Pheesiks? We don't need no steenkin' pheesiks!

Given an atmosphere of infinite thickness …

This is where I point out that they have trouble with Excel.

Dude…I expect some basic science with the study of paleoclimate…like, “does this meet the bounds of physics?”

pat says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:13 pm
………………….
I judge how well the interview came across – by the comments 🙂

Rattus Norvegicus says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:04 pm
There is still no proof that any e-mails were stolen from anyone.

Jimbo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:33 pm

Now that Hulme has started the walking back, I expect Jones to follow.

Kim2000:

Who is that picture of?
Mr Mann – Mr Schmidt – Mr Black???

The Mann of La Bristle Cone.

With the passphrase protected data, could you have password protected folders within password protected folder?
Think of it like an advent calendar, were someone supplies a password every now and again.

dp says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:51 pm………..
The Mann of La Bristle Cone.” ]
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ahhhh a “desperado” 🙂

I would not have described the manipulators of the temperature records as a group of paloeclimate researchers, though some of them may have done that too. The public output of substance from the CRU is processed temperatures series, flogged as proof that man-made emissons of CO2 are strongly affecting temperatures, amplified by compliant and apparently, based on the Climategate 2 files, co-conspiratorial media.
It is patently obvious from three perspectives that they do not believe the AGW meme themselves: the way they try to prevent people from seeing how they derive their ‘outputs’, the way they speak to each other expressing what appear to be perfectly genuine unease that they will get caught misrepresenting natural variation as man-made, and lastly, the patently unscientific manner in which they interact in public places such as R/C and SkS with scientists who call them out for their inadequacies, misrepresentations, errors, lack of compliance with publishing standards, misunderstandings and misbehaviour.
The ‘Team’ is not into paleoclimates, they are into protecting their income and grants, their positions in the UN/IPCC AGW promoting processes and their reputations as ‘processors of the globe’s temperature data’.
All this is shown by their private and public behaviour. To me it seems the emails were stolen and also that they are legitimately supposed to be obtainable using the FOIA which they conspired to evade (not ‘avoid’ which as a very different legal implication).
The sum of evidence shows some interesting things. They were probably not doing much at all to the incoming temperature data, by which I mean they were charging for things not done – somewhat like not emitting CO2 and being paid for it. They were at pains to hide this fact. The data was processed in meaningless ways using defective programmes they threw together and did not understand and which were seamfully (as opposed to seamlessly) stitched together to give an ever-rising global temperature trend. That their work at the CRU was useless is not really the main point. It is rather, the deliberate hiding, suppression and where possible vilification of information and sources that contradicted their pre-supposed conclusions. Having no meaningful reply to legitimate, well-earned, valid and biting criticism of their collected works, we see in private and public a wholesale resorting to schoolyard bullying encouraging others to ‘pile on the rabbit’ – rabbits of their careful choice (so as not to raise too much notice).
What an extraordinary waste of time and public money. I think we deserve better than that.
Solution? Easy. Cut…..off…..the…..money. Stop giving them contracts. Stop publishing crap science without data and methods. Stop making it worth their while to get out of bed in the morning to lift a hand against those who are are willing to follow the scientific method without fear, favour or pre-conception.

part of the problem is that the physics has been ‘settled’ for years…and now the only problem is to educate, persuade people and policy makers what the issue is. For example, train people in climate change using software like this:
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/projects/cmip/cmip_abstracts/wigley03.pdf
Mike Hulme was starting this in 97
“We too here have plans to exploit SCENGEN (and MAGICC) in a
training/educational context. I ran a pilot seminar here for UNEP before
Christmas on scenario construction, although this was using the new
WINDOWS/Unix versions of both MAGICC and SCENGEN (MAGICC 2 and SCENGEN 2;
IPCC 1995 compatible) we have re-written. Also, I have just submitted a
proposal (called SPARCCS) to ENRICH in DGXII for a support package for
regional climate change scenarios. This would be a 2-year project with
emissions people, as well as MAGICC, SCENGEN and our new global historic
climatology. I think we have a good chance of funding.”
0853426848.txt
The paleo stuff was a late comer, but was icing on the cake….or so they thought

Crispin in Waterloo says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:09 pm
………….the patently unscientific manner in which they interact in public places such as R/C and SkS with scientists who call them out for their inadequacies, misrepresentations, errors, lack of compliance with publishing standards, misunderstandings and misbehaviour.”
R/C and SkS is somewhat akin to watching a Chinese movie – with ill fitting voice-overs and captions.

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:57 pm
“We now have inexpensive LCD tunable filters that are capable of wavelength resolution down to the 0.1 nanometer scale. We could easily fly one of those on the ISS using the downward facing scientific window designed for this purpose and do an experiment and get results of far better quantitive and qualitative value than our simple student experiment of the 1990′s.”
What would the hardware package for this device cost? What would it cost to get it built, debugged, added to an ISS resupply launch and get it installed and operational on the down looking window?
Thank you for the interesting perspectives!

Tom Davidson says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:20 pm
CO2 absorbs energy from all directions, and re-radiates that energy in all directions. The main difference between CO2 and other gases, besides the absorption spectrum, is that CO2 has a slightly higher specific heat than the other components of air. Physically this means that it takes MORE energy to raise the temperature of the air a given amount if more CO2 is present.
In planetary physics this makes CO2 a (mild) form of thermal ballast, reducing fluctuations.
‘Greenhouse’ gases only work in greenhouses – structures designed to inhibit convection.
To that you have to add that as water vapor (feedback?) increases as a percentage of a volume of air so the enthalpy of that volume increases. So the heat energy required to raise that volume of air increases by up to ~10 times. BOTH ‘green house gases’ therefore make it more difficult to raise the atmospheric temperature as their concentration increases.
This is why it is a data-type error to measure atmospheric temperature and use it to quantify atmospheric heat content.

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:57 pm
…Today we have far too much computer modeling and far too little experimental physics…

Actually, the experimental physics to AGW, are made available to us, by the most excellent lab team of Al Gore and Bill Nye. The data produced… robust.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/
Perhaps you should discuss your proposal with them? 😉 GK

The Team practiced no physical science at all and they do not to this day. What they did is select some types of tree rings because they had been used in the past as proxies for temperature. In the past, the selections had not been justified in accordance with scientific method and The Team did nothing to justify them.
“Hide the decline” is the clearest case of this failure to do physical science. They discovered that after 1960 their readings from some kinds of tree rings began to diverge from past readings and from thermometer measurements. At this point, physical scientists would have asked what caused the divergence. Not The Team. They hid the divergence.
Physical scientists would have done empirical research to discover the physical laws that govern tree ring formation in the environments studied and would have used those laws to explain the tree ring divergence from 1960 to 2000. Not The Team. Briffa published an article or two around the year 2000 and explained that he had no idea why the tree rings changed. To this day, there is no article that explains the changes in accordance with scientific method. (Rumor has it that Briffa is working on one – just ten years late.) The Team was never interested in such matters. The Team has always been interested in nothing but finding strings of numbers associated with some natural proxy for temperature and using those strings to support the claim of rising temperatures. There is not one of them that has the instincts of a genuine scientist. Having forty years of divergent data, a genuine scientist would have said “This is our big discovery and this is what we must publish, namely, that tree rings are worthless as proxies for temperature.”
There are in Climategate 2 some emails from prominent scientists explaining to members of The Team that what they are doing is not science. Professor Daly is most prominent among these. He tells The Team pretty much what I have said here and he admonishes them that they should try to embrace the scientific method. Of course, Team members are livid at such a put down even though it is spot on.
Jeff Id has done some excellent work on his website addressing other articles in which The Team showed the same poor judgement that they showed in the “hide the decline” matter. I highly recommend that you visit Id’s site and put yourself through his highly depressing but enlightening account of just how unscientific The Team was in its practices. This is all new material not found in Climategate 1.
Some say that Climategate 2 is a yawn. BS. It is crammed with context and detail that surpass “hide the decline” in all ways.

“GeologyJim says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Not the slightest curiosity about what part is attributable to multidecadal processes (ENSO, AO, PDO, AMO, solar radiation, etc.)”
There actually was some curiosity and even trepidation about this. The following is from 1682:
“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural
fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably…”

Sean Peake says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:11 pm
So, Michael Mann’s father or grandfather was an actor. Who knew?

Mac the Knife says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:41 pm
“What would the hardware package for this device cost? What would it cost to get it built, debugged, added to an ISS resupply launch and get it installed and operational on the down looking window?”
———————————————————–
I’d suspect a hell of a lot less than is p*ssed away by most developed economies in a single hour due to CAGW scaremongering.

Theo Goodwin says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Smokey says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:48 pm
If everyone will read the emails carefully I think you will come to agree with me that Briffa is a likely candidate to be the whistle blower. (Though the whistle blower is most likely a team, given the skills possessed.) >>>
That’s probably the first “whodunit” theory I’ve seen that actually makes some logical sense! I’ve had this nagging feeling that someone on “the team” has quietly switched sides for a while now.
On the lighter side, my vote for whistle blower goes to Michael Mann. He’s running out of excuses and legal manouevering room. I’m waiting for him to announce that he is the whistle blower, and everything he did was to help out the human race by exposing the scoundrels, and he should be exonorated as a result.
Hmmmm…. I don’t actually think he’s the whistle blower, but wouldn’t it be a hoot if he tried that argument? Given the absurdity of the rest of his excuses, he might just try a stunt like that!

Briffa is a likely candidate to be the whistle blower.

I wouldn’t go that far. But I will say that Briffa has my respect and is one of the few in all of this that seems to posses some scruples. Briffa might have been an influence but I don’t think he did it. Maybe he did, though, no idea. My guess is that it had to be done by an IT staffer or with the assistance of one. I would hope one had to have “root” access in order to obtain these files but I have seen mistakes where all users were placed in a “mail” group of a Unix server that held a mail store owned by “mail” user and “mail” group with group read/write privs. I also believe the trail isn’t completely electronic. I don’t think they will ever find an electronic trail of how the data got from point A to point B. I believe it was likely carried by hand at least a portion of the way.
My prediction for posterity is that the real story, if it ever comes out, will shock and amaze.

As the Lawyers say: “If you have the law, argue the law. If you don’t have the law, but have some facts, argue those. If you neither, obstruct and litigate until the other side wears down and caves.”
So, the alarmist AGW crowd has no physical law, they want to argue statistics, and knowing that tact is “thin ice,” they have become extremely proficient with obstructing and litigating.”

Jean Parisot says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:59 pm
“Mac, alot of spectral studies were done using balloons to reduce cost. My guess would be that updwelling spectral data collected against a deep space background would be better then trying to deal with the down dwelling issues.”
Hi Jean!
My questions for you are similar to those for Dr. Wingo.:
What would the hardware package for this device cost and how many devices would be needed? If they are flown on high altitude balloons, how many flights at how many different locations around the world would be needed? What would the average flight cost? What logistical support cost?
How could we ‘dress it up to look like an AGW support package to secure funding from our own taxpayer funds, then make damn sure the data and analyses were unadultered reported honestly?

To avoid being cryptic, I’m looking at you Mosher.

davidmhoffer says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:40 pm
Your observations of human nature are spot on. People on The Team are hardcore and play hardcore. That one or more of them has created an “out” for himself by posting Climategate 1 and 2 makes a lot of sense for this kind of personality. However, I think Briffa is a special case for the two reasons that he was treated badly over a long period of time and he objected to The Team’s excesses over a long period of time. Of course, he also fully embraced what The Team was doing. That is how hardcore people are.
One thing is certain. The person who put together Climategate 1 and 2 had a participant’s knowledge of those emails. Two continues One all too well for it to be the work of a computer programmer.

Hi Dennis,
Rather than flying the sort of ‘experiment’ you suggest aboard ISS, do you think daily flights to 100km aboard a suborbital RLV could be an alternate, or even, better option?
Dave

artwest says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:33 pm
“I’d suspect a hell of a lot less than is p*ssed away by most developed economies in a single hour due to CAGW scaremongering.”
Art,
Believe me, I understand the disgust you sense for all of the taxpayer dollars wasted on the AGW meme. But I’m genuinely asking folks to flesh these ideas out some more and provide estimates here. If these are basic measurement packages that can get the fundamental data needed to really quantify the ‘positive feed back contribution of CO2’, then we ALL should pursue this with unswerving determination! If the ultimate answer is ‘not much – get a real religion’, I’d like to make that happen as soon as possible, before another 15 years of taxpayer treasure is wasted and an ersatz global regulation of CO2 is effected!!!
If this is the foundation atmospheric physics that must be run, let’s get white paper proposals in place to secure funding to make it happen! Dress it up in AGW frippery to get the funding, maintain secure control while you run the experiments, analyse the data and publish the results openly and honestly.

Theo Goodwin says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:38 pm
davidmhoffer says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:10 pm
I am not sure whether you intended a parody but it is not a parody.>>>
Nope. It was intended as a simplified explanation of “paleo science” and how it has been used. I chose 1950 for the suddenly short tree because that is in fact when tree ring data stopped tracking the temperature record. The tree ring studies that were then truncated to “hide the decline” were chopped off (if memory serves me correctly) in 1950 and 1960 respectively.
I do write parodies from time to time, but they are way over the top ridiculous. Oh… I see your point. What they actually did was way over the top ridiculous…

The real quote:
“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!!!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqomZQMZQCQ
The oft attributed phrase “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” is as corrupted and false as Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’
“Pheesiks? We ain’t got no pheesiks. We don’t need no pheesiks. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ pheesiks!!!” I think that tells the whole story, quite well….

Dennis Ray Wingo, good points all and a tempting experiment. However, isn’t there so much heterogeneity of CO2 content in the atmosphere that you’d come up with all sorts of results, but what would it show for certain except there’s heterogeneity of CO2 content in the atmosphere?

Here is the highly biassed Sydney Morning Herald view of ClimateGate 2.0:
“The IPCC found there was a 66 per cent probability that doubling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to a temperature rise of between 2 and 4.5 degrees.
The new study funded by the US National Science Foundation estimated the warming at this level of emissions was most likely to be 2.3 degrees, with a 66 per cent probability it would be between 1.7 and 2.6 degrees.
The world’s governments accept that a temperature rise of more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels is likely to have serious consequences, potentially triggering unpredictable tipping points as ice sheets collapse and large amounts of greenhouse gas are released from melting Siberian permafrost.”
“Its publication followed the release on Tuesday of a second cache of hacked emails between senior climate scientists — dubbed “Climategate 2″ by sceptics.
….
Nine inquiries into the initial hacked emails found nothing that undermined the climate science backed by the world’s major scientific academies.”
The SMH is always full of this sort of rubbish. No wonder most the Australian populace has been so effectively brainwashed.

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:57 pm
—————————
Dennis, would your experiment be able to confirm or refute one point in this paper, namely that increasing temperature increases the mean free path of EM radiation, thereby ( my probably erroneous conclusion) introducing a self limiting effect of CO2?
http://www.biocab.org/Mean_Free_Path_Length_Photons.html (paper by Nasif Nahle)
It would be nice to see his conclusion that CO2 has no effect on warming be vindicated by actual experiment.

Guys – in all seriousness, consult the initial testimony of the UEA IT staff on this back in 2009:
http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/MR%2018%20Dec%20final%20IT%20Personnel.pdf
One of the IT staff states confidently that it was a “sophisticated hack” but provides no evidence.
However most of the other participants treat the possibility of a leak very seriously.
Now I know there are many other computing types here other than me, including some that have also provided network support commercially – read this testimony; what do you see?
My reaction now is the same as it was when I first read this report nearly two years ago:
i) The CRU IT infrastructure is (was) nothing short of crazy with unaccounted for data and means for access to it scattered all over the place.
ii) Imagine an external hacker footprinting that mess? I’m not even sure it would be possible without intimate knowledge of the internal workings of CRU and especially its scattered IT “policy”.

Hehe, re: backup server
Maybe that explains why 0626.txt is in this batch.

the point of 0626 being in this batch might be a message: “I got a lot more than just your email, folks, I have everything on your computers … code, drafts, data, Pr0n, everything.

“Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:57 pm … ”
Thank You… Comment of the year for me. Sums it all up, succinctly and definitively. When there are billions, nay, hundreds of billions of dollars being extracted from global tax-payers because of AGW, there is no excuse for failing to do what you suggest. Donning my tinfoil hat, I can only come up with one reason. There is a conspiracy to prevent the truth of the matter being conclusively known.

Until those 5,000 ppm of CO2 in Martian atmosphere does not create any measurable “greenhouse effect”, that 100 ppm of allegedly anthropogenic one should be beyond serious discussion. We have plenty of natural mechanisms to be blamed for both warming or cooling.

Steven Mosher,
I have enjoyed your contribution to the debate for a number of years, but your recent decent into condescending arrogance in defence of your “lukewarmism” is wearing very thin with me as well.
davidmhoffer is quite correct in his response to your defence of rattus, it is BS.
Perhaps you should emulate bender (who always had a point when he was being acerbic)
and take some time to regain your composure.

“In other words, if there existed a correlation between church of England attendance and the temperature record over a cherry picked calibration period, they could not resist including it in their reconstructions. ”
Or, perhaps, pirates?
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/
Personally, I am paying careful attention to this. Global temperatures, as we all know, have peskily refused to go up for the last 12-13 years (since the 1998 peak) and are very likely actually edging down. Now they COULD be following the solar cycle — the 20th century represented a 9000 year Grand Maximum peak in solar activity, according to the proxy record as (re)published on the solar archives site, and the sun appears to be returning to its “normal” much less active state. However, conceptually this involves the use of all of that pesky physics (including the numerous bits that we haven’t really worked out yet or don’t correctly include in the GCMs). Or, it COULD be that the effect of the recent growth in the number of pirates especially from Somalia is finally being felt and we are being pulled back from the brink of disaster.
It’s enough to make me want to take my boat out to sea with a jolly roger flying overhead and see if I can pillage a dinghy or two. We all need to do our duty here. If only we could get the IPCC to see — the correlation between global temperatures and the number of pirates is far too strong to be “just chance”. If we could get a number of countries in the developing world to convert their legitimate navies in to privateers and outright pirates, I am certain that the effects on global temperature would be immediate and profound, especially if the next solar cycle continues to regress towards the mean or even overshoots to a Grand Minimum a la Maunder minimum.
Just remember, it is pirates, not the sun, or CO_2, or space aliens, or the solar system moving through bands of diffuse dark matter that cause a distributed local heating through physical mechanisms not yet well understood.
rgb

“The oft attributed phrase “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” is as corrupted and false as Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’ ”
Or rather, it is the correct quote of the JOKE misquote from Blazing Saddles, which was a very different context…;-)

@Dennis Ray Wingo:
Would this experiment be easier to perform in the lab?
Say a 10m tube, energy emitter at one end, temperature sensors and spectral receivers at the other end.
Vary the energy source, pressure and the tube contents (CO2 and water vapour etc).
We would then have a repeatable measure of CO2 absorption in a variety of atmospheres.
Field studies could constructed to use balloons to measure CO2 and water vapour etc values for every 1000 feet of altitude (by taking samples).

99 comments and only one (by Davidson) states the obvious? “The team” doesn’t use physics because the physics contradicts their thesis.

Not only was the paleo ‘Team’ of AR4 WG1 gamers not physicists, they weren’t statisticians either.
They were assigned by the ‘save the planet’ ideologues to clearly show unprecedented warming in the 20th and early 21st century. They failed while getting a score of zero points for professionalism and integrity.
I suggest the paleo team members were selected because they were expendable. Whoever picked them was right . . . they are indeed expendable.
John

Paul Murphy says:
November 27, 2011 at 7:07 am
99 comments and only one (by Davidson) states the obvious? “The team” doesn’t use physics because the physics contradicts their thesis.
Not quite. They don’t use physics because they are not doing real science and are in fact intentionally avoiding it. Climate Science is only a massive Propaganda Op. = Postnormal “Science”. “Onward, comrades compadres, perceeption ees reeality! Vaminos!”

Si se pueda!

“Vaminos, Teeemnachos!”
The Gringos banished Speedy Gonzales, long live Speedy Gonzales!
With due respects to Blazing Saddles, which should also be banished! Along with coffee.

Elephant in the room on this topic is the Slayers’ science that refutes the greenhouse gas effect. If you want rigorous atmospheric physics that also applies experimental evidence to back it up then simply read the research papers over at Principia Scientific International (PSI) under ‘Publications.’
http://principia-scientific.org/
Note: this is not a plug for any book – the above papers are free to view to anybody – this is merely a suggestion that some people need to take a long hard look at what’s been productively achieved by an independent think tank of 22 scientists, 11 with PhD’s who have done detailed research (unpaid) on the failing GHE hypothesis.

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:28 pm
I swear by Gropthar’s Hammer that I got this email from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) after this thread started.
Colleagues,
The next Enterprise Chapter meeting….
_____________________________________
HOLY BAT GUANO ROBIN! http://files1.guildlaunch.net/guild/library/68863/batman%20horrified.jpg

johnosullivan says:
November 27, 2011 at 8:31 am
OT but maybe, you can ask Mr Watts for room to explain about what happened surrounding / to the Japan Satellite Story????

crosspatch says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:00 pm
No one wants to open Pandora’s box.
There’s no butter on that side of the bread. You will need to present the experiment in such a way as it looks to be a shoo-in to validate AGW. You position it that way in order to get the funding, pretend that you are out to validate the hypothesis and then once it is done, publish what the data show.
________________________________________
You forgot something Smokey,
AND you add the get out of Peer Review free card
“This study does not in any way negate the validity of the dangers from anthropogenic greenhouse gases”
I am so sick of seeing that sentence or its like stuck on every peer reviewed paper. Even when the paper SHOWS it is a crock.

Katabasis & Wayne,
An interesting pdf. I like the bit where one of the participants laments the fact that the emails are not deleted from the backup server after a period of time. Surely if the university were to implement doing so it would be a breach of the data protection act.
Whether the emails were obtained via local or remote hacking / access we may never know unless the people behind it come to be known. Whoever did it deserves a medal for delivering some of the information that so many obstructed foia requests asked for.
I can understand that the police have to do their job and try to track down the hero or hero’s responsible for the release of these emails. But I would like to know why the police are neglecting to investigate and prosecute Jones et al for the many admissions relating to deleting of emails etc.shown in both releases of emails.
If the police only pursue the path of perceived political correctness and do not enforce ALL the laws, then we are on the way to a form of police state last seen in communist Europe, and still present in many tin pot countries.
Perhaps the police are in collusion with the hacker and have taken away the server in order to prevent the truth from coming to light ? OK, that one does rather go against Occam’s razor.
The backup server may itself have been backed up to tape (or hard drive), if that’s the case then there would not necessarily be any traces to be found in the backup server itself. You simply take a tape and copy it, post the copy to Russia, then put back the original tape where you got it from. Unless of course some Unix expert can tell me this wasn’t possible for some techy reason.
It considerably disturbs me that the UEA and the police are allowing the blatant admissions of foia obfuscation and email deletion by members of the team to go unpunished. My taxes pay for the police and I expect them to do their duty even handedly. If they pursue hackers / leakers / whistle-blowers, then they should also pursue apparent breaches of the data protection act. That might also include asking why the UEA servers and IT systems were not better secured. Perhaps the UEA is itself in breach of the data protection act.

Kim 2000
The question is what career path could Mann etc follow once they have served any jail time society might hopefully one day succeed in levying.
My first thought was supermarket shelf stacker, until I thought more about it, and realised that I would have a hard time reading the labels if they were upside down, the contents may well also have been adjusted in unfortunate ways and the signs in the store directing me to the relevant ails would have been obfuscated to say the least.
Flower arrangers perhaps, but then again, some flowers stuffed into the vase upside down, stalks cut at inconvenient lengths.
Has anyone got any ideas to help rehabilitate the team to become useful members of society ?

Mac the Knife says:
November 26, 2011 at 9:46 pm
…If this is the foundation atmospheric physics that must be run, let’s get white paper proposals in place to secure funding to make it happen! Dress it up in AGW frippery to get the funding, maintain secure control while you run the experiments, analyse the data and publish the results openly and honestly.
___________________________________
Depending on the amount there is a possibility of funding from sources outside the usual. The Koch brothers come to mind and others in industry that are the target of this whole mess.
I know from watching another issue that we are not talking about a united front among ALL the elite.

Dear Mr Watts,
Since I have a hard time telling Mr Mann – Mr Schmidt – Mr Black apart in their pictures…could you please post Mr Manns’ upside down for me?
I believe it would be of great service to us readers 😉

Briffa is a likely candidate to be the whistle blower.
I, too, thought that in 2009 but after reading some of Gail Combs’ posts, I lean more towards Alan Kendall

Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:06 am
I just want to thank you….I enjoy your posts filled with information 🙂

pat says on November 26, 2011 at 6:13 pm

o/t but the MSM’s refusal to expose the public to the contents of Climategate II emails is nothing short of a disgrace:

Which gives us an opportunity to point out to people just how irrelevant the MSM are, n’est pas?

J Martin says:
November 27, 2011 at 9:44 am
Personally, I’d like to see them ALL in service to the environment…hmmm….. pickin’ up trash???

“NOW the thing about such email servers is that they can EASILY be set up to place a COPY of EVERY email passing through into a continuous stream file – this is simply a file the can be used later as an audit trail. The users of the system do not even know that every email sent and received has had a copy stashed. Pulling such a file apart later is a tedious and boring process, but quite possible.
My speculation is that this is what has happened.”
As a 25 year Unix sysadmin (as well as physicist) I would disagree. None of this is standard of practice, or common, or likely. It is far, far more likely that the mail spool directory e.g. /var/spool/mail on the primary server was religiously backed up in one of the usual “reliable” (to 3-4 9s) methodologies, e.g. a full backup once a month or thereabouts (periodically stored offsite), followed by incrementals that track the day to day diffs in the individual user spools. In that way the mail spool file as of any given day could be reconstructed from the full overlaid with the incremental.
Typically the backup process will not pick up any mail received during the day and deleted on the same day, although over the last 5+ years many sites have adopted a much more aggressive mirroring and incremental system that backs up the primary spool to a DISK on a secondary (large) backup server, as often as every X hours. I don’t know of any systems that journal EVERY change — one hits information theoretic problems that make it very difficult to provision enough storage with too fine-grained of even a differencing scheme, especially with binary files.
There are thus two possible explanations for where the list came from. Most likely is that somebody hacked into the system OR abused their pre-existing privileges on the system to run e.g. cat /var/spool/mail/* > cru-spool.txt. This is fast and easy and records an instant snapshot of everything all jumbled together. Personally, I wouldn’t do this — I’d do tar cvf var-spool-mail.tar /var/spool/mail and then compress it and copy it out of there — that would make it a lot easier to sort things out by user later (basically it makes an archive copy of the entire mail spool). This would explain why there are holes — any mail deleted from the server as of the time the copy is made is not in the individual mail spool files.
A second (less likely) possibility is that the hacker/cracker/sysadmin had and used access to the full/incremental backups and built a COMPLETE record of the mail spool file ex post facto, including files that were deleted by the users sometime AFTER they were recorded on an incremental (on whatever schedule the incrementals run). Even this is probably not “complete” — I’d guestimate that 20-40% of all incoming mail never makes it into a incremental (in my own case it is more like 80%, given the effectiveness of my spam filters and instant deletion of junk mail, but others are less vigilant or don’t know how to use procmail filters) but people in research tend to save IMPORTANT letters from their friends in their mail spools and not delete them so rapidly. Some of them they might, however, copy into personal mail folders in their local system space and although this would also have been backed up it would be VERY tedious to go through all of userspace looking for it. In many cases saving a message to a local spool deletes it from the primary spool.
If I were a forensic computer cop (and I am a bit of a security expert, although not a cop), I would first be giving polygraphs to the systems admins, then to the e.g. grad students, postdocs, faculty, staff. I’ve seen appallingly poor practice — the root password literally posted on a bulletin board in the server room so that postdocs can “self-service” certain problems — and then, depending on the operating system used on the server and how it was maintained, it may well have had easily exploitable and well-known holes that permitted unauthorized people to gain root access to run the tar command (e.g.) above. For example, if /var/spool/mail was exported via NFS, users may have been able to mount it on their own LAPTOPS with root access. Terrible practice, incompetent sysadmins, but FWIW there are plenty of incompetent sysadmins in the world and even the best of them has a hard time patching every possible leak in the security-dike.
FOIA is, from the look of it, not an idiot. He/she chose a competent encryption, for example, going out of his/her way to do so. Using zip suggests that he/she is more of a windows user than a linux user — a linux user might have been more inclined to use tar or bzip, possibly with gpg to do the core encryption. OTOH, to be able to copy the entire contents of the mail spool directory, either as a snapshot or from backups, bespeaks a nontrivial knowledge of Unix/linux as well.
The really interesting question is: what led them to do what they did? Were they a legitimate root user who was going through mail for some other reason who saw something that shocked them so much that they interpreted it as a “crime” and motivated them to violate the privacy of these users? Were they a grad student or postdoc who had a strong (if somewhat fluid:-) sense of “ethics” (and who was a bit of a hacker) who got pissed off at the blatant cherrypicking and general assholery going on and who used their diabolical skills to root the system and “out” the damning emails? Were they (still possible) an OUTSIDE cracker — a member of this very blog, perhaps — with mad skills who found an exploit that permitted them to get to the mail spool from outside? The latter isn’t insanely unlikely — again, general incompetence in systems staff often leaves exploitable holes, especially if Windows-based systems form a significant part of the server infrastructure.
A secondary question is how much access they had to the individual userspace directories of the people involved. Yes, if they had the time and the means they could have copied the entire filesystem out of the premises including all of the home directories and backed up research space. I’ve seen it done before, by an Evil Postdoc who was seeking to steal a copy of an entire research “snapshot” to go through later looking for patentable/stealable IP. I’m sure there is lots of bandwidth in and out of CRU, although there is a bit of a risk with logfiles revealing whodunnit if they were at all sloppy (again evidence that FOIA is smarter than the average bear — most dumbasses would leave unmistakeable traces in the form of e.g. IP numbers and/or login records or would do it at a time that a vigilant sysadmin would be likely to notice (for example) that the server was sluggish as it works to make a copy of a TB or so of data and move it over the network).
None of this matters very much, not really. Most sysadmins follow a code of ethics that explicitly prohibits this sort of thing — they are not “participants” in what goes on, they are an essential part of the infrastructure that permits it to happen, and the whole infrastructure suffers to the extent that individuals using it cannot rely on its security and privacy. This has the feel of somebody with passion, a participant or a disgruntled employee with a serious grudge (or both, a disgruntled employee who IS a participant, e.g. a postdoc who was screwed or badly treated by one of the hockey team and who got fed up with the arrant hypocrisy of the entire self-serving system). But it could be that FOIA is a complete outsider, an uberhacker funded by an ultraconservative shell foundation that is a front for the oil industry for all that we can tell. So what? As long as the spool is genuine, it is genuine. It’s wikileaks city — criminal according to the letter of the law, offensive to anyone who respects privacy, and yet it “outs” abominable, despicable behavior and deliberate deception in a process that is supposed to be the EPITOME of honesty, scientific research.
At the end of the day, this is what all of the leaks have revealed. Many of the participants do indeed believe in the religion they have helped found. Jones, in particular, has a long history of being swept along by this almost against his will. His OWN temperature reconstructions prior to IPCC 1 showed the LIA and MWP, and (IIRC) he expressed some serious skepticism towards MBH and the hockey stick at the beginning, before allowing himself to be convinced and even to participate using the “new” method of cherrypicking the data. His angst has become even more pronounced — although he still “believes” that AGW is taking place and may still be catastrophic, he acknowledges that the evidence is getting thinner and thinner and that the early papers upon which the “catastrophic” part was based e.g. the hockey stick were bullshit.
He is not alone, even among those that still “believe” in AGW. This too is clearly proven in the email messages.
The sad thing is that the language of the entire debate has devolved, moving far, far away from the language of science. The idea of padding scientific committees intended to review science upon which hundreds of billions of dollars worth of policy decisions are supposed to be based with hand-picked members who will deliver a pre-agreed upon conclusion is offensive to any scientist — even if you truly do believe that some “skeptics” are just as religious as hockey team “believers” seem to be, there are plenty of real scientists who are skeptical (like me). I’m even a physicist, with no dog in the fight. I may not be an expert on dendroclimatology, but I can detect bullshit science and confirmation bias and lying with statistics when I see it. I can also make perfectly reasonable suggestions for ways of improving the science — DRW’s empirical studies being a perfect case in point; directly measuring nighttime cooling rates over time in arid climates (as I’ve suggested on other threads) being another.
I’m even sane enough not to knee-jerk reject the idea that there is SOME anthropogenic component to global warming since the LIA because I don’t “like” the hypothesis or want to get paid off by giant oil companies or because I like driving an Excursion and having electricity and refrigeration and air conditioning and plenty of food and all of the other things that plentiful and cheap energy provides me. The big question is, however, how much?
To answer this, one has to begin by determining the temperature that we SHOULD be experiencing outside, less the increased CO_2. Without an accurate knowledge of this baseline — accurate to well WITHIN the marginal temperature increase supposedly attributable to CO_2 — it is not possible to transform OBSERVATIONS of global temperature (no matter how accurate) into an estimate of the MEASURED effects of the CO_2 increase. With some readily available confounding variables that are perfectly capable of explaining all or most of the observed temperature variation even before looking at CO_2, this is not easy.
This is where Mann’s hockey stick has done the world an enormous disservice. Because it was so very, very badly done, it was far too easy to falsify. Everyone who was merely rightly skeptical of any far-reaching hypothesis such as AGW has now — equally rightly — become even more skeptical, and Climategate I and II only reinforce that by revealing that the primary participants in the game have been WILFULLY lying, WILFULLY manipulating the data, KNOWINGLY engaging in cherry picking and confirmation bias, hell, openly stacking the supposedly fair deck of their committees and refereeing process to prevent any real scientific challenge to their foregone conclusions from emerging. The theory is, in their mind, not falsifiable, it is “given truth”, as obvious as the truths that the world is flat and at the center of the Universe. All evidence supports their hypothesis; evidence that appears to contradict it is not permitted to reduce their degree of belief and is ruthlessly suppressed.
None of it matters. Economics will, slowly but surely, push the world away from burning as much “fossil fuel” because it is a scarce resource with a high cost of recovery and a high environmental cost associated with its use OUTSIDE of the possible cost associated with “CO_2. and AGW”. In fifty years I will be dead, but atmospheric CO_2 will be on the way back down from a peak that will have been well short of 600 ppm. Most of the hype and religious dogma associated with the current “crisis” will be a short, somewhat shameful chapter in the history of science, and grad students will write theses on how it could have all been avoided if only.
Perhaps — and this is something that all of the skeptics on this list need to openly recognize as well, or else you are indeed just as dogmatic and religious as the hockey team — the AGW >>hypothesis<< will have proven to be true, and some fraction of the world's global mean temperature will be directly attributable to the increase in CO_2. Perhaps that increase will have had bad effects that outweigh its good ones. Perhaps it will have had good effects that outweigh the bad ones — if we begin a Maunder-type solar minimum and global temperatures try to DROP by 1-2C, a 1-2C CO_2 enhanced warming might be just what we need to stay "normal", whatever that means.
The important thing to do is keep an open mind, one that does indeed change its degree of belief as OBJECTIVE evidence is accumulated that supports or does not support any given hypothesis, including AGW. The relatively UNBIASED temperature records, reconstructions that predate IPCC 1 and MBH altogether, show an entirely believable temperature increase from the LIA onward, one that is fairly clearly associated with a significant change in solar activity over that time up to the 9000 year 20th century Grand Maximum. That same time frame coincides with a steady increase in anthropogenic CO_2 in the atmosphere. PERHAPS some fraction of the former is caused by the latter — I rather think it has been. Roy Spencer, somebody that seems fairly rational about the whole thing, estimates order of 0.5C, but even if one goes to 1C it hardly implies dire consequences UNLESS you simultaneously assert a large climate sensitivity that just isn't there; it makes no sense. If our climate didn't have neutral to negative relative sensitivity, it would be even more unstable than it already is, unstable enough to run away to catastrophe without our help.
This is one thing that the climatologists really could learn from physicists. If there is a "hole" into the phase space of possibilities (state configurations) that leads to disaster, sooner or later random chance will carry your system into that hole and the disaster will occur. The fact that no such catastrophe has occurred in the past is thus de facto evidence that there is no such hole. It is why one shouldn't lose any sleep when people argue that the next generation of supercollider will create micro black holes and the earth will collapse into them, or the explosion of a nuclear bomb will "ignite the atmosphere" and turn the earth into a star.
Cosmic rays hit the earth every day with more energy than we will EVERY create in an accelerator. Asteroid collisions create temperatures and pressures EVERY bit as large as those in a nuclear bomb. If there was a catastrophic hole in the space of possibilities, we would have long since fallen in, so there is no such hole. If there was a catastrophic hole in climate such that a mere doubling of (very low concentrations of) atmospheric CO_2 would "veniform" the planet, transforming it into a hot hell-hole of desert and drought, it would have happened long, long ago and we'd still be there.
rgb

J Martin says:
November 27, 2011 at 9:44 am
“Has anyone got any ideas to help rehabilitate the team to become useful members of society ?”
The first step is to give each of them a lengthy treatment for testosterone poisoning. Mann would need surgery.

Robert Brown says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:53 am
“NOW the thing about such email servers is that they can EASILY be set up to place a COPY of EVERY email passing through into a continuous stream file – this is simply a file the can be used later as an audit trail. The users of the system do not even know that every email sent and received has had a copy stashed. Pulling such a file apart later is a tedious and boring process, but quite possible.
My speculation is that this is what has happened.”
As a 25 year Unix sysadmin (as well as physicist) I would disagree. None of this is standard of practice, or common, or likely.
=====================================================================
Say what? As a 35 year veteran in the computer networking world I have to say this is really easy to do and quite common in industry. I’ve no idea how common it is in academia where principle may override CYA and corporate espionage concerns. Perhaps your experience isn’t quite as broad as you imagine it to be.
Here’s how it’s commonly done. Even found a video tutorial for you:

Two maxims are applicable here, rgb, that I learned decades ago.
1) The network never forgets.
2) Never put anything in an email you wouldn’t want to see appear in the newspaper.
Had these yahoos (Jones, Briffa, Mann, Santer, Schneider, etc.) any real experience in intranet or internet they’d know about the two maxims above and surely I’m not repeating them for your benefit but rather for the benefit of others reading this. The hockey team pikers learned the hard way.

Robert Brown.
Nice post.
Re the UNIX stuff. What about Rsync as a candidate. It’d be rather obvious to any sysadmin, but as it was just a backup server it may have hardly if ever been looked at. Indeed, Rsync may have already have been on the server. Though I guess there are endless ways to do it.
With any luck the people advising the police are the people wot dun it. I would think the day the police make an arrest the missing password will enter the public domain. If it was an internal thing then the police have a chance of pinning it on somebody in which case the password should immediately become public knowledge. But if the job was external, especially if foreign, (perhaps a media organisation ?) the police will get nowhere and then we will just have to wait until FOIA.org decide to release the password.
Re co2 physics. I have seen two physics papers on the internet that both conclude that co2 has no warming effect whatsoever, and that if anything it may have a cooling effect. Degree level maths and beyond. I’ll try and find links. Though others here may have such links more to hand.

kim2ooo says:
November 27, 2011 at 11:23 am
Robert Brown says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:53 am
……………………… ” ]
Good read!
How about a guest post?
_______________________________
I second that motion… All in favor?

Dave Springer;
Say what? As a 35 year veteran in the computer networking world I have to say this is really easy to do and quite common in industry>>>
So, you must have bee retired now for what, 15 years? Your answer is only partly accurate and totaly obsolete.
1. The video you link to explains a procedure in the context of an outsourced e-mail system. The CRU ran their own email system. What they could and could not do would depend entirely on two factors. The first would be the specific e-mail software they were running, and the second would be axactly how that e-mail system was implemented. Unless you have knowledge that pertains to both of these issues, you cannot say how easy, difficult, or even possible, any particular approach to preserving email might be.
2. The technique described in your video would be of little or no use in any venue with the volume of email that CRU would generate. Logging all incming and outgoing email to a single account would create a single email box with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of entries. Just opening the folder would take hours, perhaps days, let alone searching it for keywords in anything amounting to a timely fashion. Further, we can likely surmise that this is in fact NOT what was done as the various e-mails refer to the end users themselves searching their personal email rather than the compliance officers searching all the CRU email.
3. Complance law and FOIA law and privacy law all overlap to some extent. The techniques suggested in your video do not meet the legal standards for any of these, in private organizations or academic ones.
4. In general, anyone who runs central comuter systems of any sort is aware (or ought to be) of the basics of regular backup to protect against data loss. This applies to email in spades. In more modern email systems, archive software is run in addition to backup systems. In the case of a “hacker” trying to make copies en masse of an email system, the backup and archive systems would be a far easier target for someone on the “inside” than would be the email system itself.

Dave Springer;
France has the largest percentage of nuclear generated electricity in the world at almost 80%. The average price per kilowatt hour there is $0.19. The average price in the United States, which gets only 20% from nukes is $0.11.
Got it? Write that down!>>>
Yes, the retail price of something is a 100% accurate indicator of the cost of production. NOT!
Gasoline costs more than twice as much in France as it does in the US. Are you seriously going to argue that a refinery in France costs more than twice as much to operate as one in the US? Did you even bother to compare costs at point of production in order to eliminate factors such as taxation regimes and environmental regulation that can substantively alter the end user price? Did you break down the other sources used in the total average to eliminate the cost advantage available in North America from hydro?
France exports a lot of that nuclear generated electricity. Are you suggesting that they sell it at a loss? Or perhaps you are suggesting their customers are so stupid that they pay more money for nuclear generated electricity than they do from other sources?
“write that down” indeed. NOT!

Dave Springer says:
November 27, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:06 am
“If Jones can not even run Excel, I VERY much doubt he was running Unix or any other of those more difficult languages. That is why “BASIC” was invented. A simple language for us dumb scientists to use. I had a ONE HOUR lecture on BASIC during my training in undergrad Chemistry in 1970.”
Good grief. Excel is an application. Unix is an operating system. Basic is a language. Dumb is on a case by case basis.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dave,
Excel is EASY even for a computer dummy like me. If you can handle a computer operating system like Unix, especially the older version, then Excel should be an absolute SNAP. All it takes is a bit of poking around. You do not even have to take a course or read a book to be able to deal with Excel.
I think what a lot of you are missing is that those with degrees dating pre-1975-ish do not have the bone deep computer skills that those growing up with home PCs have. We forget the ready access to computers really did not happen until the mid 1980’s and the era of cheap PCs, before that is was Mainframes and the first to get access to new technoligy were the bean counters. Also once you become a teaching professor your GRAD students do the actual work at your direction. You are better off thinking of these guys as mid level managers because that is what they actually are.
That is the point I was trying to make but messed up, sorry.

Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 1:01 pm
“Excel is EASY even for a computer dummy like me. If you can handle a computer operating system like Unix, especially the older version, then Excel should be an absolute SNAP.”
This is like you saying that if I can grow tomatoes then it should be snap breeding horses. The one provides very little insight into the other and no one familiar with both would say such a thing.

Dave Springer;
You ignorance is showing again, as usual. A record of emails going back 10+ years isn’t captured on routine server backups.>>>
Yes it is. Standard backup architectures are daily incremental and weekly full written to an off server media such as tape. How long back emails can be recovered is entirely dependant upon the data retention plicy of the organization. If they retain their backup tapes for ten years, then any email that was backed up ten years ago can still be recovered.
Dave Springer;
These at best capture only what individuals have chosen to save.>>>
Wrong. They capture all data that the backup system is designed to capture, regardless of of what the end users do or don’t do.
Dave Springer;
Archiving all emails whether individuals choose to save them or not is pretty common in commercial settings and it doesn’t matter if you own the mail server all you need is adminstrative rights and then there are many ways to do it so your lecture about the video tutorial using an external mail provider (gmail in his example) is irrelevant.>>>
My point was that the methodology demonstrated in your video is not practical from a technology perspective and doesn’t meet the legal reqquirements of compliance law, privacy law, or FOIA requirements.
Dave Springer;
You’re right my experience is dated but both my son and son-in-law are certified IT gurus so I’m pretty much still in the loop.>>>
Your experience is not only dated, it was plain wrong and doesn’t apply to anything in the context of the email systems at CRU and CG1 or CG2. Having a son or a son in law “in the business” means nothing for your competency, and everything you write is either wrong or very wrong or just plain misleading.
Dave Springer;
My wife runs a small medical practice. You wouldn’t believe the regulatory burdens on IT in her little office for HIPPA compliance. It’s awful.>>>
It is quite manageable if you understand the regulatory requirements, how email systems are architected, and what tool sets are available to simplify administration of these. Your wife needs to get in a consultant who has experience in these areas which clearly your son and son in law do not have or I presume they would have helped her with it already. There are also service providers who specialize in provisioning email and other administrative systems to small healthcare offices that include the implementation of the required compliance systems.
Dave Springer;
Anyhow, its worse now than in the past because corporate and government entities are required by law to archive email – it’s no longer a choice – although in my experience it was usually done to aid in potential litigation. >>>
Wrong. The law in the Unites States requires that companies have a data retention policy and adhere to it. This may include archive systems as a method of meeting the data retention policy. Most of the financial justification for archive systems before Sarbanes-Oxley (commonly called SOX) came into force in the United States was cost reduction as it allowed older email to be removed from the email system and housed instead on lower cost storage media such as low performance hard drives and/or arrays, or media such as tape and optical media. After SOX, the additional capabilities of most archive software to respond to court ordered search as well as FOIA requests made the business case to implement archive systems in support of compliance and litigation requirements even more attractive.
Dave Springer;
Please stop talking out of your butt. It only makes you look stupid and makes me waste time correcting you>>>
The largest email system I ever built was 200,000 users. The most complex compliance project I ever did was for a $5 Billion per year private company with operations in 22 countries. The largest backup system I ever built was for a medical organization with 20 hospitals, over 100 secondary care facilities and 28,000 users. Oops, that was the largest one that was HIPPA compliant. My largest ever involved a provincial government and a tape library that at the time (about 5 years ago) was the 2nd largest tape library every deployed in the world. The most secure data protection system I ever was involved in was for a NATO organization that required CIA Orangebook B2 class security and was active in combat operations for the war in Bosnia.
Frankly Dave, your arrogance and ignorant debating style is beginning to wear thin. I’ve responded to you with civility, and facts. You want to argue from authority, then read a few snippets from my background and experience above. You really want to put your credentials up against mine? If you really want to take the gloves off, by all means. Of course, I’m not a circus clown (or was it a rodea clown? I forget) that you can challenge to a fist fight and then not show up. Nor do I shoot my mouth off about what a good scienist I am when I’m just a bully moderator at Uncommon Descent where RC like moderator practices are used to advance the “intelligent design” pretend science as a cover for pushing religion. BTW, I was doing cpu design win work for Intel when you were programming primitive graphics systems for Coleco. I was doing design work on military command and control systems for naval battle ships and system control for communications satellites about the time you were proudly proclaiming that the Dell desk tops you were marketing had the best Quake benchmarks on the market.
Stuff your head back up your butt sir, because that’s where it belongs.

J Martin says:
November 27, 2011 at 12:56 pm
“and got $0.16 twice as high as I was expecting.”
I’m going by 2009 worldwide prices from a table in Wikedpedia which is $0.19. Point still stands as that’s still 50% higher than US price.
“I’m sure when I was visiting a friend in France two years ago that it was half that amount. I remember that she got her electricity from the same company in France that I got mine from in England and her cost per kwh was half mine then.”
Progressive tax rate would be my guess. If you use very little you pay a very low rate. Some states, notably California, are like that in the U.S.
“Perhaps the French electricity companies are milking their customers for whatever they can get. Or
perhaps they also now have a windmill tax.”
I think it’s the government doing the milking.
“$0.11 that’s cheap.”
Not as cheap as eastern Europe.
“Diesel here is £1.40 per litre.”
Highway robbery. Canada is like that too and has been for as long as I can remember. It’s less than half that here. Taxes again. It’s no mystery to most of us conservative small government yanks why Europe’s economy is going down the tubes. The only mystery to us is how it lasted this long without collapsing. Socialism doesn’t work and that’s the direction western Europe has been heading in for at least a few decades. Eastern Europe on the other hand has been going in the opposite direction. Which has shown the greatest improvement? Thirty or even twenty years ago I’d have never imagined that eastern Europe would become better allies than western Europe but by golly I’ve changed my mind since then. Eastern Europeans have a little more appreciation for self-rule under some flavor of democracy I guess after having lived without it for so long.
“But what annoys me most as we approach a series of cold winters is that the cost of wholesale gas in the US has halved, but over here in the UK they are putting up gas and electricity prices, claiming that the cost of wholesale gas has increased. Yet we know that a there is a vast amount of readily accessible shale gas here.”
What can I say? You’re still some form of representative democracy, right? You get exactly the government that you elect. We’re in process of housecleaning right now. It only took a couple years for the consequential reality of liberal majority to make itself evident. Stuff happens. Last time a mistake like this was made was Jimmy Carter. Every generation has to make the mistake one time I guess.
“Time we had a bitterly cold winter followed by a general election, and we can vote out some of the religious co2 muppets that pose as members of parliament.”
I hope so.

Anthony;
If you’d like, I could knock off a high level article on email systems, backup and archive systems, and compliance intended for a lay audience in a few days if that would be of value for your readership in terms of understanding the terminology and issues regarding CG1 and CG2. Just send me an email.
DaveH

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 27, 2011 at 3:08 pm

I think that suppression is a strong word. In my NASA world which is dominated by planetary scientists, the science missions are all geared toward answering planetary science questions and the funding goes to planetary scientists who want to answer those questions. It is a fairly closed loop fraternity and this is the reason that for those of us who’s focus is the economic development of the Moon and solar system, we almost never get our desired missions funded.

Was there ever a time when you did get those missions funded? This was never more than a dream from what I can determine that made great science fiction plots but never seriously moved towards science fact. I shared the dream and maybe even still held onto it as late as the end of the Apollo program but then it became pretty apparent that LEO was the only thing that was going to be developed and that was strictly for spy and communications satellites. Even the space stations turned out to be sideshow attractions. Now even the space shuttle is gone too. Very sad.

Dave Springer;
So ya think some hacker outside the university or even a whistle blower on the inside had access to offsite tape backups? And could pore through them assembling an archive of email spanning over a decade? That would take an awful lot of effort and an awful lot of tapes.
You just can’t help yourself digging a deeper and deeper hole of stupidity for yourself can you?>>>
I knew you would be stupid enough to take your head back out of your *ss.
You made bold statements as to how email systems and backup systems and archive systems work that were completely false, and I corrected your blatant misinformation. Rather than admit you spouted off in total and complete ignorance, you instead come back with a saracstic remark about how you think… that I think… the hacker or whistle blower got the email.
If you are so stupid as to continue announcing to the world the depth of your arrogance and incompetance on the subject, then I shall be gald to oblige you.
In a best practices backup implementation that relies upon tape as the long term storage media, data is copied to a local tape library. If possible, the tape library is located outside the main computer room itself in order that any disaster that is limited to the computer room leaves the tape library intact and available as a first line of recovery resource. The tape library while possibly being outside of the computer room itself, must still be close enough that the network communications links can operate properly. In the case of fibre channel, that may be several kilometers while in the case of ethernet it would be measured in hundreds of meters.
The “off site” copy I referred to in my previous comment was in regard to a SECOND tape copy. This SECOND copy is sent “off site” to a storage facility at a distance from the main computer room large enough to remain intact in the event of a disaster with sufficient radius to destroy both the computer room and the tape library.
Returning now to the point I made about data retention policies, best practice is for the tapes retained in the local library to be retained for a period identical to those retained in the off site facility. So, Mr Smart *SS, whatever tapes exist off site ALSO exist ON SITE and will have all the emails ever backed up and still retained based on the organization’s data retention policy.
You’ve got poo in your hair. Go wash up.

Dave Springer;
Feel free to provide some verifiable links to what you actually did for a living. I’m prepared to believe you were a manager which is what you claimed in another thread. That doesn’t mean you know jack diddly squat about the technology and your writing here certainly reflects that.>>>
I don’t debate people with poo in their hair, and I have zero interest in “proving” my credentials to you. I’ve never shot my mouth off about my credentials like that in several years of commenting on this blog and I only did so to try and bring you to some sense of reality. I don’t argue from authority, nor do I denigrate those I disagree with by make disgusting insinuations. I don’t challenge people to fist fights and then not show up. I don’t threaten to shoot people with the gun I carry if they do show up. I don’t make pronouncements about what people do and do not know based on comments that are entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
I’ve added one more “don’t” to my list.
I don’t respond to complete jerks. Consider yourself on “ignore”.

@davidmhoffer
Random sampling of companies offering email archive solutions:
http://www.messagesolution.com/Linux_and_UNIX_Email_Servers.htm
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/archiver-overview.php
http://www.smarsh.com/email-archiving?gclid=CIuf_o6Q2KwCFWJntgod-BjKjA
There are scores of them competing for the privilege of being your email archive solution.
A longish discussion of the topic:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/10/27/did-jones-delete-emails/
Several mentions of how common it is to archive all emails and discussion of software that finds duplicates of large attachments sent to multiple recipients, strips the duplicates and saves one copy, marks each email to indicate which emails had the attachment, and automatically restores the attachment when the archive is consulted.
It should be noted that attachments are preserved in the FOIA file although I have not checked to see if there are duplicates of the same attachment. Maybe Hoffer, if he’s done googling me for ad hominem ammunition, can actually exercise some of his mad ninja network skillz to investigate the actual question at hand.
The UEA claims that the archive was taken from a single backup email server not from periodic backups. The emails span a period of 13 years from 1996 through 2009.
So, as I suspected and so rudely took DavidMHoffer to school about, these emails didn’t come from periodic backups. That’s just silly. That would be a huge job to extract 13 years of email history from routine periodic server backups. These were taken from a live email backup server. The question is now whether Jones, Briffa, Schneider, and about a score of others kept 13 years worth of emails on purpose or it was just SOP at UEA-CRU to archive email like a million other institutions do and for which a good number of companies produce third party software to assist in the very task. My money’s on the latter and UEA isn’t going to admit that they were keeping copies of all the researcher’s emails. Not telling anyone their email is being routinely archived isn’t uncommon either. There’s no legal compulsion for an institution to inform individual employees what information the institution owns is being retained or discarded. The naivety being displayed by Hoffer in thinking otherwise does not square with his claims of expertise on the subject. Emails are routinely archived and held in a single point of access not scattered across scores periodic tape backups. This done for the express and proverbial purpose of the institution being able to cover its ass (CYA) in case of accusations of sexual harassment, theft, fraud, wrongful termination, or any number of other situations where that may arise where they need to know exactly what transpired.

Wow. Who’d a thunk… UEA IT department was keeping extensive, long duration, backups of email on a centralized server housed in the IT department. It seems no one responding to FOIA requests was aware that it was really easy to recover all the email traffic from any individual or group of individuals employed at UEA. And obviously Jones, Briffa, and the rest of the usual suspects had no idea that when they deleted emails from their personal folders this didn’t delete those emails from the unpublicized backup server the IT department was maintaining.
I’m here to tell you folks that this is COMMON practice. I merely assumed it was done at UEA by a brief review of the circumstances. I put the odds that this was an inside job at a higher confidence level than IPCC assigns to human activity accounting for most of the recent warming within an hour of when I first got wind of it 1999. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows what’s actually happening int he real world. It was patently ridiculous to believe this was painstakingly assembled from periodioc backups. This was taken from long term single point of access archives which are a whole different animal than periodic backups. Periodic backups are able able to restore a server to any point it was at in history, or at least at one instant in time each day or whatever interval the backups are taken. These email archives are done differently and few employees are informed it’s happening although if they ask around or read enough policy manuals they might stumble across it. It generally doesn’t go over well with the troops when you tell them they’re being recorded for posterity and things they write in emails could come back to haunt them 20 years later. Not well at all. Trust is a two way street. If you don’t trust me I don’t trust you is usually the way it works. So it’s more or less a don’t ask don’t tell policy when it comes to email archiving.
So here is my standard advice so YOU don’t get your emails recorded where you work. Get a personal email provider and use that for all correspondence you don’t want the IT department at your company going over for entertainment purposes. They can see it all for company-assigned email addresses. It’s a helluva lot harder for them to eavesdrop on your personal ISP.

_Jim;
Oh, gee, not Google searchable yet …>>>
Neither is anything CIA Orange Book B2 level security 😉
A few months ago I got into a disagreement with a sales engineer on how a particular storage array manufactured by Springer’s former employer would deal with large scale single threaded applications. I said performance would suck (the technical term applicable in my opinion) and she disagreed. After some back and forth I speed dialed a friend of mine who was her boss’s boss’s boss and also in charge of all the SE’s for half of North America. After a short discussion, he told her to be quiet and listen to me. Not as funny as the time the 2IC of NORAD told one of his PM’s to listen to me or be court martialled, but close.
Sorry, you can’t google either of those either.

…and lest anyone think I was slagging the products made by Mr On Ignore’s previous employer, I was not. That vendor has multiple products, and there was a different product they made that was more suitable to the task at hand (in my opinion).

davidmhoffer says:
November 27, 2011 at 7:29 pm
Sorry, you can’t google either of those either.
=============================================
How convenient. I was on Bill Gates’ and Gordon Moore’s speed dial but you can’t google those either.
I guess you’ll just have to defend yourself with being provably correct about what you claim. You know, like I proved I was correct about how the emails weren’t collected from periodic backups. Waving your hands around claiming to be a CIA agent or whatever outlandish claim you’re making now won’t cut it, bubba. Cry why don’t you ya big baby.

Oh my. I proved I was right about the emails with a quote from the UK government investigation saying the emails were stored exactly how I figured they were [SNIP: Dave, I asked you nicely. -REP] LOL

“Ian W says:
November 27, 2011 at 3:42 am
I suggest that you check your assumptions about saturated air and read http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/enthalpy-moist-air-d_683.html and use the formulae there”
A sentence at the bottom said: “Note! The latent heat due to evaporation of water is the major part of the enthalpy. The sensible heat due to heating evaporated water vapor can be almost neglected.”
In my post, I was NOT talking about any phase changes. I was assuming for example that you have two 20 liter containers full of dry air. Then you add enough water vapor to one to reach a 4% water vapor concentration. Then you find that it takes about 8% more energy to heat the one with the added water vapor to the same temperature increase as the dry air.
Your statement: “So the heat energy required to raise that volume of air increases by up to ~10 times.” left me with the impression you were just heating air with water and NOT causing any phase changes with water. I completely agree that incorporating phase changes affects all calculations.

[SNIP: Dave, I asked you nicely. -REP]
You’re getting very, very sleepy. Your eyelids are getting heavy. I’m going to comment backward from ten. When I get to one you’ll be too tired to snip and fall into a deep, deep sleep.
Ten…
[REPLY: Sorry, but there will be other moderators on duty even if I ….z z z z z z z

[REPLY: Not a saint and not swearing. Derailing a thread with OT personal attacks will be snipped. Those are the rules. Thanks. -REP]
I understand. Snip away. The next mod to take up the watch may be more or less strict. I don’t try to read minds or figure out who’s got the helm. Most of the time what I wrote tonight wouldn’t get snipped. But that’s okay. I don’t expect the moderators to indistinguishable clones. No hard feelings.

davidmhoffer says:
November 27, 2011 at 3:09 pm

Anthony;
If you’d like, I could knock off a high level article on email systems, backup and archive systems, and compliance intended for a lay audience in a few days if that would be of value for your readership in terms of understanding the terminology and issues regarding CG1 and CG2. Just send me an email.
DaveH

What? Are you the same David Hoffer who wrote the following? The guy who makes the second in command of the North American Radar Defense system threaten to court martial a Provost Marshall for disrespecting you? The guy who called up what must have been a member of the board of directors at Dell to get some little female FAE who disrespected you to “be quiet and listen to you”?.

A few months ago I got into a disagreement with a sales engineer on how a particular storage array manufactured by Springer’s former employer would deal with large scale single threaded applications. I said performance would suck (the technical term applicable in my opinion) and she disagreed. After some back and forth I speed dialed a friend of mine who was her boss’s boss’s boss and also in charge of all the SE’s for half of North America. After a short discussion, he told her to be quiet and listen to me. Not as funny as the time the 2IC of NORAD told one of his PM’s to listen to me or be court martialled, but close.”

Surely this ain’t the same guy begging Anthony Watts to let him post an article on this blog?
Non-sequitur.
Oh I know! Make one of those awesome phone calls to people in high places and get your article published in the Wall Street Journal or something like that then Anthony will link to it and sing your praises in the process! Oh I have an even better idea! Give Ann Coulter a ring. I mean she takes calls from a couple of right wing professors I know in the Intelligent Design circles so surely she must take your calls too, right? Get her to get you an interview on the Sean Hannity show. You’re just WAY TOO IMPORTANT to be pleading in public for blog space here.
SO non-sequitur. ROFLMAO
And REP, notice there was NO name calling involved here. No villification. Just making helpful suggestions to Hoffer for getting a “high level” dissertation of email policies to consider in figuring out what happened at UEA.
Oh wait. I already gave that dissertation and proved I knew what I was talking about with a direct quote from the Muir report which specifically the emails were stored in the manner and place I assumed along was the case. Nevermind. I guess I wasn’t being helpful after all.

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 27, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Gail: “One of the crucial assumptions seems to be that CO2 is “uniform” through out the atmosphere. As a chemist who dealt with real world mixing problems in industry, I have a major problem with that assumption.
Can you shed any light on that point???”
From what I understand wet chemists have found considerable variation in CO2 concentrations in laboratory experiments, from the low 200′s to the 500 ppm range. Indeed early measurements of CO2 atmospheric concentration were done by wet chemists and they have major variations in concentration. In the 1964 DARPA book that I referenced in a previous email I read that the military’s measurements of CO2 concentrations found that below 100 meters altitude there is a wide variance in CO2 levels that would tend to confirm the work of wet chemists.
If this is true, and have have no reason to not believe this as it is from two separate disciplines of experimental findings, then the computer models have a major problem when assuming uniformity, especially at the crucial ground/atmosphere interface.
I think that Anthony had something on this here on WUWT a couple of years ago and I know that Chris Monckton was interested in this as well.
============================================
I do wish someone with real science expertise would get interested in it.. I’ve been trying to point out that the basic physics of AGW are science fiction, in this one: ‘the CO2 well-mixed in the atmosphere’ is based on the fantasy that oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide are ideal gases, i.e., that they have no volume or weight and are zipping around at tremendous speeds in empty space knocking into each other in elastic collisions and so, ‘carbon dioxide is uniformly mixed thoroughly in the atmosphere’.
Seriously, I asked about this of a PhD teaching the subject, and examining on it, he was adamant,(once I got him to admit that CO2 pooled by giving real world examples), that CO2 ‘having pooled on the floor in a room without any work being done to change the conditions (open window, fan) would spontaneously begin diffusing and zipping through the air in the room bashing into the other molecules it would become sooooo thoroughly mixed that it couldn’t become unmixed without work being done’. The examples from the AGWScience Fiction department given to argue this is ‘real physics’ are ‘scent diffusing through a room and ink dropped into a glass of water’. They do not have convection. This is a fictional physics to describe their fictional world, in which radiation rules supreme.
The AIRS data, which has not been fully released, no lower or top of atmosphere results and no proper detail of the mid which they released a picture or two, came to the conclusion, and oh that bloody suprise again, how surprised they were to find carbon dioxide was not thoroughly mixed, but lumpy.
I’ve given the story before, wish I could find the link to it.., about the AGWSF-educated scientist who hearing the argument from real physics that molecules have weight and so heavier than air will always sink displacing air and lighter will always rise, and mines in real life are given as examples, decided to go to a mine to check this out. He found that the methane he’d introduced layered at the top of the mine and didn’t diffuse into the air. He couldn’t believe it, sent his team to search for hidden sources which he thought could be adding to the layered at the ceiling and so spoiling the diffusion into well-mixed. They couldn’t find any such source. He concluded that they had missed it..
This is an absolutely huge teaching from the AGWScience’s production department of fictional/fantasy physics and they have been extremely successful introducing it into main stream education.
There’s a whole generation of people who think the atmosphere above us is empty space, they have no grasp of the fluid gaseous volume of air above us..
When you try to explain real physics about this to them they come back with ‘then carbon dioxide would sink into a layer at the low points like the Dead Sea’ or ‘layer as in a cake’ – they have no grasp of the dynamics of life cycles (they exclude the Water Cycle completely in their ‘energy budget’ KT97 and its ilk. But a warning, don’t expect any internal coherence in their explanations, that was never the point of the AGWSF world physics, so for example, if they’re stumped with you rejecting the ‘ideal gas claim’, they’ll give you Brownian motion for CO2 mixing thoroughly, suddenly they have fluid gas volume but exclude CO2 from it.. 🙂
They have no sound in their world. They can’t hear you.

Dennis Ray Wingo says @ G. Karst :
November 27, 2011 at 10:41 pm
While it is not getting any publicity companies are sending their own experiments to ISS for processing. That is a small market, today
There is a lot of analog lunar activity starting to build and though it is not public yet, interesting things are happening.

Dennis Ray Wingo,
The amount of private moneys going into private ventures for space based business and habitats are not completely available to the public. Nor should it be.
Based on discussions that can be Googled . . . . the interest in non-earth business and habitats is accelerating. Therefore one can also reasonably think the amount of private money going to those areas is growing significantly.
The non-scientific agendas supporting alarming/concernist AGW by CO2 from fossil fuels actually may have stimulated private space development.
John

Dave Springer says:
November 27, 2011 at 11:18 pm
Forced? Is someone holding a gun to your head? Try using your arrow key or mouse wheel and scroll past my name to the next one in line. I promise I won’t be offended.

Gee Dave, that’s easily fixed:
It was interesting reading while we are NOT forced to watch David Springer and davidmhoffer kick themselves to pieces.
I read all of YOUR comments as well as davidmhoffer’s because you are both intelligent and fact filled individuals. I am stimulated by new ideas and perspective. I enjoy spectator fights as much as the next guy. But even boxing matches have an end. If a KO doesn’t end the fight it is called after 3, 4, 6, 8,10 or 12 rounds depending on club and fight/level. They are not allowed to bite off ears or disembowel each other! What would be the fun in that? Both of you should back off the personal animosity, return to your corners… wait for the bell! GK

As for the mixing of CO2, there are only minor variations in the CO2 concentration throughout the atmosphere.
It is a common misconception that buoyancy applies to gases as it does to liquids, however that is not the case. If we take a helium filled balloon in a room, it would rise to the top, however a CO2 filled balloon would go to the bottom. However if we poke a hole in each balloon, the individual molecules spread out very evenly. And in the atmosphere outside, the distribution of all gas molecules with the exception of water vapor, is very consistent. If all heavier molecules would sink to the bottom, then we would never have very heavy chlorofluorocarbons in the stratosphere. Helium atoms do escape from our atmosphere. However it is not due to buoyancy. You could have a CO2 molecule and a helium atom in the same place high in the atmosphere at the same temperature. Being the same temperature means the translational kinetic energy is the same. Kinetic energy is calculated by the formula E = 1/2mv2. Since the helium atom is much lighter than the CO2 molecule, its velocity at the same temperature is much higher so it can reach escape velocity and thereby leave Earth. By contrast, Jupiter has a larger gravitational field and a lower temperature than Earth, so it can hold on to its hydrogen and helium.

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 29, 2011 at 9:09 am
Mauna Loa is described in the spiels about this as a “pristine” site for measuring this unproven ‘background’,
I really don’t know about the quality of the Mauna Loa data>>>
I looked into the issue a long time ago and came away pretty satisfied that their data is accurate. Willis Eschenbach did a very deep dive on the matter and came away with the same conclusion, as has Ferdinand Englebeen. If Willis and Ferdinand are OK with it, I’m OK with it.
Beck and the pre Muana Loa data is more difficult to sort out. Beck showed for example that readings taken at night when there was no wind were much lower than readings taken on windy nights. On a windless night in the centre of a corn field, the level of CO2 would be effectively zero because the corn had sucked it all up. To get accurate readings, Beck worked out various technicques for sampling in areas where vegetation could not have a large effect, sufficient wind to ensure the local air was mixed by the turbulance and so on.