New twist in UEA climate change row
Last updated: 28/01/2010 10:03:00
Norwich’s flagship university was at the centre of a new row today after it emerged it broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny in the climate change row over stolen emails.
The reputation of the University of East Anglia’s world renowned climatic research unit (CRU)was shaken to the core last year after emails posted on the internet from researchers including its director Prof Phil Jones appeared to suggest ways of avoiding freedom of information requests together with a “trick” to explain away an apparent fall in global temperatures.
Police including a team from Scotland yard were called in to investigate amid speculation that the leaks were part of a smear campaign by climate change sceptics to discredit the UEA in the run up the Copenhagen summit last year.
Other theories were that the leaks were the work of a disgruntled insider angry at the way the university was handling FOI requests.
The row has reverberated around the world and it emerged today the Norwich university breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) decided the UEA failed in its duties under the act but said it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late.
Read the complete story at Norwich Evening News
See the press release and background from ICO previously covered on WUWT here:
CRU inquiry prompts sought after changes in UK law, citing failure of CRU’s FOIA officer
Loophole in UK FOIA law will apparently allow CRU to avoid prosecution
A lot of people bag the media for not covering climategate or the sceptical views.
The sole purpose of the media is to sell advertising. Period. They have no responsibility, or even desire, to tell us the truth, or provide a public service. They are responsible to their clients, the advertisers. If I were to go and do public service activities at the expense of my clients, I’d soon lose clients. They are no different.
The exception, one would think, is public funded media such as the BBC and ABC (that Oz, not sure if any such service exists in the US?). They are typically politically motivated, however. Ho hum.
What the MSM need is something sensational that increases ratings and is OK with the advertisers. I think that climategate provided that in spades, but is just starting to be ‘OK’ with the advertisers. I can see most MSM putting a toe in the water to test the temperature. hopefully most will take the plunge once the tide turns.
The top few hits for news on Google these days is about 40/60 warm/sceptic, down from 90/10 a few months ago. Times are good.
@Robinson. Shhh! Sure, anyone with half a brain knows that, but don’t let Algore catch on. He’ll be trying to cap & trade water next.
See that condensation on your window? That’s £5 worth of H2O credits please.
So who is going to try to update the Phil Jones page in Wikipedia and add this bit of information?
You will need to be really fast with the screen shot, it likely won’t last 30 seconds.
Mike Ramsey (16:19:10) :
Graham UK (14:46:06)
I think the tide is turning, but making governments change direction will require a lot more effort.
It’s called an election.
————————————-
Unfortunately there is no major UK party which is not gung-ho about AGW. No party which stands a chance of being part of the government even in a hung parliament is at all sceptical.
Well, either the tide has turned or the plug has been pulled on the IPCC. Whatever metaphor you choose to use, things will never be the same, particularly since John Beddington gave AGW sceptics the royal seal of scientific approval.
And, re Norwich and the CRU, did you know that lonely servicemen in WW2 ended their letters home to their girlfriends and wives with the letters NORWICH ? Standing for (excuse the vulgarity) Nickers off ready when I come home.
These 4 lost souls have been added to the UN/Pachauri’s Glacier Endangered Species list.
The Four even wax and wane; amazing.
…-
“British geographers find uncharted glaciers in Albania
A team of British geographers has discovered a group of previously uncharted glaciers in an inhospitable European mountain range.
The academics from Manchester University found the four glaciers in the Prokletije or “cursed” mountains of Albania. They have formed at an altitude of 2,000 metres, relatively low for such a southerly latitude. Other glaciers at this latitude survive only on higher mountains further north.
The Prokletije mountains extend from Northern Albania and Kosovo to Eastern Montenegro in the Western Balkans. The glaciers, the largest of which is the size of six football pitches, vary in size every year according to the amount of winter snowfall and temperatures during the summer.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7007094.ece
“Robinson (17:01:02) :
Today’s amusing story in the press concerns the amazing discovery that water vapour is a ‘major cause of global warming and cooling’. When I read this I was literally gobsmacked. I think perhaps a Nobel prize will be on offer to these fine fellows.”
Read up about Ferenc Miskolczi. He predicted that. Well actually he says: “If the system were capable of reaching a higher temperature, it needn’t wait for us to increase the CO2 because it has an abundant supply of a far more powerful GHG: Water vapour.” Quoted from memory.
Something very weird about “it’s too late to bring charges”.
In the US, there is no limit on claims resulting in fraud. What’s the big deal?
They allegedly used US Grant $$$ improperly, and I believe they are being investigated for just that.
They didn’t get Al Capone on what they were after him for, but that didn’t stop them from bringing him to justice.
Robinson (17:01:02) :
Quick, somebody get that water vapor memo off to Big O, the EPA and the SEC before they pour gas all over our economy and toss a match to it.
Someone with a wicked sense of humor needs to quickly get off a book that is over the top sarcastic about Chicken Little! My gawd the author would make a cool bundle! That would release the pent up steam and allow scientists to write the dry, distant, boring stuff (as it should be) related to sensors, refuting bad science, and natural climate variability. Get that gal who draws her own cartoons a publisher! Quick!
They got the photo caption wrong. It should read : ex-director.
BTW this may be worth following up http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/esef5.htm
Provides scientific derivation of true proportion of anthropogenic CO2 around 4%, not the somewhat arbitrary guestimate of 21% used in climate models.
This also implies a much shorter residence of about 5 yrs. This is more in line with air/ocean absorption mechanisms.
So timely of them. In other news, the USSR launched the first satellite, Sputnik.
And they STILL can’t get this right. It was a decline in a RECONSTRUCTION, not a decline in global temperatures.
Maybe a combination of Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried “Wolf”, plus The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Mann is running a little behind in his investigation. I am sure the gravy train is about over. What will happen with the department of dirty data at NASA GISS? are they up for evaluation?
The sock puppet for convicted felon George soros is extremely aggitated. Romm is snorting and scratching with his hooves.
After firing, many of the criminal/fraud cases follow. after those run the course, the civil charges fly Companies don’t get very aggressive for being defrauded with research money because of adverse publicity. Meltdown Mann
Read up about Ferenc Miskolczi. He predicted that. Well actually he says: “If the system were capable of reaching a higher temperature, it needn’t wait for us to increase the CO2 because it has an abundant supply of a far more powerful GHG: Water vapour.”
I’m sure a lot of people have been thinking this way. It’s one of the problems I came up with as a “beginner” some years back in looking at AGW [not that I’ve advanced much farther since]. I was thinking:
Why didn’t water vapor already produce a “tipping point” or already do what it could maximally do, given a very large supply for it? If it was inhibited, what stopped it?
Why would minimal amounts of CO2 make water vapor do what it couldn’t do before?
Even if CO2 did produce some increase in temp., why wouldn’t it and water vapor be stopped at some relatively low level of temp. increase, too?
I’m sure there are ways around these questions, at least in theory – but from the point of view of reality, why didn’t even relatively much higer levels of CO2 in the past relate to temps, and why wasn’t there a “disaster”? Even if there was, it’s how we got here.
What are the benefits of GW?
Ref – Carbon-based life form (18:58:07) :
“Maybe a combination of Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried “Wolf”, plus The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
_________________
Now you’ve gone and done it. You just rattled off the CIA and MI-6 code names of the top three AGW enemy agents. It’s a good thing you didn’t mention “Mother Goose” (aka Al Gore) or we’d all be in thouble. Ooooops!
Maybe a combination of Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried “Wolf”, plus The Emperor’s New Clothes
I’d think perhaps… “The Sting”
The plot being as a I recall that the swindlers cheat the mark out of his money in order to set up a bigger operation to cheat him out of massive money.
Substitute “mark” with “taxpayer”….
I agree with an earlier poster on the appearance of Prof. Jones. The man has gone startlingly and completely gray by contrast with the photographs previously available online. It looks more than a bit as if the past few months have driven him down physically as well as professionally.
It must be hell for the CRU correspondents to have been suddenly kicked off the summit of their profession, and to know that they really haven’t yet seen the worst of what’s going to happen to them.
Meanwhile, the populiarizers of the AGW fraud – such as James Hoggan – are continuing to spout online and to obliterate responsory posts articulating sound scientific critique of the carbon dioxide forcing concept wherever they can do so.
Anybody care to speculate on whether or not it might be possible to salvage Wikipedia once the warmist cancer has been cut out
So who is going to try to update the Phil Jones page in Wikipedia and add this bit of information? You will need to be really fast with the screen shot, it likely won’t last 30 seconds.
There’s nothing on his page about this, but I see William Connolley has been busy deleting today. This is what he deleted:
On January 28, 2010, the Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA and Jones had breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. In one e-mail, Professor Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a website run by climate sceptics. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece]
The reference is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phil_Jones_(climatologist)&diff=340582875&oldid=340582737
This is starting to get heavy. The following has been written by Richard Tol, Roger Pielke Jr and Hans von Storch. Expect it to start appearing in more mainstream publications soon. http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2010/01/27/ipcc-reform-now/#comments
“J.Peden (19:16:27) :
[…]
Why didn’t water vapor already produce a “tipping point” or already do what it could maximally do, given a very large supply for it? If it was inhibited, what stopped it?”
It does what it does to the maximum extent possible and it always does – except for in an ice age when the cold makes it freeze out, the greenhouse effect breaks down and the cold perpetuates itself.
Wherever there is not an icecap, the greenhouse effect maximizes itself (through evaporation). And once it’s maxed out it can’t go any further because of the resulting cooling of the UPPER layers and the following reduction in water vapour.
A REAL positive feedback could be happening through reduction of the icecaps. Less area iced over –> More area where the saturated greenhouse effect occurs. The poles are the only area that can modulate the greenhouse effect.
poneke (19:30:54) :
Just go add it to the climategate page
A REAL positive feedback could be happening through reduction of the icecaps. Less area iced over –> More area where the saturated greenhouse effect occurs. The poles are the only area that can modulate the greenhouse effect>
extra energy = melting ice
less ice = more open water
extra energy has no ice to melt, so warms water instead
warmer water = higher radiance = negative feedback
planet cools
starts to make more ice….
Guilty but can’t be charged! That’s a first in any law abiding country I know about. It now means the FOI laws are useless as anyone can get around them by using delay tactics. So the AGW scam now has uncovered another scam – FOI scam.