From a University of East Anglia Press Release
Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.
Professor Jones said: “What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible. After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director’s role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support.”
Vice-Chancellor Professor Edward Acton said: “I have accepted Professor Jones’s offer to stand aside during this period. It is an important step to ensure that CRU can continue to operate normally and the independent review can conduct its work into the allegations.
“We will announce details of the Independent Review, including its terms of reference, timescale and the chair, within days. I am delighted that Professor Peter Liss, FRS, CBE, will become acting director.”
An AP story is here
h/t to Jeff Id of The Air Vent
“When I were a lad, we’d have ter hold us breath, dive ter t’bottom of t’lake, turn t’mud upside down, and graph t’sediments before breakfast.”
What! You were allowed a breath before breakfast! We ad ter drain the lake, take samples of the mud, get ’em to the lab for analysis, return ’em were we got ’em, and refill the lake, all before we even woke up.
I noticed that a lot of money for the new center (here’s the link, btw)
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/139/centre_for_low_carbon_futures
was coming from something called the “Yorkshire Forward.”
http://www.yorkshire-forward.com/about/what-we-do
One senses the vast is the extent of the AGW cancer, with tentacles reaching throughout academia, economics and government. It’s positively frightening.
They are so invested in this that they cannot afford to ditch AGW. It’s the fantasy foundation that all their activities are based on. I fear that there will be no long term consequences from Climategate. There’s too much momentum behind it. G-d help us.
Oh, and is there anything this guy hasn’t got his paws into?
“Results 1 – 10 of about 95 for <b<"Yorkshire Forward" "George Soros". (0.25 seconds)”
Kate, Kate, Kate,
Where’s the link to this story? Oh, here it is — so simple to do: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1232722/Professor-climate-change-scandal-helps-police-enquiries-researchers-banned.html
And why do you say he was “arrested” when the story clearly says the police said he’s being treated as a victim?
Has “arrest” got a different meaning over in the UK? Does “arrest” now mean something good? LOL.
hm….well “helping the police with their enquiries” often is used as a euphemism for being arrested and questioned.
What doesn’t quite ring true here is that I thought when the story first broke, the UEA were supposed to have involved the police from the outset, in the investigation of the supposed “hack”, so Jones, et al, including the IT people, should have been assisting the police with their enquiries (literally and not euphemistically) for some time now.
….well “helping the police with their enquiries” often is used as a euphemism for being arrested and questioned
———–
Do you mean to say that news reporters intentionally misreport things or do you mean to say that the police lie to reporters?
tallbloke (12:04:59) :
correction, maybe.
I don’t know that Soros is connected with Yorkshire Forward, except that they appear in the search results together, and that his writing is featured on the Y.F. website.
Also, I meant to quote this from the announcement of the new to-be-built Leeds climate center.
(The extra links are to illustrate what a piece of tripe that excerpt is. I hope the censors deem them appropriate)
Bonnie (12:42:39) :
Hi. Your question is legitimate, and deserves an answer.
I am an old hand at reading reports like these, and I can tell you that the British press uses certain words and expressions that mean a lot more than you might at first gather. When the police get involved in a complex situation like this, they will take a party to the police station to “help them with their inquires”. What this actually means is that they have not given the party the option of not responding to a criminal complaint, and, such as in the case of the “cash for honours” scandal, people are arrested under caution, and taken to a police station for formal questioning.
As far as most people in Britain are concerned, that’s an arrest, and that’s what has happened here. The whole thing may have been spun to the press to make out he is the victim of some crime or other, but we all know there are serious complaints against him which have to be investigated by the police, and that process has now started.
Craig Moore (19:04:18) :
Your comment only adds to what I have suspected, that Dr. Pielke Jr., while he may mean well, is not someone I can trust for political insight, and probably not on the climate, either.
While your use of his gratuitous dig at Bush’s Iraq policy isn’t the best analogy to illustrate the evils of Climategate, it is very illustrative of D.P.J.’s warped perception of reality.
Just goes to show that good intentions aren’t any guarantee that someone is right. I suspect his views on climate change are equally distorted, based on some of what I’ve read by him.
Thanks for the info.
Thanks, Kate, but…. It seems to me that if a person is arrested, he would have been booked into custody, give his fingerprints, photograph, and DNA sample. You’re saying that in Great Britain, these things are covered up by the press, that people are actually arrested and the press doesn’t report it? I find that hard to believe, frankly. And you’re also implying that the police lie to the public? Or are you saying both? Sounds dreadful, whichever it is. That’s like saying if I were arrested in London when a visitor there, the police would not tell anyone? I don’t believe it.
Finally, the REAL inconvenient truth is getting out, it was a hoax!!!!!!! Where is the press coverage????
Bonnie, you must learn to understand double speak. Instead of coming up with useful phrases for each event, busy people come up with one phrase that covers everything. So it could mean exactly what it says or it could mean something else. That’s what double speak is meant to do. Cover yur arse.
Maybe that’s how it is in the UK, but here, arrests are public information, and a person is either arrested or he’s not. Police don’t hide the arrest status of a person. Maybe you guys do. All I can say is it strikes me as very odd, and I’m not sure I believe it. There’s no concealing an arrest here. If you’re saying that’s what’s done in the UK, I’ll have to check it out somewhere before I’ll buy it. No offense to either of you, of course. But what you’re saying makes no sense at all to me. I apologize for diverting the discussion, though, and perhaps should end my participation in this particular issue.
“[Zorita] said: “I can confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU files. The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.” The researcher added although he does not believe that man-made climate is a hoax, he and other researchers have been bullied and subtly blackmailed to fit in the scientific mainstream. “In this atmosphere, PhD students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the “politically correct picture”,” he said. “Some, or many, issues about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of these attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture.”
The boldfaced portions above indicate where we should focus our attack–on the impaired credibility of “the Consensus of Climate Scientists” and the IPCC resulting from their “machination, conspiracies and collusion” and “bullying and subtle blackmailing.” The remedy we propose should be a re-examination of the evidence by a non-partisan IPCC-like body, with oversight by elder statesmen from fields outside of climate science, from major scientific societies, and from prominent scientific climate contrarians.
That panel, realizing that the whole world is watching, won’t attempt any shell games. As a result, it will issue a responsible, non-catastrophic report, a recantation of the hockey stick, and recommendations for research that does not look to a foregone conclusion, including Monckton’s recommendation for an automated worldwide weather-reporting system. It should also allocate lots of dough to attempts to falsify the CAWG-hypothesis. That’s the scientific method.
What our side should NOT do is get tempted into making exaggerated claims about:
* e-mail statements that might have an innocent or semi-innocent interpretation;
* the extent to which CRU’s force-fitting of the data was culpable or significant;
* the extent to which the global temperature record is unreliable;
* the extent to which global warming has been disproved.
On all those points, and similar ones, our opponents can turn the discussion into a technical matter that the average non-initiate can’t follow, and thereby fight us to a draw, or the appearance of a draw. We must force the fight to occur on a battleground where we have an overwhelming advantage, and not do battle elsewhere. (Did Sun Tzu say something like that? If not, he should have.) Find the weak spot in the enemy’s line and press the attack THERE.
Here’s an analogy. (There must be better one, but I’m pressed for time.) Let’s say the director of a charitable foundation was discovered to have been diverting some of the donations improperly, and yet not criminally. Let’s say he felt the money would be put to better use if spent on some matter completely unrelated to his charity’s charter, and that he’d done so.
His critics, who’d always been suspicious of him, would have an open-and-shut case for auditing the charity’s books, and taking away the charity’s book-keeping from his cronies, and suchlike measures.
However, if that director had powerful allies inside and outside his organization, and if public opinion had been trained to regard him as a saint, his critics would be unwise to claim that he had been acting unethically, or that everything he’d done was wrong, or that the charity to which the money had been diverted was undeserving of a penny from anyone. Those assertions might be true or they might not be, but in the existing situation they would be the wrong cards to play.
We must not overplay our hand. We need to get mainstream scientific opinion and mainstream journalists and environmentalists to take the first steps toward distancing themselves from the consensus, and then let time and the effects of unbiased examination do their work. We mustn’t try to hustle them into a Saul-to-Paul conversion, which they’ll resist. (For one thing, they won’t like the implicit suggestion that they have heretofore been playing the role of Saul.)
Here’s a statement by Tim Ball that keeps the focus on the proper place–the untrustworthiness of the CRUsaders:
“Several scientists have known for years the science was wrong and the CRU with a few others were doing things beyond normal scientific techniques to mislead the public. We couldn’t compete with the deliberate media misinformation, personal attacks and frightening orchestration disclosed in the hacked emails.”
You know why this isn’t in the news?
It’s because no newsworthy story has emerged except one lawsuit I know of in the UK.
The news media will cover NEWS.
So, go make some news for them to cover.
It’s really as simple as that.
You either need a lawsuit or a big name to hold a press conference and announce … well, you gotta work on that detail.
But the point is, they will cover it if it’s NEWS.
Go
make
some
NEWS!
Do something. We cannot expect the press to root out corruption that it does not itself see. Do you get it? Do you see what I am saying?
The guy from MIT sounds like a good candidate….
Here’s a statement by Tim Ball that keeps the focus on the proper place–the untrustworthiness of the CRUsaders:
“Several scientists have known for years the science was wrong and the CRU with a few others were doing things beyond normal scientific techniques to mislead the public. We couldn’t compete with the deliberate media misinformation, personal attacks and frightening orchestration disclosed in the hacked emails.”
______
OK, that’s a perfect illustration of what is NOT news and will NOT be covered. The media is not out to mediate the warring sides. It is in the business of telling people what has happened.
You have to DO SOMETHING for it to be reported as HAPPENING.
Do something; don’t just sit there.
You will lose this thing unless you do something worthy of being related to other people via the media.
Think concretely. Media aren’t interested in your editorial thoughts unless they’re in a context of SOMETHINTG HAPPENING — NEWS.
All right. I’m off my soapbox.
Bonnie (18:22:14) :
“That’s like saying if I were arrested in London when a visitor there, the police would not tell anyone? I don’t believe it.”
…If you were arrested in London and questioned, but not formally charged, at that stage, with a criminal offense, while the police continued elsewhere with their inquiries, you would be described by the police and press alike as “helping the police with their inquiries”. In the US, you would be said to have been “arrested in connection with..” or “arrested on suspicion of…” etc.
Bonnie wrote:
“OK, that’s a perfect illustration of what is NOT news and will NOT be covered. The media is not out to mediate the warring sides. It is in the business of telling people what has happened.
“You have to DO SOMETHING for it to be reported as HAPPENING.”
There are leaders of the Contrarians’ camp who are going to be interviewed, there are debates that are going to go on within the scientific societies that have endorsed CAWG, there are columnists who are going to be writing op eds, there are bloggers who are going to be weighing in, etc. I’m urging them to focus on the “intangible” aspect of the CRUtape letters–the character of the participants, the politicization of the field, the engineering of consensus, etc.
There is no harm done in urging these opinion-leaders to play their cards in a certain way when they speak or write.
Maybe they, or someone else, should do something else as well. I have suggested ways of getting better publicity, primarily urging Stossel (or someone at Fox) to run a regular weekly series of lengthy interviews with Contrarians. (And give warmists a similar time slot for their side.) I’ve urged that someone on our side set up a point/counterpoint website, to rebut the warmists’ rebuttals. I’ve also run a nifty Climategate logo up the flagpole here, but no one’s saluted. (I’ve probably made other practical suggestions, which I can’t immediately recall.)
I think lawsuits will provide a news peg for the media to hang a story on, but those are hardly going to be filed overnight, and the persons who might file them will do so or not without my input.
I’m not sure that staging a pseudo-event would necessarily be a winner. The Caitlin expedition, and other warmist attention-getting gimmicks, like protesting the DC power plant, mostly backfired. Fence-sitting scientists, who are going to be the most important ones who will decide this issue, may well be put off by such stunting.
Even if we somehow made the headlines in a positive manner, I don’t know that it would make much difference. The word is getting out over the Internet, including amusing videos on YouTube, and public opinion is shifting rapidly, without the help of any PR stunts from our side.
Time is on our side. The warmist Titanic has been torpedoed. There’s no need for emergency publicity because Copenhagen is doomed, and so is the possibility, now, of getting anything through congress within the next year or two; i.e., prior to a re-examination of the case for CAWG by neutral scientific panels. With Climategate, fence-sitting politicians have an excuse (which they’ve wanted all along) for delay. Temperatures will continue to plateau or fall during the interim, and more contrarian voices, hitherto silenced, will peep up. The tide has turned. No need, or not much, for froth.
Wow. I was petulant, wasn’t I? Sorry, Roger. I don’t mean gimmicks, of course, nor frothing, but I guess I asked for that. Or pseudo-events or PR stunts, for that matter. I meant serious actions. I meant to shed light on the actual reason for media behavior. I don’t think it’s necessarily their bias in all cases.