Odd things are going on at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Widely available data, existing in the public view for years, is now disappearing from public view.
For example this link to Keith Briffa’s Yamal data:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
Now redirects to a generic page of UEA. Try it yourself.
Now here is what that page says:
Climatic Research Unit
Due to the present high volume of visitors to this page, you will shortly be directed to the latest news about CRU on the main University of East Anglia website, or you can go there immediately by clicking on this link.
The cached page at Google is still available here, though none of the links to data or papers works there either.
I’ll point out that if indeed “traffic” is a concern, redirecting to another page on the UEA server system doesn’t do much for the load, it just moves it around. The data files are mostly text, and not that large, they don’t have that much more impact that some wab pages with graphics.
The news page that you get redirected to hasn’t much to say, and has not been updated since December 3rd.
And it’s not just subfolders with data, it is the entire Climate Research Unit website that is shielded from public view. Try the main link which has been functional for years:
In the last press release issued by UEA we read:
Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor said: “The reputation and integrity of UEA is of the upmost importance to us all.
So now apparently, in this newly pledged period of “openness and transparency”, with the promise of releasing new data access, such as the Met office has done here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html
The access to important CRU data is simply denied?
That’s a hell of a way to build public trust.
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Redirect is also true for the root url: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
so not connected to Briffa alone
REPLY: that’s in the article in case you didn’t notice. -A
These people are just amazing. Their actions scream “Fraud! Fraud! For your own good, don’t believe a word we say!”
Big attack on Svensmark and the papers of Prof.Eigil Friis-Christensen in UKs ‘The Times’ newspaper today. Pages 1,8 and 9.
Ah yes, trusting in public officials… Ask the former Duke University Lacrosse team how that works out…
With the amount of public scrutiny now focused on CRU, wiping the web site is a bit odd – especially with a statement about traffic.
A few days will tell maybe? We’ll see.
Isn’t it possible that they are having server problems and/or have decided to start temporarily removing some of the finished products that are under investigation?
REPLY: This isn’t like a CSI crime scene where the evidence can be “contaminated” by the public. Unless their web security is completely bollocks, files on the server can’t be modified. There’s no threat to the investigation by leaving public files up. But from a public relations standpoint there’s everything to lose by shutting down access. – A
Interesting note in the CRU Statements:
“Sir Muir Russell to head the Independent Review into the allegations against the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)”
The interesting part is in the “Notes to Editors” section.
Looks like the emails and sundries were first leaked to RealClimate?
What’s up with that?
This looks like it may be a default load handling page to me. Perhaps they have crashed their web servers.
We have similar, come through a load balancer on a public IP to several servers depending on response times its directed to the least used one.
When you hit a threshold of use or the web servers fail we serve a static page that comes from the same public domain but actually comes from a different server.
Not a great way to set things up and handle excessive load but I’ve seen it done before.
Has anyone else already saved this data from the CRU website in the past or is it now lost to us until such times as they deign to release it agIn?
There is an other potential explanation: They no longer have faith in the data, so they have removed it.
Urgh, “was downloaded on the RealClimate website”
Surely
… “was downloaded from”
or
… “was uploaded to”
or
… “was placed on”
Anthony it’s not just the public locked out. A couple of days ago I saw on Climate Audit where Dr. Curry was discussing something with one of the posters there and went to the CRU site for a graph and she couldn’t get in. When other Climatologists can’t get into a system that they were allowed in before thats makes it bigger then just pulling public access to public areas.
A possiblilty is that the servers are being locked up by the Police/Scotland Yard since they have two investigations ongoing. The first is the investigation of how the material leaked and then there is the investigation into the charges brought by Lord Monckton about FOIA violation.
Have the police impounded their servers and data?
The Climate Illuminati at work. So what. Truth will prevail and this will be to the disadvantage of UEA and the students. Given the Met Office list is real, the reputation of the environmental faculties of the whole Kingdom will be toast. They play a dangerous game.
I guess time will tell, but me thinks that maybe all servers containing web sites related to mmgw migh be getting a thorough thrashing of late!
I noticed that climatedebatedaily was down for a fair few hours yesterday as well………
I might spend the next few hours snooping around the cru site to see how many othe pages refuse to serve up and report back….
My general rule of thumb …
“Never put an action down to nefarious activity when simple incompetence could easily explain it”
If you use their search engine all sorts of links are failing, some work, some don’t. There is probably someone with a “webservers for dummies” book scratching his head right now.
The coverup garners more prison time than the crime. I just hope these jokers get a day in court.
The New Zealand example, and the antartic examples are the reasons why.
They have realised that having people check their data is very risky. After all people might find out that its a sham. Can’t have that can we.
Nick
RE: Rocky
Yes, this could quite possibly be a load balanced server problem. I don’t think even the CRU could be quite that ham-handed if their intent was to hide previously published data.
Ruh Roh !!
If they delete it, it never existed??
This could get even better !!!!
The reputation and integrity of UEA is of the upmost importance to us all. — This is from Piltdown U.
“REPLY: This isn’t like a CSI crime scene where the evidence can be “contaminated” by the public. Unless their web security is completely bollocks, files on the server can’t be modified. There’s no threat to the investigation by leaving public files up. But from a public relations standpoint there’s everything to lose by shutting down access. – A”
I didn’t mean that the information was vulnerable during an investigation.
I meant that they might have decided to remove information until the investigation determines that it’s something that the university should stand behind.
This is what I’m trying to have universities throughout the world do. They should remove information (hockey sticks, etc.) while such items are being investigated.
For example, if the Penn State’s investigation of Mann determines that his hockey stick isn’t something they will endorse, then how can universities throughout the world justify haven’t kept the information on their serves while it was being investigated? Shouldn’t the risk adverse universities start thinking about their reputations now?
The mist is rising to reveal the deceptions, …… http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17916
I had used the whole Briffa affair to show the pupils at the school I teach literature at to dismiss their fears of dying in city swollowing ocean rises. Their response was a sense of relief that they were not going to die! I was approached by other staff who attempted to tell me not to tell pupils anything that ran against the AGW policy! I explained that as we lived in a country that defended the right to free speech I would do not such thing.
When I offered to show him the information on your excellent site he refused to even look! He said he didn’t want to see the facts and I should be ashamed of myself. Hidden data means nothing when those educating our children are not even interested in looking for it!
Thankfully my pupils are now upsetting the science department with some very uncomfortable questions.
Keep up the fantastic work gents. Every time they try and twist and turn you are waiting with the truth to debunk their lies.
They might have fired some of their systems administrators, possibly for being the suspected leaker, and now their systems don’t work right.
Or somebody is just on holiday leave.
Or the Devil did it.
If an institution is under investigation for fraud by one of its agents or employees, the first reasonable thing to do is quit repeating the isrepresentations of fact. In CRU’s case, that would mean refraining from publishing any of the suspect representation and re-evaluating almost everything to make sure it wasn’t cooked.
AJStrata may have been right – he suggests that Briffa himself is the source of the leak.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11861
We already know it was no hacker. And the first attempt to download the data to RealClimate leads one to believe that the leaker thought he would find a sympathetic ear there, but was bitterly disapointed. Remember, these files had also been leaked to a BBC reporter previously, who also sat on them and did nothing. The move to put them on the russian FTP site was in fact the 3rd try at disseminating the information, and done only after other more AGW-sympathetic avenues were explored.
That all implies it was done by someone quite intimately connected with the ongoing situation. Why not Briffa?
And quite possibly the “team” already knows this, but doesn’t dare release the news since they’ve already settled on the “hacker” story. The files may be all getting locked down because they now know they have moles on the inside and have no idea how many there are.
This looks like an act of desperate damage control taken only because their ship is sinking and they know it.
Wow just tried it!
There is no way that they could be stupid enough to try and close the whole thing down, it’s gotta be something along the lines of investigators taking hardware of site to examine….
They’d be mad to do it themselves as it would just implicate them further….
Of coure it could just be that the data needs to be homogenised before being put in the public domain!
A lot of speculative “conspiracy” theories
I noticed the redirect sometime last evening, say about 0100 UTC.
I doubt it’s load related – web traffic to my site is way down, I think people are beginning to panic about Christmas. Like I should….
To be fair as anyone who works with websites and servers knows tere are dozens of reasonable explanations for why they have put a holding pattern in place. Probably best to just wait and see what they say over the next few days before jumping to conclusions which may make us look silly later on.
Perhaps the explanation is not so nefarious. I bet someone broke in and defaced the web page.
Climatologists crawling….out of sight…lol
@richard: Well said sir.
There are enough real goings on without coming up with David Ike style reptilian overlord style theories over everything. It then gets thrown back in your face when you try and say anything counter AGW … “oh so you believe its all a big conspiracy theory do you ?” … “err, no I believe its a big load of bollocks science though”.
Somewhere along the lines they are going to try and upgrade their servers to stem any possible leaks. Upgrades = outages.
Wait and see when the website comes back up properly.
My hypothesis : the whistle-blower was the IT manager, who has just been nicked.
Couple of observations – you would take the data down if it may be faulty or misleading. Also if the UK politicians don’t get their way in Copenhagen they will look for a scapegoat – UEA.
cheers David
You guys need to go study the case of Mr Clive Ponting OBE, a high flying MOD civil servant in the 1980s, who leaked documents which gave the lie to Government statements about the reasons for sinking an Argentine vessel at the start of the Falklands War in 1982. In effect, the truth was that the Argentine vessel was steaming in a direction away from a UK destroyer, who decided, despite that, to sink it. With the loss of several Argeninian lives.
There was an initial agreement to retract the official version due to clear anomalies being highlighted by the Hon. Tam Dalyell, a back bench MP of considerable experience, repute and integrity.
Then, somehow, somewhere, a decision to go for full Establishment cover-up was taken.
Mr Ponting leaked the documents to, horror of horrors, the House of Commons (the UK equivalent of the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill). Who to? Mr Dalyell, of course.
The result: his arrest and charge under Section II of the Official Secrets Act, one of the most disgraceful politically motivated trials of the entire 20th century.
The Govt ‘selected a hanging judge’ who directed the jury to convict in a way which brought British Justice into temporary terminal disrepute.
What rescued it was a jury who stuck 24 fingers up the judge’s fat ass and brought in a verdict of Not Guilty, unanimously, within 2 hours.
Not surprisingly, the Establishment have been seeking ways to limit the use of jury trials ever since.
They still exist, but it tells you a bit about how the UK Establishment works.
As previously stated, the rule of thumb should be:
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
— Napolean Bonaparte
I’m tending to agree with wobble. If, in the broader view, the university itself accepts (and it does seem to accept) that there ARE questions about the research and associated reports, hitherto promoted on the UEA’s website, then it would be the responsible thing to remove that content from the UEA’s site.
It’s all too easy for us to look at this from the cynical standpoint, suspecting a conspiracy of concealment wherever we can find it, but if we don’t colour these changes with our own suspicions it’s perfectly reasonable to consider that what is happening might actually just be a responsible action on the part of the university until such time as it can (or can’t) place confidence in research performed in its name.
Who knows, perhaps this is an indirect acknowledgement on the part of the university that WUWT, climateaudit.org et al have at last been heard.
@Larey: He put wot I sed in betta english than me and he wos french 🙂
Perhaps an attempt to “hide the decline” in reputation.
I would hold fire on this one for a while. Taking the data offline may be the first sign that the UEA is ready to acknowledge there are serious problems with it.
If the autorities suspect that your corner store is selling unfit produce, the first thing they do is close it to customers.
What about the damn Russians?
Random act of gratefulness: Thank you, Anthony for all you do.
Bob (06:37:37) “Big attack on Svensmark and the papers of Prof.Eigil Friis-Christensen in UKs ‘The Times’ newspaper today. Pages 1,8 and 9.”
This is why –
“An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece
That data was removed weeks ago plus links etc… Hope someone saved it? (the before pages) probably not…
Coco: You wrote, “He said he didn’t want to see the facts…”
It’s tough to argue with a person who’s not interested in fact.
Pretty sure Briffa might be the Mole. Has a good resaon and motive from emials…
“REPLY: This isn’t like a CSI crime scene where the evidence can be “contaminated” by the public. Unless their web security is completely bollocks, files on the server can’t be modified. There’s no threat to the investigation by leaving public files up. But from a public relations standpoint there’s everything to lose by shutting down access. – A”
—————————————
I agree, it does look dodgy. Although,
“As previously stated, the rule of thumb should be:
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
– Napolean Bonaparte”
So you never know. It looks like people panicking. Perhaps they really do have something to hide? Or is it those nasty [fictitious] Russian Hackers again? or will this be a real hack done via Russia to try to convince people that the original leak, really was those nasty [fictitious] Russian Hackers?
HELP! I am falling into their conspiracy theory world!!!
Yes, there are lots of “reasonable” explanations, unfotrunately for this group of “scientists” people are not going to cut them a lot of slack.
Whatever the issue, they need to communicate what is going on with the public.
This is an institution in crises, casting crises management aside is not very smart–just ask Tiger Woods.
The public won’t be satisfied until we’ve had a couple of record winters back to back. The stupid cap and tax laws will be repealed. A lot of politicians will be replaced and a lot of scientists will see their funding cut.
Hopefully, some of those people will go to jail and have to give all that money back.
I can see two potential technical scenarios: 1.) depending on the server, content architecture, and method of attack… if the server had in fact been hacked it could have been compromised so severely that they’re having to rebuild everything on it (i.e. the site had been “infected” and end-to-end corrupted) or 2.) because of less pervasive exploit (like a password exploit) they might be reviewing everything to make sure everything that was out on the server is valid and uncompromised.
I don’t really see a large scale infection compromise (1) being the issue since every link I’ve seen on their site is to direct files – I’ve only seen this happen on relational DB back-end sites (i.e. every URL has php, asp, etc in it or obsfucates the query name for a more friendly name which, I believe, is how wordpress works). Not to mention that this would have also left conclusive evidence that this was a break-in, and I’d imagine we would have heard about it by now.
TBH, my money is on PR as the explanation – circle the wagons, collect everything they have, review it and republish EVERYTHING with new guidelines, processes, and maybe even a reformat of the site to go with it. Make assurances that moving forward everything wll be above-board, etc… If I was in charge of te review and concerned about protecting UEA and CRU’s reputaion, that would be my approach.
“Fred2 (07:05:47) :
They might have fired some of their systems administrators, possibly for being the suspected leaker, and now their systems don’t work right.
Or somebody is just on holiday leave.
Or the Devil did it.”
Or the Russians! It’s the KGB again …. Wooooooooooh!
OT:
1991 UN Policy Paper Describes the Exact Purpose and Trajectory of Current Copenhagen Treaty
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24037511/The-next-40-years-Transition-strategies-to-the-Virtuous-Green-Path-North-South-East-Global
Neil Jones: “Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece”
Either your link’s wrongly copied or the article’s been removed. I wonder which??
I don’t suppose any of these data had not yet been downloaded yet, so they certainly can’t have any hope to avoid the spreading of embarrassing data. So in the grand scheme of things it’s totally meaningless.
I hope analytical types have collectively downloaded everything that use to be available. I think its a bit like the burning of the famous library at Alexandria two millennia ago that destroyed the collected knowledge of the day, including such common knowledge that the earth is a sphere that took 1.5 millennia to rediscover
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=Alexandria%20library%20burning&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
We need a safe central depository of data, particularly the raw temperature data. I believe there are some great PhD studies now to be done in climatology.
Could it be those pesky Russians again? I mean they hae their hands i this to right? LOL
With the short retention span of the human brain, unfortunately, I would think that scientists and politicians are just waiting for the whole thing to blow away , when one thinks of the billions already spent it’s a little bit late in the game to say ‘I might of made a mistake’ Even Google has played with the ‘Climategate’ counter, it’s just amazing that the Nigerians didn’t think up this ”trick” but then, ah, maybe?
If I were a UEA big cheese and there were doubts about our research, I’d take it down – but I’d explain why rather than hope no one noticed. I’d be very surprised if this is a load/traffic issue – it’s been 3 weeks since the story broke, why would the incoming traffic peak now when it didn’t crash within 96hrs?
Their reputation is in the toilet and they compound it further – like I said the other day, it can’t get worse – and then it does.
I saw posts here about replicating all the CRU/GISS et al data over the weekend so that records were preserved for posterity. Let’s hope they’ve all been squirrelled away safely.
I have advanced education in 5 different fields. All of them are within departments of a University. With what we see and read, I suspect lawyers are now advising the school. Having said that, the school would be following fine legal advice to take it down. These sites are not verified to accuracy and it is better to shut down access than to risk having false information under the school name.
I am not saying the information is false.
I am saying the risk of it being false suggests they not leave it up.
If the school leaves up information that is later found to be false, that can be used against the school.
If I were the responsible adult at the UEA and I learned my faculty and staff were not trustworthy and their accumulated data over the previous 20 years was faulty and/or bogus — guess what? I’d take it out of public view too. This is what is known as the ‘when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging’ syndrome. Also, as the responsible adult, I would send a memo to all the UEA ‘team’ to “just shut up.”
AFAIK (accessing from France), CRU’s pages have been shut down and redirected to a disclaimer page at least two weeks ago, when I tried to retrieve the the-dog -ate-my-data pages.
What the Damage Control Machine called the Met is doing is removing all Evidence that the CRU was in fact manipulating the raw data . Since everyone in agreement that the CRU was exaggerating and fabricating global warming data was even to slow or didn’t respond quickly enough , this gave the U.N. the time to either remove or make it very difficult to access the raw data on the internet .
” It is better to be thought of as a Felon then to expose all the evidence and leave no doubt “
Down for forensics, I betcha. They’ve got a Snipe Hunt on, I’d say…
What’s going on…
Well, one theory might be that they need the computer memory for more complex modelling.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_13991384#ixzz0Zg6seKWA
Boballab, Larey, etc,
Just thought about this when I was reading your comments, but when the hack/leak was first announced there was a blurb somewhere that they had taken their primary server offline and moved all their traffic to their backup server and that it had broken some links and could result in out-of-date content. I do not think this is truly load related – it’s too consistent IMO – but another part of the reasoning could be that the backup server’s content was, well, crap
RichieP, it’s there, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece
But try the link in the first paragraph here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/nigel-calder-in-the-times/
RichieP
The link works fine.
I believe that Nigel Calder left the New scientist after a disagreement about, among other things, the New Scientist’s attitude to global warming.
If I were a lawyer counseling the head of an organization whose research department has come under scrutiny for doctoring data, I would immediately recommend that the organization lock up the web pages that displays that data until further notice. And I would recommend that the organization send a general letter of recommendation to all of the clients of such data to do the same.
The fact that this has been done, at least with the organization under scrutiny, smells like lawyer-on-retention advise to me.
We apologise for the break in transmission. Whilst our technicians are working on the fault we will now play you some music.
Anthony One of the first things CRU did after Climategate broke was to delete from their site all the papers and data sets put together by Dr Timothy Mitchell – who was respnsible for assembling many ( perhaps most ?) of the CRU data sets -as part of his Ph D I think.
Dr Mitchell published an article in Evangelicals Now in April 2000 which reveals his mind set and suggests possible bias in his data set assembly. He says ” Although I have yet to see any evidence that climate change is a sign of Christs imminent return,human pollution is clearly
another of the birth pangs of creation as it eagerly awaits being delivered from the bondage of corruption.”
At that time he was a member of the South Park Evangelical church,– I kid you not you couldn’t invent this stuff.
I would think a review of his work might be in order as part of the CRU investigation.
I have taken to saving interesting websites because I have noticed how often web sites disappear. I like to have proof.
Web sites disappearing are not unlike the disappearing of information and rewriting of history in Orwell’s 1984.
Neil Jones (07:28:49)
Nigel Calder! That’s a name I haven’t heard for years. I have a book on climate written by him and published by the impartial BBC.
The Book ? Well it’s called ‘The Weather Machine and The Threat of ICE’ It was published following a BBC programme ‘several hours long’ on the threat of the coming Ice age. Published 1974 !!!
Bottom line is that we don’t know why this has happened. The appropriate response is to inquire of the University and CRU for their explanation. That should not be very hard for some enterprising journalist. Until then speculations only increase the probability of looking silly.
If google no longer works, the caches will still be available (briefly).
If there is anything you haven’t downloaded, saved, copied, I hope you are all doing that ASAP before it potentially vanishes for good.
I tried accessing everything CRU, and it all redirects to that pointless page. Every other faculty member, every PR page from CRU– if it’s associated with CRU, it’s currently OOC.
I just think that the enormity of the fraud is just starting to sink in.
Anyone with Vast knowledge of Climategate, who would like to Argue an Alarmist into the Ground,…I would appreciate all the Help I can get 😉
Website is http://floridastate.rivals.com/forum.asp?sid=1061&fid=1078&style=2
It is a Football website,…that has it’s own Political board for political information only….
Any and all welcome….
Maybe they’re just trying to “hide the decline” of their credibility?
I notice that WayBack has no records saved for 2009 – was this because it was based on server records rather than webpages or something else?
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
RichieP @ 07:36:45…
The link worked OK for me a couple of minutes ago (16:15z)
RichieP (07:36:45) :
Neil Jones: “Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece”
Either your link’s wrongly copied or the article’s been removed. I wonder which??
No, article is still there…
Either your link’s wrongly copied…
Worked for me (twice) – note that teh article is datelined 2007; this isn’t a new statement by Calder.
@wws (07:08:53)
I think you’ve got it right. Briffa may have done it.
The response?
“Hide the decline” again and again.
RichieP (07:36:45) :
Neil Jones: “Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece”
Either your link’s wrongly copied or the article’s been removed. I wonder which??
Neither – it works just fine. The problem is at your end.
Oh dear – follow the money and…
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019821/climategate-with-business-interests-like-these-are-we-really-sure-dr-rajendra-pachauri-is-fit-to-head-the-ipcc/
RichieP (07:36:45) said :
Hmmm, worked for me. WUWT?
Still there – I just googled for the phrase
“Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece
It makes sense that the person who did this was an insider -who at first tried to go to the BBC (If I recall the story correctly), apparently unaware that the MSM wouldn’t report anything that didn’t support AGW. This person probably wasn’t a skeptic- based on who they shared the information with first. It was a sympathizer, reluctant to act against the cause. Whoever it was, they should be commended, not vilified. Now if that person will just find the courage to come forward with the whole story.
RichieP (07:36:45)
remove the ” at the end of .ece
it doesn’t matter if its from 2007. Scienttific veracity doesn’t change according to time periods, although if new evidence throws doubt on a proposition then there are grounds to question a hypothesis.
In physics nowadays – especially radiative physics, not least of those that pertain to the climate, there are many absurd propositions that remain unchallenged. Its become an esoterical study due mainly to its lack of accountability. In biology this absurdity doesn’t pass muster, due to the fact that life depends on verifiable propositions.
I am waiting for…
“We cannot explain the website going down, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
I was attempting to find documents relating to Jones’ statement in one of his emails (1255298593.txt) that the original data wasn’t actually destroyed, and could be reconstructed from work he did with the Department of Energy in the mid 80’s . All the documents listed on google scholar that linked to CRU were offline, and that was 5 days ago.
Perhaps someone could call up the IT department at CRU, ask for an engineer or admin, and have the issue explained? Perhaps try to have the relevant parts restored, if there are no legal issues?
As to the original data, I ran into roadblocks with the CRU site, DoE, and the Smithsonian Institution (may not be pertinent), and had to move on to other issues for the time being. I did find the following, however:
Jones, Wigley and Wright article in Nature circa 1986 – Global temperature variations between 1861 and 1984:
“Recent homogenized near-surface temperatures over the land and oceans of both hemispheres during the past 130 years are combined to produce the first comprehensive estimates of global mean temperature. The results show little trend in the nineteenth century, marked warming to 1940, relatively steady conditions to the mid-1970s and a subsequent rapid warming. The warmest 3 years have all occurred in the 1980s.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v322/n6078/pdf/322430a0.pdf
Didn’t The Met Office say it would be taking CRU and Hadley data off line for 3 years or something to perform a complete review?
Maybe this is just them complying with a Met Office order?
Maybe the same evil thieves that have been targeting Andrew Weaver at U Victoria have finished their evil work there and have moved to UEA.
Any Black Helicopters hovering over the CRU ?
Has the UEA Dept of Anthropology had any break-ins as well . . could be a repeat pattern
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/new-kgb-fossil-fuel-company-attack-at-uvic/
The Great Gordon Brown saviour of the financial and warming world arrives at COP15
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_MXByb84VSgE/SyZlVKQ4UvI/AAAAAAAACxM/SQ12HnALGx4/s1600-h/article-1235481-0796520E000005DC-96_306x816.jpg
Guys…. this is standard practice for them … deleting data is nothing new. There is nothing to see here folks… move along … what fake data, show us where.
Watt & McIntyre – 21st Century Woodward & bernstein?
http://blackswhitewash.com/2009/12/14/we-need-a-woodward-bernstein-the-mail-leads-and-implicates-the-bbc-in-collusion/
To RichieP. The timesonline link is fine but has an extraneous quote following. Firefox simply discards it. Apparently your browser doesn’t so you’ll have to do it manually.
Pamela Gray (07:51:12) :
If I were a lawyer counseling the head of an organization whose research department has come under scrutiny for doctoring data, I would immediately recommend that the organization lock up the web pages that displays that data until further notice. And I would recommend that the organization send a general letter of recommendation to all of the clients of such data to do the same.
The fact that this has been done, at least with the organization under scrutiny, smells like lawyer-on-retention advise to me
And I had posted this a few minutes earlier.
Henry chance (07:42:21) :
With what we see and read, I suspect lawyers are now advising the school. Having said that, the school would be following fine legal advice to take it down. These sites are not verified to accuracy and it is better to shut down access than to risk having false information under the school name.
I am not saying the information is false.
I am saying the risk of it being false suggests they not leave it up.
If the school leaves up information that is later found to be false, that can be used against the school
You are correct Pamela. The schools must hustle and disassociate themselves with purveyors of corrupt publications.
It is simple. Banks tell customers to cancel cards when the credit cards and bank accounts have been hacked.
Yahoo Answers has also disappeared the question:
“Who said ‘I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right””
The answer now is:
This question has been deleted
There was a problem performing that action, please try again later.
The New Big Lie: Climategate Emails Are Not Significant
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, December 14, 2009
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17916
Denying access or manipulating the data to falsify the models pervades the emails. Jones wrote to Mann on Feb 26 2004. “Most of the data series in most of the plots have just appeared on the CRU web site. Go to data then to paleoclimate. Did this to stop getting hassled by the skeptics for the data series. Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we’ve done anything wrong.” Jones to Mann, Bradley and Hughes on Feb 21 2005. “I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!”
These are not innocent comments. What was there to hide? Answer how they falsified the data as the emails expose when you put them in context.
My main question on disappearances is what happened to the text in 1120593115.txt which now ends at “Unlike the UK, the public in Australia is very very na”.
Luckily, I saved the original text which includes such statements as:
“The science isn’t
going to stop from now until AR4 comes out in early 2007, so we are going to
have to add in relevant new and important papers. I hope it is up to us to decide
what is important and new.”
CRU webpage is down many days, redirected at UEA. I had to check for HadCRUT chart at Metoffice web.
A corollary of Occam’s Razor is to avoid imputing evil intent when stupidity will suffice as an explanation. My guess is that UEA isn’t actively trying to remove public access, but instead just stupidly did a blanket redirection without considering the impacts.
The access has been shutdown to files has been about a week now. I know that two weeks ago I could access the Global Average Temperature time history graph at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
I think it was last Tuesday, December 8th that the above link started redirecting. That matches the last update date for the “CRU Statement” page that everything is being redirected to.
Thanks Coco.
You’re some future free thinker’s favorite teacher.
When some of those kids are in their thirties, and politicians are warning them of the coming ice age, they will remember you.
forgot to include this one also: Jones’ 1985-1986 paper: Northern Hemisphere Surface Air Temperature Variations: 1851-1984 (see appendix for the numbers)
http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/jones1986.pdf
Speaking of Briffa, Gavin inadvertently pointed us at these words by him. I thought they were revealing. From the climategate letters:
Briffa:
>I know there is pressure to present a
>nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand
>years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite
>so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and
>those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some
>unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do
>not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.
> For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually
>warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming
>is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth
>was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global
>mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of
>years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence
>for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that
>require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future
>background variability of our climate.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=136
Rhys Jaggar (07:19:55),
If you are referring to the Belgrano then you need to realise that it was sunk by HMS Conqueror, a submarine and that the Artentines themselves later admitted the attack was legitimate (confirmed by both the captain and the argy government).
So I think in this instance you will have to find some other conspiracy to back yourself up with.
Regards
Mailman
I’ve just noticed on the Google web page “Explore impact of climate change on Google Earth.” If you click on that it takes you to a video with Al Gore and others. I couldn’t take more than a few nanoseconds of that so I can’t report on the full content of the first sentence.
The claim that it is “Due to the present high volume of visitors” is clearly a lie. The site was working fine until they pulled the plug a few days ago.
This collection of global warming Christmas songs is sure to globally warm your hearts. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQXY4tWaoI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=cs_CZ&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
CRU is in a transition phase, first hide the decline, then hide the data and now hide the scientist.
Rhys Jagger,
Am afraid what you have stated is not quite true, or at least not the full story. The Belgrano had been switching course regulary, sometimes steaming away, them coming back, then away – as Mailman says this was confirmed by the Argentinians after the event. It was sunk as a warning to the Argintinian navy that the Brits had subs in the area (..oh…and american saterlite info too…) to keep away.
So whilst it was in fact steaming in the other direction, the fact that it kept turning back kinda makes the point somewhat diluted!
Sorry this is OT …but its an oft repeated myth that needs to be nailed (& I was against the war at the time – I was wrong, but just thought context needed).
I think Mr Obama Should sign the Copenhagen Treaty. I think the US Senate should ratify the Copenhagen Treaty. If not for anything else but for my own entertainment purposes.
Listening to Monckton and Jones today sounds like listening to murder mystery radio show. Only it’s not about a murder, it’s something about establishing this world government. Monckton was talking about the previous leaked draft treaty and the new version where the IMF and world bank control all the taxing and money without representation or something like that.
I want everybody to sign and ratify the treaty to prove them wrong. And afterward, I don’t want to hear anybody complain, Jones and Monckton were right, everything they were saying about establishing world government was true. Oh boo hoo. I want them to be proven wrong.
In a crime scene like hacking you remove the file system from further access – access can over-write deleted files (destroy evidence) and unless you are 100% certain of your security (no one should be!) you may be still open to attack.
One could also guess that every hacker on the planet is trying to make a name for himself by finding real fraud on the servers (= heavy load by attack) not like the non-fraud found in the current batch.
Hide their decline.
Maybe this following piece of specuation has something to do with it.
“Is Keith Briffa The Climategate Whistleblower? ………….
1. All of Briffa’s materials at CRU have been pulled from their website. Even the cached versions are gone. Want to read is Yamal response? You can’t.
2. While Briffa is cc’d on and the direct subject many of the recent emails, there is almost nothing from him in the last year! How is it we see so little of Keith in all these emails? He was at CRU and and his emails would be in the same group – why are his apparently missing or so few?
….He appears to want to let the data tell the story, but keeps getting caught shading it to meet the Hockey Team’s goals. I think Keith Briffa was more scientists the AGW zealot…..”
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11861
What’s going on?
I’d like to know what’s going on at RealClimate?
Gavin Schmidt and Ray Ladbury both work for NASA-GISS and are using their public employment to engage in a deliberate manipulation of the public perception of the current climate scandal and debate.
It’s one thing to have professional opinions and distribute them in a public forum.
It’s quite another to filter out and obstruct all of the substantive challenges to their work and science to create false impression.
That’s defrauding the public by public employees.
It has to stop.
RealClimate is prohibiting posts from many skeptics, censoring posts they allow and truncating dialogues when they turn unfavorable to the effort to continue the cover up and distortion of their work on climate science.
Under what premise is this even close to being acceptable?
Their continued misrepresentations are serving as a distribution point for wider falsifying of news for public consumption.
These are public employees using their public employment time, and access to government files to deceive the public.
I challenge any savvy climate observers, researchers to attempt to engage the discussion at RC with germane and specific critiquing and see how it’s received.
You’ll notice the total absence of any of the damning revelations and information appearing there.
There’s only one way for that to be the case.
Deliberate censoring and obstruction.
If this were private individuals and a private blog it would not matter. It is not.
It is our publicly funded officials using their positions to distribute an altered and false presentation of an important issue and process.
It is not ethical or acceptable.
Exactly where would one demand it be stopped?
Perhaps the CRC should post a link to the ‘way back engine’:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa
(to relieve the strain on their servers)
Unfortunately, it looks as though yamal2009 was not captured in the archive, though.
Given that apparently everything under the http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk subdomain now redirects to a page at the http://www.uea.ac.uk domain, it does indeed look like an entire server was taken offline. While the site may have been “working fine” to outside appearances, increasing traffic might have been causing minor issues to show up in the server logs, and someone decided to take it offline to prevent the minor issues from becoming major issues.
Even if the explanation Henry chance (08:47:59) gave is the real reason the pages have gone missing, that doesn’t mean the official explanation is false. Given the choice between saying “our lawyers said to do it to reduce our potential liability” or “our servers are having problems keeping up with traffic”, the natural impulse is to use the reason that doesn’t sound as bad, even if it’s not the main reason.
I expect that somone wants to recheck the data for ‘adjustments’ that were introduced after 1988. Sort of expected.
Mike S. (10:02:19) :
“”Given the choice between saying “our lawyers said to do it to reduce our potential liability””
I hadn’t thought about it that way. I was thinking in terms of credibility. But I wonder if there are liability concerns.
Up until now, there wasn’t enough evidence of possible wrongdoing so no liability existed for them. They could simply claim that the university hadn’t been given any reason to question whether or not the information they were officially disseminating was fraudulent. But that’s not true anymore.
Their lawyers may be worried about answering this question some day, “But why didn’t you immediately cease dissemination of the information – information we now all know was fraudulent – AFTER your suspicions were raised high enough to warrant an investigation? If the university – as a whole – wasn’t in on the fraud, then wouldn’t that have seemed like a prudent measure to take?
In other words, the university may be posturing in an attempt to disconnect themselves from any possible fraud that might be revealed by claiming that it was the work of a rogue department.
Or is this just all wishful thinking on my part?
Evan a search on the site for “Yamal” yields these choices”
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=017206723852458922445%3Ak-pi2er7fim&ie=UTF-8&sa=Search&q=yamal
and the Briffa webpage associated with the search results takes you back to the initial CRU page
Could this signal UEA movement of a certain climate scientist to the underside of a bus??
In other news Ireland, expected to pony up $1B or so in reparations, speaks out in the Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6954387.ece
This is another one gone missing….
CRU acknowledges earlier warm periods but doesn’t explain the lack of a CO2 link:
Climatic Research Unit: Information sheets: 3: UK Weather and Climate (CET/EWP)…seasonal and annual temperatures for the entire CET series…. show unprecedented warmth during the 1990s, but earlier decades such as the 1730s and 1820s are comparable.
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=017206723852458922445%3Ak-pi2er7fim&ie=UTF-8&sa=Search&q=information+sheet+3
The title is still there but all links now lead back to the main UEA info page…..
Coco (07:04:30) :
Bravo!
If our nation [and indeed, civilization] is to prosper, it needs many more teachers with your attitude.
OT but:
Saw this from a link at The Reference Frame:
Andy Revkin’s Last Day at NY Times: December 21
December 14, 2009
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2009/12/andy-revkins-last-day/
They say more info later today.
(Mod feel free to snip if this has been noted already)
My take on this would just be that they finally figured out it was THEIR web server that was the source of the leak (and having had data leak from there a couple of times in the past…).
In the case of a ‘break in’ you shut down for a bit, grab tape of every server you can, do a basic “was it hosed or buggered” inspection and put the ‘good servers’ that pass inspection back up. Then you start digging. (I think we saw all that happen when the leak first happened and there was a short outage.) If you are good, you put a bunch of added monitoring and tripwires in place to see if the perp returns and catch ’em. I doubt they did that part.
THEN:
When you figure out where the break-in or leak came from, you scrub that box to an incredible degree. There are all sorts of “clever” things that can be hidden in places you don’t normally see, even as root / sysadmin. You can put ‘tools’ in what are marked as ‘bad blocks’ on the disk. You can hide things in plain sight by swapping binaries out. Etc.
So, depending on how much you care (and at this point, I’d guess they care a lot…) you might go so far as to start from “bare metal” and re-install every single thing. NOT a ‘restore from backups’ that might carry ‘tools’ back in. But a real, vetted all the way, new install. With new OS copy with newest patches, virus software, etc. Otherwise it is a long time to find where some odd bit of binary software had it’s permissions set just a bit different and lets someone hack in.
(On systems I ran, we did an “ls -l” long format listing of systems files and kept it in a “special place”. Periodically it was re-run and compared. ANY changes were cause for investigation. ALMOST always it was a slightly less then perfect systems admin – sometimes me. Sometimes it was an ‘inside engineer customer’ being cute. We were ‘tight enough’ that it never was an outsider… though they tried every single day… BTW, we also had a ‘bare metal instal’ golden master tape. If a machine were compromised, we didn’t have to re-create the whole install process, we already had a Secure Golden Master of it and could, in fact, just do a restore from tape. These things are much easier if you thought them out in advance… )
So my guess is that they are just recreating every single thing on that server from ‘first sources’. It’s what I would do (at least, without a Secure Golden Master to work from.)
Wait, come to think of it, they have yet to do things the way “I would do”… so maybe not… 😎
FWIW, we actually had a paper printer attached to the main systems console of a couple of our key machines and printed the console log. Why? One of the ‘key tricks’ when you ‘get root’ is to erase your ‘footprints’ in the console log on the disk… can’t do that with paper inside the locked computer room… Caught a couple of folks that way.
Sometimes it’s the simple things 😉
At any rate, I’d give them a few days. If it isn’t done by Friday and back up, then my thesis is probably wrong and they are scrubbing for a different kind of cleaning.
BTW, the Russian announcement that the “stuff” came through their site, but was not them, and they had something to share if folks didn’t stop tossing eggs at them: An anon re-server still has logs. It is only anon because the admin chooses not to talk or scrubs the logs. So my guess is that they did not have the machine set up to ‘not log’, but had chosen the ‘not talk’ option… then the Secret Police showed up 8-{
So Mother Russia ought to have a log of where the traffic originated. And given that they did not just say “It came from Latvia”, it has blackmail value. My further guess from this, especially since much of the Russian Spy Breakin thesis came from English sources, is that their logs say “Came from UEA itself”.
So far, our leaker has done a stellar job. Were I doing this, I’d have “washed” the file through at least 3 places. But one of my favorite ‘distractors’ is to make a fake file of the right size, wash it one way (so things look to originate from A ) then wash it back (so it looks like a ‘from B to C’ ) but in fact, to swap in ‘the real deal’ on B. That lets you claim that the real source, B, must have been hacked too and gives plausible deniability while pointing to A as the ultimate source. One can only hope our real leaker was as careful. (Though they did wash the date stamps so they were clearly thinking…)
Given this, and given that UEA web server went down a day or so of negotiations after the Russian “announcement”, I would further speculate that someone from England talked to the Russians, said they would ‘quiet the finger pointing’ but could a little bit of log file be shared over vodka?…
And the log pointed back to the web server.
Which would then force a full forensic audit and rebuild. Especially if our leaker was careful enough to leave all ‘back pointers’ pointing internally at dead ends. (If you get “inside”, you want to make it look like all traffic originated from inside. But you want the actual box used to be hard to spot. Things like a laptop with wireless login to a lab box, then use the lab box for all the transit and washing, and remove the remote login from the lab box log files… so investigation shows “Phil’s Lab!!!” and not laptop from the parking lot outside Phil’s window… ) Devious? Why, thank you!
The cop has to be at least as devious as the perp to catch him.
(God I miss the chase some times … I can feel the brain lighting up and the slight elevation of adrenaline just remembering it… )
RE: nominal (08:34:36) :
Jones, Wigley and Wright article in Nature circa 1986 – Global temperature variations between 1861 and 1984:
“Recent homogenized near-surface temperatures over the land and oceans of both hemispheres during the past 130 years are combined to produce the first comprehensive estimates of global mean temperature. The results show little trend in the nineteenth century, marked warming to 1940, relatively steady conditions to the mid-1970s and a subsequent rapid warming. The warmest 3 years have all occurred in the 1980s.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v322/n6078/pdf/322430a0.pdf
______________________________________________________
The 80’s were hotter than the 30’s? O RLY?
Seems like “the team” has been trying to make this argument for a while (80’s, 90’s, and now the noughties)
Had never seen that one before, thanks for the link!
How about an FOI request?
Dear UEA,
Please can you publish the website traffic figures to the CRU parts of your site for the last 3 weeks to substantiate the claim:
“Due to the present high volume of visitors to this page,” etc. etc,
We are [directing you to a page that essentially tells you, calm down there is nothing going on here]
If there is ANY reason to do this other than the one specified – high traffic – then it is a fraudulent statement.
Some posters seem naive to think that they have merely an isolated problem with just this section of the UEA site, come on, really.
I typed in the search term “History of the CRU” into google and got this:
History of the Climatic Research Unit:
In 1979, CRU hosted a remarkable, international, interdisciplinary conference ( Climate and History), a turning point for the future work on historical …
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/ – Cached – Similar
When I tried to access it, my Opera browser came up with this, which I found quite amusing.
Server name http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk
This page may not be secure
The servers name does not match the certificate’s name *.uea.ac.uk
Somebody may be trying to eavesdrop on you
The certificate for “IPS SERVIDORES” is signed by the unknown certificate authority “IPS SERVIDORES” it is not possible to verify that this is a valid certificate.
Holder *.uea.ac.uk, University of East Anglia
Issuer: ipsCA CLASEA1 Certification authority
I suspected there was no significance to this so I authorised the page and went to….. guess where, same place as everything else, the main info page for the University.
The website was running just fine before they took it down also – I don’t believe it was overloaded in the least bit.
CRU could avoid a lot of suspicion by announcing what parts of the web site are now unavailable, for how long, and above all, why. Has CRU made such an announcement?
In the absence of a public explanation, suspicion is inevitable.
As Larey noted above as well as E. M. Smith, this is probably far less insidious than it seems.
I noted in the CruTape Letters™, that the CRU network is probably a haphazard mess and leaky as a sieve.
As a consequence of this UEA have probably called in IT consultants/Security experts to complete rewire their network topology. It’s also likely these guys looked in the rack room and starting swearing, finding nothing labeled and heaps of dangling CAT5 spanish moss.
They are probably charging UEA exorbitant rates and can dictate whatever infrastructure they decide to put in as they have UEA by the short hairs during this crisis.
For those who were wishing to correct my interpretation of the Belgrano, I made no claims about legitimacy or otherwise of the sinking, the point I made was about how the Govt Establishment was lying to Parliament and was exposed as doing so.
I know that there WAS a conspiracy inside MOD to cover up the lying to Parliament because Ponting was present to it and that was the reason he leaked to Parliament.
If you read the book he published after being acquitted at the Old Bailey you will see it.
My view on the whole episode was that of Denis Thatcher in the Private Eye column Dear Bill: ‘what the hell is war about if not torpedoing a bunch of Argies before they do the same to our boys?’
The Russians already know where the files came from, and likely so does CRU. Was it Briffa that leaked them? And why does the bold text below sound like a threat directed at somebody? There are curiosities everywhere.
“By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms…”
“Now, it has emerged that IT experts specialising in hacking techniques were brought in by the Russian authorities following this newspaper’s exposure of the Tomsk link. … ‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.'”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20061018065125/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/
I pointed out recently that those thinking they can use the wayback machine to investigate what happened in the past need to realize that where it is important, the internet archive is about as reliable as CRU.
Case in point.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
Though it seems we do get a result for their home page.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
I don’t know how long it will take for them to plug that bottle, but for now you may still be able to serve yourself.
They haven’t gotten to erasing the “text only” version, yet.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080113212447/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/home/text.htm
Maybe even this might be useful?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080103111415/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/
I haven’t tried the other links, though wayback may work on some of them, as well, for now.
Happy hunting.
Its that damn dog again…
“What[‘s going on?”
Experiencing technical difficulty?
When I use the wayback machine to go here.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080421195708/http://cru.uea.ac.uk/robots.txt
I get this message.
“500 Can’t connect to cru.uea.ac.uk:80 (Bad hostname ‘cru.uea.ac.uk’“
Is that just another way of saying, it’s down the “memory hole?”
Perhaps they should change their message to read, “Due to the present high volume of visitors to this page, [WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS] . . . “
“What IS going on?”, indeed!
Looks to me like they are all in on it. Because “a staged crime scene is an admission of guilt.” (forget where I heard that, but it has helped me spot the phonies on a number of occaisions).
Could the CRU be cleaning the crime scene?
If they ‘clean’ the data enough, maybe they can make the models work? I doubt it, but they can try.
Let’s see how long the data is gone, but not forgotten.
To me, it seems as though the data (not just CRU’s) was very weak to begin with and it just keeps getting weaker.
Yes, ctm and E M Smith – I smell a per-hour consultancy in there, too. Good things take time, y’know, lots and lots of time.
Unless the fools have contracted fixed-quote….
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 – 1832)
I think Walter Scott was right on the button when he penned this line! All you alarmists out there just need to take a deep breath and accept that maybe, just maybe, you may have made an error of judgement when it comes to the science. Lying about it is another thing entirely!!
I always tell my pupils that the greatest attribute of a learned man is to be the first to point out he may be wrong. ( of course this applies to the equally learned ladies out there before my wife reads this. She is a science teacher at a secondary school – 11 to 18 – who now refuses to teach AGW as anything but a theory along side natural climate variation. Flat refused to show Al Bore’s fantasy though as she said it demeaned her as a scientist!)
It might also be a Gag Order has been placed on the DATA and database pending the investigation.
AdderW (07:11:03) :
A lot of speculative “conspiracy” theories
I know,,,
Fun isn’t it. :-))
Who was the mole at the cRU?
Was it Briffa or Wigley or YOU!
The source of the leaks
Keeps us guessing for weeks
And the meeja is all in a stew
bryan (12:32:02) :
“It might also be a Gag Order has been placed on the DATA and database pending the investigation.”
Then why is it still available in the “text only” link, and why the error msg., “500 Can’t connect to cru.uea.ac.uk:80 (Bad hostname ‘cru.uea.ac.uk'”?
If there’s a gag order, then I would expect it to be news. Haven’t read anything about that yet, though.
Dave F (11:37:50) :
The Russians already know where the files came from, and likely so does CRU. Was it Briffa that leaked them? And why does the bold text below sound like a threat directed at somebody? There are curiosities everywhere.
“By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms…”
“Now, it has emerged that IT experts specialising in hacking techniques were brought in by the Russian authorities following this newspaper’s exposure of the Tomsk link. … ‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.’”
Who is making the claims of FSB involvement?They would logically be the person or group being threatened with the release of the details.
Try this link:
https://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
Works fine. Note: secure server not responding to ALL requests. Specifically not Yamal data:
https://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
hadcrut3 data was also taken down but is now back up in a very different and harder to use, format:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/data/download.html
Ryan Underdown (12:51:07) :
“Try this link:”
And with the other, I get the same. Looks like someone’s reworking the whole site?
If you want any of the old stuff that may still be available, I suggest you use the wayback machine as I indicated above, via the “text only.”
They are cleaning house, it seems. You snooze, you lose.
Ryan Underdown (12:51:07) :
On trying your first link to uea, Firefox tells me
This Connection is Untrusted
Even my browser’s heard about them!
I like this link on the “text only” site.
The IPCC Data Distribution Centre Seems they still have techs on duty.
Actually, this is the real link (no real difference, though, IMO)
http://web.archive.org/web/20080111154921/www.ipcc-data.org/
And when I search at that link on the term “Briffa” I get the following msg.
because open and transparent is only a slogan.
ASIDE – It’s no accident that their climate model program is called “MAGICC.”
lol @view
That interstitial firefox page just means the server’s secure certificate isnt signed – not a big deal. You can click through – just dont give them your social or credit card info 😉
@Yonason – thats definitely possible – but I’d wait a day or so before getting too riled up… as others noted there are lots of possible explanations at the moment. Although the 404’ing of all things Briffa does look odd.
Ryan Underdown (13:21:24) :
“I’d wait a day or so before getting too riled up… as others noted there are lots of possible explanations at the moment.”
Oh, I’m not “riled up.” A bit amused. But not upset, or surprised.
It looks like they are redoing their site, and it’s taking a while before all the bells and whistles work the way they want them to. All I’m saying is that if anyone wants to find anything, now’s the time to do it, before they give it the Briffa treatment.
I doubt you’ll see Briffa’s stuff anymore. I could be wrong, but I’ve seen material “disappeared” that way before on other sites, never to be seen again. Time will tell, and at the rate they seem to be going, I think it won’t be long.
LAST CALL?
E.M.Smith (10:53:29) :
FWIW, we actually had a paper printer attached to the main systems console of a couple of our key machines and printed the console log. Why? One of the ‘key tricks’ when you ‘get root’ is to erase your ‘footprints’ in the console log on the disk… can’t do that with paper inside the locked computer room… Caught a couple of folks that way.
Sometimes it’s the simple things 😉
I found ‘The Cuckoos Egg’ a good read too. 😉
I just had a vision of CRU’s army of techs hurriedly reworking the site. I hope you don’t mind my sharing?
Honestly, if I had Soros-size wallets I’d have a comfortable estate somewhere, outside the reach of the UK authorities, ready for the UEA whistleblower to step forward.
And if I were in Downing Street I’d put the person up for a knighthood.
I’m anxious to see the next chapter in the “Russian hackers” story. Too bad we’re apparently dependent on “Russian hackers” to save Western democracy.
Mike Ramsey (12:50:17) :
Interestingly, the IPCC. Perhaps the identity of the ‘hackers’ or ‘leakers’ or whatever you want to call them would be damaging to the IPCC somehow? Nobody will know for sure until the investigation is completed (how is that going?) but I am just reading between the lines on these things. That comment from the Russians I quoted above did sound like it was directed to somebody. Briffa leaking information could be viewed as damaging to the IPCC and he did seem to have reservations, so it seems possible.
“The computer hack, said a senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was not an amateur job, but a highly sophisticated, politically motivated operation. And others went further. The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/was-russian-secret-service-behind-leak-of-climatechange-emails-1835502.html
Simple explanation:
People are crawling back through EACH data point (station, core, tree) and finding out all the games that have been played. Removing the “action item list” from the net slows that process.
These guys are crooks.
yonason (13:30:23) :
Ryan Underdown (13:21:24) :
“I’d wait a day or so before getting too riled up… as others noted there are lots of possible explanations at the moment.”
Oh, I’m not “riled up.” A bit amused. But not upset, or surprised.
It looks like they are redoing their site, and it’s taking a while before all the bells and whistles work the way they want them to.
I don’t think so, unless they are really incompetent. The usual practice for a major change is to build the next version on a test machine and test it before switching out the old and switching in the new. One just wouldn’t wing it this way espcially with the availability of virtual machine technology. If EAU’s computer science department is any good at all there should be plenty of students to draw from who would want a sys admin job and who would know enough not to botch it this badly.
Hurry, now.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071128074307/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT3_accepted.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20080109054508/http://hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/data/download.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20080110145028/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ftpdata/crutem3.zip
Can you row faster than CRU?
Here is another stink-bomb from the propaganda mills that lines up with the emails in a way that does not make climatology look good:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1016&filename=1254108338.txt
The climatologist worked to remove the high temps in the ’40s from the temperature record, then this paper comes out and says that even though the melting was fastest in the ’40s, based on the work of the climate cabal, it was cooler then, so there must be some other explanation.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.d1adbaecf2f1d58fb3880c64655e52ea.151&show_article=1
Dave F (13:50:32) :
Interestingly, the IPCC.
The Russians are net energy exporters so one could argue that they would have something to lose if the scammers, err, I mean the IPCC, succeeded with their agenda. Maybe the FSB has gathered more intelligence about things that the IPCC would not want publicized. They would potentially have access to much, much more than just e-mails. Some of it might be quite personal and blackmail-able.
This is a typical move if:
1. Forensics investigation in response to a security breach is going on.
2. Criminal investigation has taken the systems into custody.
Prison Planet has copied your blog post word to word. They seem to have a link at the top to the post leading here though. Odd.
r (07:56:09) :
I have taken to saving interesting websites because I have noticed how often web sites disappear. I like to have proof. Web sites disappearing are not unlike the disappearing of information and rewriting of history in Orwell’s 1984.
This is one of the things that scares me about the Internet. As more and more people get their information from the internet, a government, like China, could do exactly what George Orwell warned us all about. Free people must be vigilent about keeping the Internet free. Go WUWT!
I suppose that is one way of hiding the decline.
You have to wonder about Google – and Google bias! Take a look at this. Just appeared on the google.co.uk homepage “New! Explore impact of climate change on Google Earth”, which links to http://www.google.co.uk/landing/cop15/ and shows a typical Al Gore video. Where’s the link to WUWT to give the other side of the story? How can Google be allowed to get away with such bias! Will Google be placing links on it’s home page for just the democrats now?
Considering:
1) The trillions of taxes planned to be taken from prosperous nations
2) The multiple statements of “The science is settled on this!”
3) The mockery they spewed forth against reasonable skeptics
3) The sheer weight of regulations they planned to dump upon an unsuspecting world
4) The power that could be acquired through these regulations
5) The amount of profits to be had for the purveyors of Global Warming
…you would think they would gladly let the data out to everyone…to PROVE what they were saying was true. They would have trumpeted it from the rooftops. Instead, they are attempting to hide the data from the public, because they cannot afford a real analysis of it.
Too late for excuses. This is no “data failure”. No “overloaded servers” This is a cover-up! And but by the grace of God and a whistleblower, they would have gotten away with it. The Climate Change gang are simply thieves, liars and fraudsters
Is there still a hole in thr ozone ring that will kill us all?
In high school, we were all getting ready for the coming ice age…
I wouldn’t trust the current “peer-reviewed journals” to line a bird cage without poisoning the bird or being accused of animal cruelty…
Any file I try, I get “Not Found” redirect to main page
Here’s one I’ve found. Anyone interested in Alpine Climate?
http://web.archive.org/web/20070706154131/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/ftpdata/alp_pre.txt
It’s not much, but the pdf is no longer available.
other stuff you can still get, sort of.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080112061951/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/posters/
http://web.archive.org/web/20080111051849/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/grid/CRU_TS_2_1.html
And, FWIW, this search shows them to be very busy beavers.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=pFz&as_q=Mike+Hulme+and+Phil+Jones&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=pdf&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images
They have their paws into so many pies that there will be a LOT of resistance to removing them.
For those needing remedial “civil-service-spotting”:
“How’s the Environment?”
Sir Humphrey, Permanent Secretary for Administrative Affairs: “It about a planning inquiry … rather importatn we get the right result …”
Permanent Secretary for the Environment : “You do know my planning inspectors are absolutely independent … no question of undue influence.. ”
Sir H: “Of course, I would never suggest such a thing … but … if it could be question of giving certain informal guidelines, putting the Inquiry in to the proper perspective, in view of explaining the background to facilitate an informed appreciation of the issues and implications …”
“THAT would be quite proper, of course…”
“Larey (07:21:16) : As previously stated, the rule of thumb should be:
‘Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.’
– Napolean Bonaparte”
Perhaps, when it comes to regular people. But when it comes to Leftists, never assess as stupidity that which can be attributed to malice.
The AGW all-stars have earned mistrust as the knee-jerk reaction to their actions.
Seriously, I agree that it is likely that a bunch of people who used to have access to various servers are now being kept away in case they were involved. Server oddities are to be expected if inexperienced helpers or outside experts in a hurry are altering things.
Less seriously:
* CRU was asked to date some files, so they’re taking core samples from the disk drives.
* The server being down doesn’t matter because their server statistics are robustly insensitive to the sign of the status.
* You just need a better browser, as you simply don’t have the level of understanding to be able to interpret the data which their webserver is supplying.
* Unavailability is openness, when a hundred years of availability is being measured rather than only a few decades.
* The peers are not trying to access the data, so the data availability has passed peer review.
* The whole world is busy in Copenhagen, so this is a good time for server maintenance.
Once upon a time . . .
We purchased a fireplace insert, and the fellow said if we bought it he would give us an add-on. I asked him to write it on the bill of sale, and he acted upset that I didn’t trust him. I gently insisted, and when he saw he wasn’t going to make the sale without it, he wrote it down. When they delivered it, without the add-on, my wife showed them the receipt, and they grudgingly complied. Lesson – NEVER trust anyone who says, “trust me.”
Adrian (14:29:15) :
“How can Google be allowed to get away with such bias! Will Google be placing links on it’s home page for just the democrats now?”
We are fighting against a very powerful enemy. Do we stand a chance? I think we need help.
” Steve Oregon (09:55:27) :
What’s going on?
I’d like to know what’s going on at RealClimate?
Gavin Schmidt and Ray Ladbury both work for NASA-GISS and are using their public employment to engage in a deliberate manipulation of the public perception of the current climate scandal and debate.
It’s one thing to have professional opinions and distribute them in a public forum.
It’s quite another to filter out and obstruct all of the substantive challenges to their work and science to create false impression.
That’s defrauding the public by public employees.
It has to stop.
RealClimate is prohibiting posts from many skeptics, censoring posts they allow and truncating dialogues when they turn unfavorable to the effort to continue the cover up and distortion of their work on climate science.
Under what premise is this even close to being acceptable?
Their continued misrepresentations are serving as a distribution point for wider falsifying of news for public consumption.
These are public employees using their public employment time, and access to government files to deceive the public.
I challenge any savvy climate observers, researchers to attempt to engage the discussion at RC with germane and specific critiquing and see how it’s received.
You’ll notice the total absence of any of the damning revelations and information appearing there.
There’s only one way for that to be the case.
Deliberate censoring and obstruction.
If this were private individuals and a private blog it would not matter. It is not.
It is our publicly funded officials using their positions to distribute an altered and false presentation of an important issue and process.
It is not ethical or acceptable.
Exactly where would one demand it be stopped?”
…
I wonder if anyone has thought of putting together a new website of screengrabs people have been taking of their questions posed to RealClimate which have been moderated out? I’ve seen a few of these screengrabs from various people now, critical but thoughtful and polite questions which RC seemingly simply would rather not deal with. It could help the wider community get a better idea of the kinds of censoring going on at RC and help clarify the kinds of questions that they’re avoiding.
Perhaps the website could be called “RealQuestions” ?
Could be an interesting project..
Maybe their server overheated due to global warming…
Stu, Try here http://rcrejects.wordpress.com/. I don’t think this blog has legs yet although it has been up for some months. Scroll down to “Post Your RC Rejects Here”. Ray
Someone pointed out that the earliest email usefully points to who the leaker might be. Another useful pointer could be the sequence of attempted recipients for the FOI file. First it was sent to journalists, then, when that failed, to less well known bloggers (compared with WUWT, anyway). This indicates someone who is attuned to the mainstream media and not the blogging community, thus an older insider. So Briffa himself is a good candidate. Maybe his recent illness is stress related as he remembers his ideals and has a “what do you see in the mirror” experience.
Larey (07:21:16) : As previously stated, the rule of thumb should be:
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
– Napolean Bonaparte
—
Of course, the correlary to this is Clark’s Law:
“ Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. ”
Seems the web archive still has lots of it …
http://web.archive.org/web/20071111095902/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/data.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20071113151414/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/temmaps/
Folks should download before that goes AWOL too.
The Charley-Foxtrot with their web servers is to be expected… it’s not like they have any competent IT folks there… look at Harry’s comments about the code in the data dump.
The certificate issue (This is an untrusted site! error) is probably because they rebuilt the web servers on new iron and the SSL cert does not match the actual name of the server… they will have to get new certs issued and installed.
I am with EM Smith on this one… having done a few forensic examinations of compromised systems, starting over with bare metal is the only way to be sure of what you have.,, or you could nuke it from orbit… that works.
In 6 months, we will see the Willy_Read_Me.txt files.
They will reveal the year long saga of a webserver administrator, who kept trying to hide data where no one could find it. He captured all the emails, sorted them and filled in the missing ones. He made sure that no email was ever deleted. Then one day, he was hungry, and he left the password where someone could find it. Who would have guessed that MannTrick#9 was so easy to guess?
in France i have been black listed on forum science I was giving too good arguments against HUMAN origine of global warming !
http://forums.futura-sciences.com/ethique-sciences/355808-confidentialite-donnees-scientifiques-10.html
According to Netcraft, UEA switched operating systems and server software over the summer and now runs Apache/Coyote on Linux. Presuming that the boxes themselves are robust enough and that the files being requested are mostly text files (as all html files are), taking the site down because of server load is extremely unlikely. Setting up load sharing between several servers using the above setup and a $300 router is a snap, each load-shared site accessing the same database to construct the page.
No, any server admin worth his paycheck would be able to keep the servers humming. If they were going to have a problem, they would have had it two weeks ago, not now. Plus, a decent admin would provide a more reasonable explanation of what is going on.
If they pulled the site to keep people from downloading information that had been available heretofore, that tells us something about the information pulled. That they won’t say what that something is tells us even more.
Crisis Mgmt 101 indicates that the proper response is to leave the information where it is but to disclaim it as being under review. Removing it is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Contact me and I will either send you much o the data that was there or tell you where to get it.
Anyone know where I can get the crutem3 dataset other than Cru site?
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/data/download.html
The folks at the CRU are not scientists; they are thugs.
JB (22:51:32) :
The folks at the CRU are not scientists; they are thugs.
I would argue that they are politicians rather than scientist.
Scientist go where the data leads them. Politicians lead the data to where they want the science to go.
In college, I had a text book titled “Rudy’s Red Wagon: Communication Strategies in Contemporary Society”,
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED071118&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED071118
I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how the scammers and con artists work. My favorite put-down for a scammer? Thank you for being so transparent.
🙂
Mike
I got in to this late and it might already been discussed. Are there any sites at NOAA, NASA, or American universities where data/sites are now being diverted or hidden?
Thanks
Stu (15:57:49) – There are several existing web sites trying to collect RealClimate’s frequent rejections. For some reason I remember “An Inconvenient Comment”, but you can find more about RC’s rejections if you search for realclimate censorship. It’s a common enough issue that Google suggests it when you type “realclimate”.
I have a hunch its closed to keep additional hackers out. If I were a head of state right now I would have my intelligence agency sending their best and brightest hackers in to verify the leak matches the data on the hard drive and their isn’t stuff in there implicating their current government. The UEA system may have had some very bad intruder traffic jams and ended up with a seriously mangled firewall by now.
you can retrieve any page from Archive.org: this link will list all dates cached..
http://web.archive.org/web
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa
And the reason Briffa is not in a lock up, is? …
Here is an archive of all the work including data:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/
Mike Ramsey (14:13:34) :
Actually, you will find that Russia is in good position no matter what happens. They have quite a bit of ‘excess’ carbon creds laying around, so theoretically(<-) we could end up buying oil from Russia and then paying them for the permission to burn it.
Here is the link to the start of Briffa’s stuff, on web.archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/*sr_2047nr_1000/http://cru.uea.ac.uk/*
That’ll get you 1000 hits, but there is lots lots more.
This query encompasses all of Briffa’s stuff on web.archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/*sr_2047nr_2500/http://cru.uea.ac.uk/*
It looks to me the archive has been picked over, a stuff is missing. Nary a Yamal in sight…
I used to consult every month the Global temperature – Annual Global graph and chuckle at the global cooling since 1999. It used to be found at :
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm
I cannot understand how an independent review of some researchers justifies the censuring of the most complete temperature record compilation in the world. Where can I find a similar graph?
I just want to say that I’m so freakin happy that global warming has turned out to be a total and utter con job. PHEW what a bunch of nonsense. Now what are we going to do with these criminal scumbag opportunists who have helped to decide and have decided policy that has genocide millions of innocent poor people who had no voice in all of this satanic raucous of chaos and miserable nonsense? Let the future generations look back and say that we did justice upon those who harmed the innocent through the sword, gun, bomb or PEN AND LYING MOUTH!
The CRU Keith Briffa web pages (including the data files) have been archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. 🙂
Here is the what the web page looked like on MAY-18-2008 (Clicking on the links on this page will show archived copies of these from the same date):
http://web.archive.org/web/20080518211034/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/
Here is the CRU staff directory page from MAY-31-2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080531101921/www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/
Enjoy!
Found hadcrut3!!!!! Hurry and copy/paste/download before they take it down!
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly