Odd things are going on at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Widely available data, existing in the public view for years, is now disappearing from public view.
For example this link to Keith Briffa’s Yamal data:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
Now redirects to a generic page of UEA. Try it yourself.
Now here is what that page says:
Climatic Research Unit
Due to the present high volume of visitors to this page, you will shortly be directed to the latest news about CRU on the main University of East Anglia website, or you can go there immediately by clicking on this link.
The cached page at Google is still available here, though none of the links to data or papers works there either.
I’ll point out that if indeed “traffic” is a concern, redirecting to another page on the UEA server system doesn’t do much for the load, it just moves it around. The data files are mostly text, and not that large, they don’t have that much more impact that some wab pages with graphics.
The news page that you get redirected to hasn’t much to say, and has not been updated since December 3rd.
And it’s not just subfolders with data, it is the entire Climate Research Unit website that is shielded from public view. Try the main link which has been functional for years:
In the last press release issued by UEA we read:
Professor Edward Acton, Vice-Chancellor said: “The reputation and integrity of UEA is of the upmost importance to us all.
So now apparently, in this newly pledged period of “openness and transparency”, with the promise of releasing new data access, such as the Met office has done here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html
The access to important CRU data is simply denied?
That’s a hell of a way to build public trust.
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Yes, there are lots of “reasonable” explanations, unfotrunately for this group of “scientists” people are not going to cut them a lot of slack.
Whatever the issue, they need to communicate what is going on with the public.
This is an institution in crises, casting crises management aside is not very smart–just ask Tiger Woods.
The public won’t be satisfied until we’ve had a couple of record winters back to back. The stupid cap and tax laws will be repealed. A lot of politicians will be replaced and a lot of scientists will see their funding cut.
Hopefully, some of those people will go to jail and have to give all that money back.
I can see two potential technical scenarios: 1.) depending on the server, content architecture, and method of attack… if the server had in fact been hacked it could have been compromised so severely that they’re having to rebuild everything on it (i.e. the site had been “infected” and end-to-end corrupted) or 2.) because of less pervasive exploit (like a password exploit) they might be reviewing everything to make sure everything that was out on the server is valid and uncompromised.
I don’t really see a large scale infection compromise (1) being the issue since every link I’ve seen on their site is to direct files – I’ve only seen this happen on relational DB back-end sites (i.e. every URL has php, asp, etc in it or obsfucates the query name for a more friendly name which, I believe, is how wordpress works). Not to mention that this would have also left conclusive evidence that this was a break-in, and I’d imagine we would have heard about it by now.
TBH, my money is on PR as the explanation – circle the wagons, collect everything they have, review it and republish EVERYTHING with new guidelines, processes, and maybe even a reformat of the site to go with it. Make assurances that moving forward everything wll be above-board, etc… If I was in charge of te review and concerned about protecting UEA and CRU’s reputaion, that would be my approach.
“Fred2 (07:05:47) :
They might have fired some of their systems administrators, possibly for being the suspected leaker, and now their systems don’t work right.
Or somebody is just on holiday leave.
Or the Devil did it.”
Or the Russians! It’s the KGB again …. Wooooooooooh!
OT:
1991 UN Policy Paper Describes the Exact Purpose and Trajectory of Current Copenhagen Treaty
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24037511/The-next-40-years-Transition-strategies-to-the-Virtuous-Green-Path-North-South-East-Global
Neil Jones: “Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece”
Either your link’s wrongly copied or the article’s been removed. I wonder which??
I don’t suppose any of these data had not yet been downloaded yet, so they certainly can’t have any hope to avoid the spreading of embarrassing data. So in the grand scheme of things it’s totally meaningless.
I hope analytical types have collectively downloaded everything that use to be available. I think its a bit like the burning of the famous library at Alexandria two millennia ago that destroyed the collected knowledge of the day, including such common knowledge that the earth is a sphere that took 1.5 millennia to rediscover
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=Alexandria%20library%20burning&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
We need a safe central depository of data, particularly the raw temperature data. I believe there are some great PhD studies now to be done in climatology.
Could it be those pesky Russians again? I mean they hae their hands i this to right? LOL
With the short retention span of the human brain, unfortunately, I would think that scientists and politicians are just waiting for the whole thing to blow away , when one thinks of the billions already spent it’s a little bit late in the game to say ‘I might of made a mistake’ Even Google has played with the ‘Climategate’ counter, it’s just amazing that the Nigerians didn’t think up this ”trick” but then, ah, maybe?
If I were a UEA big cheese and there were doubts about our research, I’d take it down – but I’d explain why rather than hope no one noticed. I’d be very surprised if this is a load/traffic issue – it’s been 3 weeks since the story broke, why would the incoming traffic peak now when it didn’t crash within 96hrs?
Their reputation is in the toilet and they compound it further – like I said the other day, it can’t get worse – and then it does.
I saw posts here about replicating all the CRU/GISS et al data over the weekend so that records were preserved for posterity. Let’s hope they’ve all been squirrelled away safely.
I have advanced education in 5 different fields. All of them are within departments of a University. With what we see and read, I suspect lawyers are now advising the school. Having said that, the school would be following fine legal advice to take it down. These sites are not verified to accuracy and it is better to shut down access than to risk having false information under the school name.
I am not saying the information is false.
I am saying the risk of it being false suggests they not leave it up.
If the school leaves up information that is later found to be false, that can be used against the school.
If I were the responsible adult at the UEA and I learned my faculty and staff were not trustworthy and their accumulated data over the previous 20 years was faulty and/or bogus — guess what? I’d take it out of public view too. This is what is known as the ‘when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging’ syndrome. Also, as the responsible adult, I would send a memo to all the UEA ‘team’ to “just shut up.”
AFAIK (accessing from France), CRU’s pages have been shut down and redirected to a disclaimer page at least two weeks ago, when I tried to retrieve the the-dog -ate-my-data pages.
What the Damage Control Machine called the Met is doing is removing all Evidence that the CRU was in fact manipulating the raw data . Since everyone in agreement that the CRU was exaggerating and fabricating global warming data was even to slow or didn’t respond quickly enough , this gave the U.N. the time to either remove or make it very difficult to access the raw data on the internet .
” It is better to be thought of as a Felon then to expose all the evidence and leave no doubt “
Down for forensics, I betcha. They’ve got a Snipe Hunt on, I’d say…
What’s going on…
Well, one theory might be that they need the computer memory for more complex modelling.
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_13991384#ixzz0Zg6seKWA
Boballab, Larey, etc,
Just thought about this when I was reading your comments, but when the hack/leak was first announced there was a blurb somewhere that they had taken their primary server offline and moved all their traffic to their backup server and that it had broken some links and could result in out-of-date content. I do not think this is truly load related – it’s too consistent IMO – but another part of the reasoning could be that the backup server’s content was, well, crap
RichieP, it’s there, at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece
But try the link in the first paragraph here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/nigel-calder-in-the-times/
RichieP
The link works fine.
I believe that Nigel Calder left the New scientist after a disagreement about, among other things, the New Scientist’s attitude to global warming.
If I were a lawyer counseling the head of an organization whose research department has come under scrutiny for doctoring data, I would immediately recommend that the organization lock up the web pages that displays that data until further notice. And I would recommend that the organization send a general letter of recommendation to all of the clients of such data to do the same.
The fact that this has been done, at least with the organization under scrutiny, smells like lawyer-on-retention advise to me.
We apologise for the break in transmission. Whilst our technicians are working on the fault we will now play you some music.
Anthony One of the first things CRU did after Climategate broke was to delete from their site all the papers and data sets put together by Dr Timothy Mitchell – who was respnsible for assembling many ( perhaps most ?) of the CRU data sets -as part of his Ph D I think.
Dr Mitchell published an article in Evangelicals Now in April 2000 which reveals his mind set and suggests possible bias in his data set assembly. He says ” Although I have yet to see any evidence that climate change is a sign of Christs imminent return,human pollution is clearly
another of the birth pangs of creation as it eagerly awaits being delivered from the bondage of corruption.”
At that time he was a member of the South Park Evangelical church,– I kid you not you couldn’t invent this stuff.
I would think a review of his work might be in order as part of the CRU investigation.
I have taken to saving interesting websites because I have noticed how often web sites disappear. I like to have proof.
Web sites disappearing are not unlike the disappearing of information and rewriting of history in Orwell’s 1984.
Neil Jones (07:28:49)
Nigel Calder! That’s a name I haven’t heard for years. I have a book on climate written by him and published by the impartial BBC.
The Book ? Well it’s called ‘The Weather Machine and The Threat of ICE’ It was published following a BBC programme ‘several hours long’ on the threat of the coming Ice age. Published 1974 !!!