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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Pamela Gray (07:51:12) :
If I were a lawyer counseling the head of an organization whose research department has come under scrutiny for doctoring data, I would immediately recommend that the organization lock up the web pages that displays that data until further notice. And I would recommend that the organization send a general letter of recommendation to all of the clients of such data to do the same.
The fact that this has been done, at least with the organization under scrutiny, smells like lawyer-on-retention advise to me
And I had posted this a few minutes earlier.
Henry chance (07:42:21) :
With what we see and read, I suspect lawyers are now advising the school. Having said that, the school would be following fine legal advice to take it down. These sites are not verified to accuracy and it is better to shut down access than to risk having false information under the school name.
I am not saying the information is false.
I am saying the risk of it being false suggests they not leave it up.
If the school leaves up information that is later found to be false, that can be used against the school
You are correct Pamela. The schools must hustle and disassociate themselves with purveyors of corrupt publications.
It is simple. Banks tell customers to cancel cards when the credit cards and bank accounts have been hacked.
Yahoo Answers has also disappeared the question:
“Who said ‘I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right””
The answer now is:
This question has been deleted
There was a problem performing that action, please try again later.
The New Big Lie: Climategate Emails Are Not Significant
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, December 14, 2009
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17916
Denying access or manipulating the data to falsify the models pervades the emails. Jones wrote to Mann on Feb 26 2004. “Most of the data series in most of the plots have just appeared on the CRU web site. Go to data then to paleoclimate. Did this to stop getting hassled by the skeptics for the data series. Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we’ve done anything wrong.” Jones to Mann, Bradley and Hughes on Feb 21 2005. “I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!”
These are not innocent comments. What was there to hide? Answer how they falsified the data as the emails expose when you put them in context.
My main question on disappearances is what happened to the text in 1120593115.txt which now ends at “Unlike the UK, the public in Australia is very very na”.
Luckily, I saved the original text which includes such statements as:
“The science isn’t
going to stop from now until AR4 comes out in early 2007, so we are going to
have to add in relevant new and important papers. I hope it is up to us to decide
what is important and new.”
CRU webpage is down many days, redirected at UEA. I had to check for HadCRUT chart at Metoffice web.
A corollary of Occam’s Razor is to avoid imputing evil intent when stupidity will suffice as an explanation. My guess is that UEA isn’t actively trying to remove public access, but instead just stupidly did a blanket redirection without considering the impacts.
The access has been shutdown to files has been about a week now. I know that two weeks ago I could access the Global Average Temperature time history graph at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
I think it was last Tuesday, December 8th that the above link started redirecting. That matches the last update date for the “CRU Statement” page that everything is being redirected to.
Thanks Coco.
You’re some future free thinker’s favorite teacher.
When some of those kids are in their thirties, and politicians are warning them of the coming ice age, they will remember you.
forgot to include this one also: Jones’ 1985-1986 paper: Northern Hemisphere Surface Air Temperature Variations: 1851-1984 (see appendix for the numbers)
http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/jones1986.pdf
Speaking of Briffa, Gavin inadvertently pointed us at these words by him. I thought they were revealing. From the climategate letters:
Briffa:
>I know there is pressure to present a
>nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand
>years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite
>so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and
>those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some
>unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do
>not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.
> For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually
>warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming
>is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth
>was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global
>mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of
>years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence
>for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that
>require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future
>background variability of our climate.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=136
Rhys Jaggar (07:19:55),
If you are referring to the Belgrano then you need to realise that it was sunk by HMS Conqueror, a submarine and that the Artentines themselves later admitted the attack was legitimate (confirmed by both the captain and the argy government).
So I think in this instance you will have to find some other conspiracy to back yourself up with.
Regards
Mailman
I’ve just noticed on the Google web page “Explore impact of climate change on Google Earth.” If you click on that it takes you to a video with Al Gore and others. I couldn’t take more than a few nanoseconds of that so I can’t report on the full content of the first sentence.
The claim that it is “Due to the present high volume of visitors” is clearly a lie. The site was working fine until they pulled the plug a few days ago.
This collection of global warming Christmas songs is sure to globally warm your hearts. Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQXY4tWaoI&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=cs_CZ&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
CRU is in a transition phase, first hide the decline, then hide the data and now hide the scientist.
Rhys Jagger,
Am afraid what you have stated is not quite true, or at least not the full story. The Belgrano had been switching course regulary, sometimes steaming away, them coming back, then away – as Mailman says this was confirmed by the Argentinians after the event. It was sunk as a warning to the Argintinian navy that the Brits had subs in the area (..oh…and american saterlite info too…) to keep away.
So whilst it was in fact steaming in the other direction, the fact that it kept turning back kinda makes the point somewhat diluted!
Sorry this is OT …but its an oft repeated myth that needs to be nailed (& I was against the war at the time – I was wrong, but just thought context needed).
I think Mr Obama Should sign the Copenhagen Treaty. I think the US Senate should ratify the Copenhagen Treaty. If not for anything else but for my own entertainment purposes.
Listening to Monckton and Jones today sounds like listening to murder mystery radio show. Only it’s not about a murder, it’s something about establishing this world government. Monckton was talking about the previous leaked draft treaty and the new version where the IMF and world bank control all the taxing and money without representation or something like that.
I want everybody to sign and ratify the treaty to prove them wrong. And afterward, I don’t want to hear anybody complain, Jones and Monckton were right, everything they were saying about establishing world government was true. Oh boo hoo. I want them to be proven wrong.
In a crime scene like hacking you remove the file system from further access – access can over-write deleted files (destroy evidence) and unless you are 100% certain of your security (no one should be!) you may be still open to attack.
One could also guess that every hacker on the planet is trying to make a name for himself by finding real fraud on the servers (= heavy load by attack) not like the non-fraud found in the current batch.
Hide their decline.
Maybe this following piece of specuation has something to do with it.
“Is Keith Briffa The Climategate Whistleblower? ………….
1. All of Briffa’s materials at CRU have been pulled from their website. Even the cached versions are gone. Want to read is Yamal response? You can’t.
2. While Briffa is cc’d on and the direct subject many of the recent emails, there is almost nothing from him in the last year! How is it we see so little of Keith in all these emails? He was at CRU and and his emails would be in the same group – why are his apparently missing or so few?
….He appears to want to let the data tell the story, but keeps getting caught shading it to meet the Hockey Team’s goals. I think Keith Briffa was more scientists the AGW zealot…..”
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11861
What’s going on?
I’d like to know what’s going on at RealClimate?
Gavin Schmidt and Ray Ladbury both work for NASA-GISS and are using their public employment to engage in a deliberate manipulation of the public perception of the current climate scandal and debate.
It’s one thing to have professional opinions and distribute them in a public forum.
It’s quite another to filter out and obstruct all of the substantive challenges to their work and science to create false impression.
That’s defrauding the public by public employees.
It has to stop.
RealClimate is prohibiting posts from many skeptics, censoring posts they allow and truncating dialogues when they turn unfavorable to the effort to continue the cover up and distortion of their work on climate science.
Under what premise is this even close to being acceptable?
Their continued misrepresentations are serving as a distribution point for wider falsifying of news for public consumption.
These are public employees using their public employment time, and access to government files to deceive the public.
I challenge any savvy climate observers, researchers to attempt to engage the discussion at RC with germane and specific critiquing and see how it’s received.
You’ll notice the total absence of any of the damning revelations and information appearing there.
There’s only one way for that to be the case.
Deliberate censoring and obstruction.
If this were private individuals and a private blog it would not matter. It is not.
It is our publicly funded officials using their positions to distribute an altered and false presentation of an important issue and process.
It is not ethical or acceptable.
Exactly where would one demand it be stopped?
Perhaps the CRC should post a link to the ‘way back engine’:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa
(to relieve the strain on their servers)
Unfortunately, it looks as though yamal2009 was not captured in the archive, though.
Given that apparently everything under the http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk subdomain now redirects to a page at the http://www.uea.ac.uk domain, it does indeed look like an entire server was taken offline. While the site may have been “working fine” to outside appearances, increasing traffic might have been causing minor issues to show up in the server logs, and someone decided to take it offline to prevent the minor issues from becoming major issues.
Even if the explanation Henry chance (08:47:59) gave is the real reason the pages have gone missing, that doesn’t mean the official explanation is false. Given the choice between saying “our lawyers said to do it to reduce our potential liability” or “our servers are having problems keeping up with traffic”, the natural impulse is to use the reason that doesn’t sound as bad, even if it’s not the main reason.
I expect that somone wants to recheck the data for ‘adjustments’ that were introduced after 1988. Sort of expected.
Mike S. (10:02:19) :
“”Given the choice between saying “our lawyers said to do it to reduce our potential liability””
I hadn’t thought about it that way. I was thinking in terms of credibility. But I wonder if there are liability concerns.
Up until now, there wasn’t enough evidence of possible wrongdoing so no liability existed for them. They could simply claim that the university hadn’t been given any reason to question whether or not the information they were officially disseminating was fraudulent. But that’s not true anymore.
Their lawyers may be worried about answering this question some day, “But why didn’t you immediately cease dissemination of the information – information we now all know was fraudulent – AFTER your suspicions were raised high enough to warrant an investigation? If the university – as a whole – wasn’t in on the fraud, then wouldn’t that have seemed like a prudent measure to take?
In other words, the university may be posturing in an attempt to disconnect themselves from any possible fraud that might be revealed by claiming that it was the work of a rogue department.
Or is this just all wishful thinking on my part?
Evan a search on the site for “Yamal” yields these choices”
http://www.google.com/cse?cx=017206723852458922445%3Ak-pi2er7fim&ie=UTF-8&sa=Search&q=yamal
and the Briffa webpage associated with the search results takes you back to the initial CRU page