Guest post by Christopher Horner, Planet Gore at National Review Online
One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.
That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim — when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications — that in fact he’d lost it.
First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.
But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?
Among all that has been revealed, there does not appear to be one. Let alone a chain discussing the importance of not at long last actually having the raw, how this loss might relate to the scores of emails they wrote about whether to release the data and how to avoid releasing the data and how they’d rather destroy it (I don’t know, “pretend to have lost it”) than give it to the folks who seem to be on to them.
This seems like a big email, and a chain of discussions that would pervade that which has been revealed. It doesn’t.
To the contrary, we have numerous emails from Jones explaining how turning over the raw data is one option, but he’d much rather destroy it than let the intrepid start pawing over it which could only lead, as he admits in one email, to figuring out what CRU et al did to said raw data in order to come up with their alarming claims.
So there is a reasonable conclusion, and it is not that the data was lost or destroyed twenty years ago.
But who knows, maybe Jones wrote James Hansen at NASA, or Gavin Schmidt — for so long a taxpayer-funded activist for Environmental Media Services’ RealClimate.blog and now implicated as a major player in these emails (Capo number 6 according to this analysis). Those should turn up when the courts help NASA figure out how to come into compliance with their legal obligations and provide me similar data and correspondence that they have been, similarly and by chance, refusing me for over two years.
Christopher C. Horner Senior Fellow Competitive Enterprise Institute 1899 L. St, NW 12th Floor Washington, DC, 20036 +1.202.331.2260 (O)
Author of the newly released: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed http://www.amazon.com/Red-Hot-Lies-Alarmists-Misinformed/dp/1596985380/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231180047&sr=8-1
Author of The New York Times Bestselling The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Global-Warming-Environmentalism/dp/1596985011
Andrew and Cynical Bastard,
Yes, the article linked is satire. There is no “Institute for Scriptural Geology” in Waco, Texas. Maybe in “wacko land,” but not in Texas.
Cheers
Given institutions have to back up their data daily and store it off site, I can’t imagine the raw data doesn’t conveniently exist somewhere.
For comparative purposes – relative importance?
Results 1 – 10 of about 27,600,000 for porn [definition]. (0.22 seconds)
Results 1 – 10 of about 22,300,000 for climategate. (0.19 seconds)
Doesn’t it seem odd to anyone else who ISN’T making statements here? Considering the number of places on the internet where Ian Harris is fingered as the author of the comments in the HARRY_READ_ME file and other incriminating code (just google him) … isn’t it a bit funny that there are NO public statements attributable to him about the matter? You’d think even a “Sorry, wasn’t me, have no idea who you’re talking about”.
From the tone of the comments, I would think Mr. Harris actually has been itching for some time to vent some of his thoughts about this. Does he not welcome a chance to do so? He may hold the survival of the climate scaremongering industry, and the careers of several prominent scarists, in his hands.
I agree with others that Jones et al have shown a propensity for deletion as mentioned in the leaked emails. I could easily imagine these malefactors deleting loads of pertinent data/correspondence for years. That is how they do science. Talk about a process of elimination!
Candice Miller speaks to congress
I am British, so feel particularly aggrieved that Climate Gate should be unfolding in my country, but of course the US also has a big stake in this.
Can I therefore suggest a course of action that someone here could take in order to get to the bottom of this web of deceit, because it is certain the British Govt will not attempt to.
Few of us can now doubt that there is a political dimension to the AGW debate that has set the agenda for the climate science community. It is no coincidence that the desire of the UK govt to push their socialist agenda under the guise of catastrophic climate change should result in the lavish funding of UK climate research units;
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/crossing-the-rubicon-an-advert-to-change-hearts-and-minds/#comments
Hadley Centre has had $250 million dollars since 1993 and CRU also tens of millions, including- intriguingly- money from Nato and the US Dept of Energy.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ah4XLQCleuUYdFIxMnhMNnlXb2JQcDZUendjUXpWWUE&hl=en
It is not therefore surprising that science with a political dimension will cut corners in order to please their political pay masters, hence the implosion at CRU.
Some concerned British citizens have started an online petition here
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/HADLEY-LEAK/
This is where the US can get actively involved. For reasons best known to our increasingly sinister UK leaders -who seem to believe Orwell’s 1984 is a blueprint for govt and not a work of fiction- they have passed a law allowing the USA to extradite British citizens to the US for activities that are not even a crime in the UK. The law is not reciprocal. We can leave aside the justice of this for another time and place.
The point is that if the US was so minded they could demand the extradition of such people as Keith Briffa and Phil Jones et al to face the legal music in the US courts-CRU have after all been major suppliers of information to the US and have received a great deal of money from your country.
At the least the action would illustrate to the scientific community that the ripples from Climate Gate have spread round the world and people in other countries are as outraged as many in my own (although our Govt and the BBC are observing a fairly steadfast silence on the revelations).
At best it might actually result in some proper legal action being taken that will help to illuminate the whole affair.
So my point is might be appropriate for a US citizen to write a suitably worded request for extradition and put it up on your own US President online petition site? It could then be used as a focal point to gain publicity via blogs, Twitter, You tube and the press, so millions of US citizens can sign it.
http://www.petitiononline.com/petition.html
TonyB
What a twisted mess we weave, when trying to deceive …
It’s not fixable, just keeps getting worse.
Worst problem is our democratic rights are confiscated by Clause 38 of treaty – IPCC/UN appoints COP to rule our governments = Taxation without Representation. Check it out and protest.
http://canbyte.newsvine.com/_news/2009/11/28/3559804-cooking-the-frog-slowly-
In a few years after the email scandal has blown over, the climatologists at the University of East Anglia will ‘find’ the data. They will claim it was still in the old building that they moved out of. They will say “The data was there all along, right where we left it in the old building.”
Computer forensics are the answer. Now that there are criminal investigations underway the coppers should move in and confiscate the computer equipment for forensic analysis as evidence. Do it before they have a chance to whitewash the hard drives, which would probably take forever.
Warwick Hughes published a much better-looking social graph of the climategate emails, in my opinion, at
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/crunet.gif
One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.
The easy explanation is that Jones did not know the data was lost until recently.
This is further bolstered by the fact they (the CRU) were recently under the gun by an FOI officer and they may have actually gone through some foot work gathering the FOI information into one spot (in fact the hacked files do seem to organized like an FOI request packet) while going through that process it was then discovered that the data was missing.
This is the simplest explanation and I tend to like what Occum has to say on the subject.
Th shredders and multi-pass hard drive erasers at NASA and CRU are working faster than Iranian centrifuges about now.
The best post/comment:
http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-happens-when-you-run-climate.html
They are clearly lying about having thrown out the raw data. They may very well have tossed the paper and magnetic tape records out but that doesn’t mean the data is gone.
It is simply impossible to believe that they can produce the “value added data” and not have the “raw” data in a database table. The only way they couyld run their program against the raw data would be if it was manually transferred into a database table or tables. Those tables would be in the same database as the resulting “value added” data.
If those tables are gone then someone deleted them on purpose and that purpose would not be to save “space”. In a database table, on a hard drive … right …
They would have deleted those the raw data tables because they knew that if they released the raw data and their programs the world would have found them out within days.
Its a long con that is coming unravelled …
Goreacle has surfaced at TimesUK.
Goreacle goes Biblical: “Institute for Scriptural Geology”:
“from strength to strength”.”
“From the Bible, Psalms 84:7 (King James Version):
They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.”
…-
“He also brushed aside questions over the reliability of climate science that have followed the publication last month of leaked e-mails between climate experts.
He claimed that the scientific consensus around climate change “continues to grow from strength to strength”.
He added: “The naysayers are in a sunset phase with a spectacular climax just before they subside from view. This is a race between common sense and unreality.”
…-
“Copenhagen targets not tough enough, says Al Gore”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6943447.ece
Posted by: maz2 | December 3, 2009 6:48 PM
Hank Hancock (14:23:34) :
If the original observations that are missing were here today, I’d be busy going through them right now. I need to see how the real records display what was written about in the period 1870 to 1910.
And, my inquiry into the missing data has been met with stone cold silence.
What if…..
What if they didn’t delete the data?
What if there was no “original data” to delete?
What if the whole thing is a complicated fabrication for political purpose.
I mean–do people really believe that trees are thermometers?
Why is there no new news on the current Cycle 24 solar minimum?
Justin,
Here are your answers (I did a quick review of the slideshow):
1. The CO2 graph goes back only 800,000 years (based on ice-core data I believe). However, based on other paleoclimate data (which the BBC ignored), CO2 was much higher in the past (before 800,000 years ago, like millions of years ago) without catastrophic warming. Remember, dinosaurs roamed 300-65 million years ago. Is that data not important too? So, the graph is essentially cherry picking.
2. 20th century temperature trend by Hadcrut is biased towards warming. This is due to urban heat island effect (cities growing around weather stations), other land use changes (converting forests to parking lots), and most likely multiple fudging by Jones and others.
3. The comments that there were cooling periods during the 20th century due to aerosols is pure conjecture. There is no hard evidence of this. The amount of aerosols in the air during the 40’s is only a guess, and their impact on temps is only a guess as well. With regard to aerosols, no one knows their impact, so how can one deduce the impact of CO2 (since aerosols confounds the temp data)?
4. Just because temps rised between 1970 and 2000 (when CO2 was rising) does not mean that CO2 is to blame. Since 1998, temps have dropped (that’s 11 years). How does that square with greenhouse gas theory? It doesn’t, plus no climate model predicted it.
canbyte (15:34:20) :
In the US any treaty signed by the President must be ratified by the Senate with 2/3 majority (67 senators) before it becomes law. Even if a treaty is signed, it does not overrule the US Constitution.
Mark
That the CRU does not have the raw data is immaterial, and not a surprise since they originally acquired it from other sources. What they do have, and need produce, is a list of all the raw data they did use which necessarily includes where they got it. Focus needs to shift to this point since they have an easy out on the raw data storage that many, including me, believe.
Mark
Why can’t the raw data be recovered from the originating met offices? Surely they will have a copy.
“This past January, the Dutch canals again froze, for the first time in 16 years.”
Quiet Sun May Trigger Global Cooling
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518958,00.html