the New York Times headline Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute. The New York Times headline editor was restrained while others were far more outraged. As an example, Mish’s blog stated the story as:
It’s now official. Much of the hype about global warming is nothing but a complete scam.
Thanks to hackers (or an insider) who broke into The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and downloaded 156 megaybytes of data including extremely damaging emails, we now know that data supporting the global warming thesis was completely fabricated.
He went on to detail some of the incriminating emails in his blog post about the alleged conspiracy to fudge the data. You can also see the emails here.
Sunspots and global cooling
Before the news of this hacker break-in, there had already been skepticism about the global warming thesis. I had previously speculated on this topic in a post:
What I am writing here may be sacrilege to some people. The popular consensus about Global Warming is that the Earth is undergoing a warming period caused by the effects of industrialization. However, there is another view that global warming is caused by solar activity – sunspots and solar winds.
Currently, the forecast for the latest solar cycle is that it’s late. Such extended cycles have been associated with cooling periods such as the Little Ice Age experienced a few hundred years ago. Indeed, there have been reports that there is more ice in the Arctic (yes – it’s only one data point) and there has been some hand wringing among the scientists about the timing of the solar cycle.”
“I am not investing based on global cooling as my base case, but what happens if Mr. Market decides to price in the possibility of global cooling?
What do you think that would do to energy demand if the Earth were to undergo a period of global cooling?
What are the possible effects on food production and commodity prices?
Just thinking out loud…”
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3656847
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property. Accessing any computer system without authorisation is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
Phil: I am not familiar with British Law. What is the penalty for obstructing Freedom of Information requests?
“Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, a married couple and EPA lawyers in San Francisco, have been railing against cap-and-trade proposals for a while. Most recently, they had a sharply-worded op-ed in the Washington Post that said current legislation would be ineffective and even counterproductive. ”
This may haunt the EPA.
“Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, or NCEE, submitted his research on the agency’s greenhouse gases endangerment findings and offered a fundamental critique on the EPA’s approach to combating CO2 emissions. But officials refused to share his conclusion in an open internal discussion, claiming his research would have “a very negative impact on our office.” ”
Is our EPA trying to pull the same stunts?
Now to the point. If the EPA does very litte research and relies on the IPCC which also does little research and relies on the quacks that massage data and reports,
how will the EPA fine a company and the company fight to get documents exposed that prove AGW?
The word is (correct or not) that CRU is responding to the crisis – by conducting mass-purges of their files.
Phil Clarke – you suggested that the email accounts and computers they were held on were not government property. This is simply untrue. Universities in the UK are government funded and are subject to all the FOI legislation exactly the same as other branches of government. In fact, the researchers are stretching the case to suggest that Intellectual Property Rights would protect them from having to release their code. It is arguable that the IPR to anything they produce while working for the university belongs to the government, not the individual. That would certainly be the case in Australia, unless a prior arrangement had been made.
I was watching “The Patriot” with Mel Gibson and there is a place where Cornwall is having a “rant” about how “these are just militia” “Just farmers and merchants” or some such… Reminded me a great deal of the “Not Peer Reviewed” rant and the great sniffing pridefulness of the UEA / CRU email about the various folks standing against them… not being ‘real scientists’ and ‘not even peer reviewed’… I found myself fondly picturing us “colonials” being “climate militia” shooting from the bushes and not even peer reviewed…
How unfair of us… Snif…
Geoff Sherrington (17:20:07) :
Geoff,
I don’t read these emails as many people here do, going through looking for gotcha phrases (often with rather ludicrous results). I’m fairly familiar with the sort of correspondence that goes on when people are trying to get publications together etc, and I followed that with interest, and was quite impressed. The general standard of enquiry is high, with cases robustly argued.
I have sympathy with the response of Nate Silver. I don’t think there’s much there. Obviously Phil Jones has a knack for talking his way into trouble, and I guess we’ll hear more about the FOI issue. I’m happy to leave that to the lawyers.
Reading through this thread and others, I can’t get too angry about the occasional disrepectful references to sceptics. Regrettable, of course, but there’s plenty on both sides.
I didn’t see much wrong with 1228330629.txt. It’s just describing what a FOI DOS attack looks like from the other side. It is a big distraction.
One email sequence which did disturb me was one listed by His Grace – 1140554230.txt. This is one of the really bad effects of the hacking and subsequent publicity. The sequence is more or less the complete Journal review process of a significant paper. Now journal review (peer review) has always been confidential, for very important reasons. Trust in that confidentiality enables full frankness (as with secret ballots), and that is vitally important in maintaining scientific standards. It will now take a long time to restore.
evanmjones (18:23:47) :
“The word is (correct or not) that CRU is responding to the crisis – by conducting mass-purges of their files.”
Not that there’s anything left to hide… no, no, of course not ;o)
If “The Team” shows up, Copenhagen could wind up being really interesting after all, eh?
What is perhaps most disturbing of all about these revelations is the extent to which the Team were simply doing the bidding of their political masters, the IPCC. Will this scandal reach the stage where one of the Team breaks ranks and attempts to offload the blame on those higher up the foodchain? (There are plenty of precedents, but I don’t want to invoke Godwin’s Law)
Nick Stokes
its not so much the looking for catch phrases as what I see as a level headed/complacent, taken for granted dialogue connected to contriving for results that agree with the objective -to prove unequivocally AGW-. Ok there is the occasional hostility and p*** take of doubters who don’t take the advocacy line in science. Why should they bother with *sceptics* afterall? – acting like overlords gives them that power, however, its the secretiveness of the process that’s also being revealed. I can understand that keeping out difficult individuals who know/understand enough to pose tricky questions puts accepted climate understanding into doubt, but that isn’t peer review. Its censorship though i’m sure you can gloss over that one too.
Phil Clarke (15:19:42) :
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property.
Prove it.
I see nothing here showing these were private gmail or aol accounts. I see a great deal of footers showing typical official affiliations. I see folks discussing their work product as public employees. (Typically, using non-approved communications to hold corporate data and work product are offenses against employment policy. For any communications to the USA, it will violate SARBOX requirements that work related data be kept and archived for the required intervals. I presume you are not accusing these folks breaking US law by circumventing SARBOX, are you? Don’t know if the UK has a similar law, but would expect one.)
Accessing any computer system without authorisation
Prove it was without authorization. I’ve seen no evidence that it was not any of:
1) An FOIA product.
2) An authorized insider leaking.
3) An off site tape and data extract (i.e. not a “computer system”).
4) Archived copies from one of the recipients, leaked to salve conscience.
5) Archived copies from a BCCd recipient for same.
6) Upper management, or any other official agency that has authorized access, leaking the documents as part of a scorched earth damage control for the upper ranks (it happens…).
You have a ways to go to prove those negatives…
is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
But it was done “for the greater good!”. It is now allowed, under English precedent, to break the law if it holds off what the party doing it believes is a terrible thing. And lord knows the AGW fantasy is a terrible thing. So I think they are completely justified, even if it was ‘unauthorized’. Prove it isn’t.
Phil Clarke (15:19:42) :
April – Neither the email accounts nor the computers were Government property.
Prove it.
I see nothing here showing these were private gmail or aol accounts. I see a great deal of footers showing typical official affiliations. I see folks discussing their work product as public employees. (Typically, using non-approved communications to hold corporate data and work product are offenses against employment policy. For any communications to the USA, it will violate SARBOX requirements that work related data be kept and archived for the required intervals. I presume you are not accusing these folks breaking US law by circumventing SARBOX, are you? Don’t know if the UK has a similar law, but would expect one.)
Accessing any computer system without authorisation
Prove it was without authorization. I’ve seen no evidence that it was not any of:
1) An FOIA product.
2) An authorized insider leaking.
3) An off site tape and data extract (i.e. not a “computer system”).
4) Archived copies from one of the recipients, leaked to salve conscience.
5) Archived copies from a BCCd recipient for same.
6) Upper management, or any other official agency that has authorized access, leaking the documents as part of a scorched earth damage control for the upper ranks (it happens…).
You have a ways to go to prove those negatives…
is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, punishable by 6 months imprisonment.
But it was done “for the greater good!”. It is now allowed, under English precedent, to break the law if it holds off what the party doing it believes is a terrible thing. And lord knows the AGW fantasy is a terrible thing. So I think they are completely justified, even if it was ‘unauthorized’. Prove it isn’t.
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Nick Stokes (18:48:31) :
I didn’t see much wrong with 1228330629.txt. It’s just describing what a FOI DOS attack looks like from the other side. It is a big distraction.
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This is pure hubris. FOI requests are most certainly not Denial of Service attacks. Again, if the Team had used only raw data that could be forwarded to the journals (and also if the journals had abided by their own rules), then there would have been no necessity for FOI requests. The use of confidential data has no place in science.
I think that a fair possibility of what has happened here is being ignored. If you were in great danger of having to disclose incriminating documents in a FOIA case, what would be the best way to taint the documents before you were forced to release them?
How about this, release them yourself on the internet anonymously and claim that they were “hacked”. Now, They are tainted and doubt about their authenticity, accuracy and legality are raised by honestly concerned individuals. Muddy the waters and only the “CRU” benefit.
DR (17:33:14) : One wonders if those requesting others delete their emails realize there a always backups and backups of backups on servers. If they also got the IT department to wipe the server drives, well, that’s another problem they have.
Under SARBOX (US law) it is illegal to erase the archive copies. The Corporate Officers can do a “Perp Walk” if it happens (not a lot of excuses allowed either…). Since these folks did business in the USA (i.e. their email and visits to GISS and NCAR) at least part of their work will be subject to US law. Hope their IT guy knows SARBOX requirements…)
I would not want to be the IT guy who was asked to do the deleting. I would refuse. (Fired vs jail time, not a hard decision… besides, the “Chief Mumble” would reinstate me for saving his tush from the slammer and making his VP do the Perp Walk instead…)
Also, as you noted, email servers have LOTS of backups. Typically the month endings and year endings are kept for years to decades. Deleting would take a great many hours to days to do, if it were doable at all. I’ve typically had a system where the ‘retrieve from offsite’ required a fairly high authorization. Retrieving all the copies would take special management authorization. We also had a “3 locations” requirement for really important things (like legally mandated email retention…) with an on site copy, a remote ‘hot site” and an offsite tape archive. The whole system is set up to prevent accidental or deliberate loss of the data…
For some very important archives, we also had an ‘undocumented 4th copy’ stored in the local bank vault. It was known to the upper IT management, and their VP, and not much else. I did the copy (as department manager) and gave it to my boss who was the only guy who had authorization / keys to the box at the bank. (HIS boss had a letter granting access if my boss was no longer with the company…).
Heck, even service downtime is not supposed to happen (either with parallel servers or remote hot sites and sometimes both)… I’ve made systems with 2 redundant copies on 2 RAID 5 servers at both the local and remote CoLo site with hot failover AND backups of each server at both their local and their offsite archives. I make that 8 copies right there (not counting the redundancy in the monthly and yearly archives of each…)
NetApp has a nice package aimed exactly at SARBOX compliance that has an “impossible to delete” feature. It is so that the management that buys the box knows they can not go to jail because some underling followed a Director or VP level order to delete things. It is literally the case that the data archive prevents any deletion. The Chief Mumble can sleep nights knowing that the underlings will get hung, not him. Sells well, too.
As I mentioned once before: Petard, meet hoist…
(FWIW, I take great glee at watching Congress Critters hung with copies of emails, text messages, IMs, etc. They created this monster. Let them live with it…)
Oh, and any emails sent TO any US address will be on those US servers and stored per SARBOX mandates… so delete all you want, the ghosts will arise…
And that doesn’t even count the copies folks save on their individual machines that go into a different set of backups… or that pass through interdepartmental gateway servers or intercompany servers with all their backups… and if anyone used an external email provider, well, then it’s on their servers with their backups…
And folks wonder why I discourage any email beyond “call me”…
Terryskinner (05:53:39) :
And still the scandals keep on coming! Very interesting piece here by American Thinker about what the e-mails reveal about the CRU attitude to funding.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/cru_files_betray_climate_alarm.html
A very interesting article… (I took the ‘sca’ off the front of the url so it ought to work now…)
Michael Mann should forever more be known as Michael Venkamann a la Ghostbusters fame:
Dean Yeager: Doctor… Venkman. The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge… or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable! You are a poor scientist, Dr. Venkman
I’m a global warming agnostic. This episode hasn’t really changed that. Here is what I think is going on:
When the possibility of global warming from CO2 became prominent, everyone involved was faced with a dilemma. If what Hansen and some others were saying was true, we were going to be in deep trouble and we needed to take urgent (and expensive) action. The problem was (and is) that establishing cause and affect in something as complex as climate is incredibly difficult. How certain did the science have to be before it was rational to turn society upside down?
Now we could have had a rational debate about that, but things took a different course. A section of the political spectrum, both in and out of science decided that there wasn’t really a downside to turning society upside down. RIghtly or wrongly they felt that society would be better off if the changes indicated by global warming happened. They felt that would be true whether or not global warming was ultimately proven. As a result, they found it easy to accept what they considered a harmless little lie: That the science of global warming was settled.
That ‘harmless little lie’ has turned out to be extremely destructive. It has set climate science back decades. In spite of millions of dollar spent, climate science is in many ways not as far along as it was 20 years ago. Much of the infrastructure for monitoring climate has been allowed to decay while these guys sat at their computers and played games with their computer models and gamed the peer review system.
The “harmless little lie” has also tarnished the reputation of science. Most importantly, at some point we probably will be able to settle the important questions of causes in climate change. It may show that CO2 or (much more likely) some other man-made cause actually will cause the temperature to rise or fall in a major way. The problem is that is the science actually eventually leads there an awful lot of people won’t believe it because of fiascos like this.
H.R. (19:01:19) :
evanmjones (18:23:47) :
“The word is (correct or not) that CRU is responding to the crisis – by conducting mass-purges of their files.”
The parsimonious explanation for the delay in calling in the police.
Riiight. The confidentiality that ensues when you get your buddies to referee a paper you haven’t even seen yet, but don’t want published because of the author. Wonderful scientific standards that.
I bet Al is sorry to have invented the Internet 🙂
Phil Clarke (14:41:17) :
“I am sorry, but that is simply wrong. Copyright of the mails belonged to the University if they contained intellectual property or with the authors if not. I have worked for a UK University…”
this may be the way you handled your own emails.
but i am sure you would not have deleted emails that contain information about a crime in russia. you wouldn’t have deleted emails that contain the intention to sabotage FOI requests, and you wouldn’t have deleted emails from mr. jones with the request to delete them. or would you ?
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/Good+climate+news+alarmists/2252439/story.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/6634282/Lord-Lawson-calls-for-public-inquiry-into-UEA-global-warming-data-manipulation.html
Barry R. (20:49:11) :
As a result, they found it easy to accept what they considered a harmless little lie: That the science of global warming was settled.
Problem is that they didn’t just accept a “harmless little lie” — they actively used it as a weapon to silence dissent, to intimidate active and potential dissenters, to besmirch good people’s reputations, and — as implied in several of the e-mails — to have people dismissed from their jobs.
Much of the infrastructure for monitoring climate has been allowed to decay while these guys sat at their computers and played games with their computer models and gamed the peer review system.
Ain’t *that* the truth. Quirkily enough, it reminded me of the Dem ward-heelers in New Orleans who diverted funding for upkeep of the levees to the purchase of a statue of one of their own in honor of his efforts to obtain additional Federal funding for maintaining the levees…
Looks as though the Times is just starting to get on board via the comments column http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6927598.ece
Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.
Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.
It is against all this background that I am announcing today the launch of a new high-powered all-party (and non-party) think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org), which I hope may mark a turning-point in the political and public debate on the important issue of global warming policy. At the very least, open and reasoned debate on this issue cannot be anything but healthy. The absence of debate between political parties at the present time makes our contribution all the more necessary.
Lord Lawson of Blaby was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983-89. He will be speaking at an Institute of Economic Affairs debate on climate change at the Institute of Directors in London today
geronimo (04:46:38) :
“I don’t think it will be on British news channels, it’s not really a story unless you’re a sceptic, and even if you were it’s illegal to use stolen e-mails in the media….”
The scandal of MP’s expenses is still a huge story in the UK. And it all came about because the Daily Telegraph were given leaked data. This didn’t stop them from splashing it across the front pages.
Ironically, there’s been no mention of this recent leak in the printed editions of the Telegraph, at least so far. Not too surprising, as they’ve been staunchly pro-AGW. However, recently their coverage of climate change has been a bit more balanced. They recently printed quotes by Viscount Monckton. So, who knows….
Chris
Before going too far down the road saying all this politicized science must have broken some law, etc., you should contemplate how scientists and engineers who work for large companies in the private sector are well aware that directors and supervisors would prefer one sort of data-set, or one type of result, over another, and how there are always helpful employees with good engineering and science credentials who are happy to support this preference (the “party line”, if you will). Time and again you will find little tolerance for information that points to flaws in past technical decisions or current technical policies (you see, there’s always some important person or group of people responsible for those decisions and policies). If climate change played out the same way this sort of thing routinely plays out in large private companies, it wouldn’t be discredited until the evidence against it became impossible to deny — say the world’s average temperature falling 10 degrees over the next 5 years — or the refusal to face reality began to hurt the bottom line badly enough to effect the CEO’s bonus! Really, as soon as scientists, engineers, and so on become players in how large amounts of money are allocated, it’s silly to expect dispassionate analysis about the merits of the technical and scientific issues under discussion. In the private sector, fortunately, people can waste time and effort any way they please without affecting most of the rest of us. When the same sort of self-interested science takes hold in the public sector, however, it’s much less tolerable, for obvious reasons. For one thing, the public thinks it’s paying for science, not lobbying disguised as science. I’m sure if you dug into NASA emails, and the emails at the top levels of the defense-industrial complex, you would see the same sort of East-Anglia nastiness at play — probably worse, in fact, since those areas of government supported science and engineering have been in operation for many more decades. Always remember, the more expensive an experiment has been to perform, the less likely it is to be declared a failure (and for that matter, when experiments produce “successes” or “failures” as opposed to just results, objectivity has been lost.)
“How certain did the science have to be before it was rational to turn society upside down? Now we could have had a rational debate about that, but things took a different course. A section of the political spectrum, both in and out of science, decided that there wasn’t really a downside to turning society upside down.”
Word!
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D. Ch. (08:32:23) :
Before going too far down the road saying all this politicized science must have broken some law, etc., you should contemplate how scientists and engineers who work for large companies in the private sector are well aware that directors and supervisors would prefer one sort of data-set, or one type of result, over another, and how there are always helpful employees with good engineering and science credentials who are happy to support this preference (the “party line”, if you will).
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I disagree. Research at most companies is aimed at improved or new products. If the research scientist in a corporation bends data to suit the “party line” then a failed product probably will result. IOW, the marketplace will judge if the results of the research passes muster or not. Unfortunately, in the case of the climate scientists, there is no market place in which to test the results. To make matters worse, even peers can’t replicate results due to the use (or alledged use) of confidential data. Confidential data has no place in government funded research or even research published in a journal. If the raw data isn’t made available, we have to take on faith whatever these clowns say and that is not science. So your analogy fails the smell test.
D.Ch (08:32:23)
Completely correct but the standard really is and must be different for the public sector.
Private sector enterprises are encouraged to rise or fall on the basis of their risk taking. If they get it wrong they pay and usually fail then disappear.
The public sector is supposed to provide an impartial service to the taxpayer. In return they get much greater security of employment and superb pension provision.
What has happened here is that a small clique has hijacked public resources and dealt with them as though they were in command of their own private Company. They grabbed all the upside and failed to accept the downside which. in combination, is a gross abuse of their positions.
Not only that, they then suborned all their unfortunate employees to their personal cause and ruthlessly used their position and power within large publicly funded institutions to turn elected representatives to their purpose.
Any disagreement was crushed and the entire public sector scientific endeavour irredeeemably corrupted.
It’s not just theft on their part. It’s far worse.
Just a personal opinion.
Phil Clarke, 13:24:56:
Some seem to have lost sight of the fact that there were personal and private communications, some even marked CONFIDENTIAL, that have been distributed after an illegal act. You don’t ameliorate one crime by committing another.
I, for one, noticed how many of those documents were marked ‘CONFIDENTIAL.’ Those were usually emails from Jones, passing on information and emails that had been sent to him ‘confidentially,’ and HE was violating trust and privacy by sharing them in the first place.
I’m not a scientist, and the biggest take away I have gotten from the CRU emails I’ve read is a more personal one- Phil Jones is a person that I would never trust with anything I expected to remain private. He’s chattier than my granny.
And while there is good evidence that Jones and company were committing a crime in denying legal FOI requests and sending each other hasty and urgent requests that other emails be deleted (which is also, btw, evidence that they understood perfectly well that they did not have an expectation of ‘privacy’ for those emails), there isn’t any evidence that the CRU leakage was a crime. It may have simply been incompetence.
The public data these people keep scheming to keep away from the public needs to be forcefully obtained by legal action on the clear grounds they may very well destroy it, as Jones has said he would. If they have already destroyed it, they need to be prosecuted as criminals.
With hundreds of billions, even trillions at stake in this issue, would you expect Climategate to be what it appears to be?
There were 1003 emails, Word documents, .pdf files, Powerpoint presentations, and Fortran source code for the climate models. The latter may prove the smoking-est gun, in fact, the code is commented with some pretty damning stuff. The ‘trick’ email is just the tip of the iceburg, too. There’s quite a few other dirty ones in there. Check it out before you say too much.
Honey Pot?
I’m speculating, though there is some evidence to suggest some plausibility to a hypothesis. The files were likely leaked, or set up as a honeypot.
In IT security, a honeypot is a network or data which appears attractive but is meant to entrap intruders. In spycraft (and politics) this concept can be nested. The leaked or hacked information is good information salted with fake information, to later be revealed as bogus. The proverbial turd in the punch bowl. It’s genius.
Who is the victim>?
Honeypots are never set up by the victim. That would mean that the CRU is not the victim, but rather the perpetrator.
The banal content of most of the emails would appear to make the corpus genuine. A few bogus emails salted in could later be proven to be faked, putting the entire collection into question, discrediting the “hacker” and everyone else using this information.
Cui Bono?
The corporate oligarchy is using AGW and nearly everthing green as a tool for economic and social control. They’re clever and will stop at nothing. It’s what they do, and they’re good at it, that why they’re them and you are you.
Then again, I may be wrong about my hypothesis. Maybe the CRU is just like most other groups of scientists; vain, greedy, and quick to supress conflicting views. Has history taught us nothing?
So were the AR4 emails part of the file ? The ones that Jones was actually worried about. I may have misssed them sorry.
Wall Street Journal Opinion section.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704888404574547730924988354.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_opinion
It is gaining ground!
I’m reading through these emails and I just can’t figure out what all the hoopla is about – just looks like scientists exchanging emails. Maybe somebody who has never participated in the scientific process and doesn’t understand how scientific communities work might misunderstand occasional phrases…but you really have to WANT to believe malicious interpretations of these emails in order for it to make any sense.
REPLY: Without knowing this history, it’s just like you walked into a room where a conversation had been going on for 15 years and somebody hands you a pad with a bunch of notes of that conversation. It wouldn’t make sense to you at first. Learn the history and the context and the light bulb will go on for you. Feel free to ask questions here, readers will help you out. – Anthony
The best one I’ve seen is Mann to Jones #1256735067
“As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly
deniable accusations…”
Does data really need to be defended at CRU like this that one would use ‘plausibly deniable’ rather than just respond to McKintyre with here is the data and here is the routines used to interpret. It screams fear and lack of confidence in their work.
“p.s. be a bit careful about what information you send to Andy and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like”
Secrecy is warranted in say the Manhattan Project, not climate change…
My 2c.
Reading all this material without thorough knowledge of the context is very tricky. Many comments seem to have been taken out of context. You are interpreting their meaning according to what you want to believe. This is all nonsense. Our impact on our planet is undenniable and we should be discussing how to protect it, not inventing absurd complots.
Guille,
For someone who is not up to speed on the subject [the basic hypothesis says that an increase in carbon dioxide will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe], your last sentence makes clear that the promotion of this extremely dubious hypothesis 24/7/365 has an effect on the population.
No one here is against ‘protecting’ the planet, so stop that please. The truth is that CO2 is a harmless minor trace gas that is required for life on Earth to exist. The fact that CO2 has been demonized by a clique that has been granted literally tens of millions of dollars, and which fights tooth and nail to keep any views of skeptical scientists completely censored, shows their motivation.
For an easy to understand account of the same people who wrote the leaked emails, see here.
That will put the problem into context.
Your doing a great job guys ,I hope you give a response to the bulldust announced by garret on the news and csiro that the last decade is the hottest ever recorded ,perhaps ask for the data to be checked ,some good news Lord monckton is coming over soon to clarify things and let the public know about this con ,the greatest fraud in history . We would be very gratefull if you can do some corrections and
additions in the paper for Dendrochronologia. We did not quite
understand what we have to do on missing rings? Just enumerate
years when missing rings occur? there are lots more emails that show very suspect things like this .Garret must be called out on his new lies .