UPDATE: A prescient comment from Willis Eschenbach has been added to the body of the story, see below.
There’ an article in Nature Magazine which is an interview with Phil Jones of the CRU regarding his role in Climategate and what has happened in the past year. It seems to be mostly a sappy rehabilitation piece where Dr. Jones gets to play the victim and the reporter is fully sympathetic. Even more troublesome, Dr. Jones seems to have fully rationalized everything that has happened in the past year.
For example, we all vividly remember this email:
From: Michael Mann mann@xxxxx.xxx To: Phil Jones p.jones@xxxxx.xxx Subject: Re: IPCC & FOI Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 08:12:02 -0400 Reply-to: mann@xxxxx.xxx Hi Phil, laughable that CA would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true. I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxx.xxx talk to you later, mike Phil Jones wrote: > >> Mike, > Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? > Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. > > Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't > have his new email address. > > We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. > > I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature > paper!! > > Cheers > Phil > > Prof. Phil Jones > Climatic Research Unit Telephone [removed] > School of Environmental Sciences Fax [removed] > University of East Anglia > Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxx.xxx > NR4 7TJ > UK
Look at what he says now about email deletion in the context of the ongoing FOI requests:
“We just thought if they’re going to ask for more, we might as well not have them.”
Regarding the Chinese Weather Station fiasco:
Jones said in a separate interview with Nature2 that he was considering a correction. He now says such a step is unnecessary and that he stands by the claims in the paper. He was on medication during the previous interview, he says, and felt under pressure then to publicly concede that he had made mistakes. He says the description of weather-station
movement “has been completely misinterpreted”.
The set of 84 Chinese stations referred to in the paper were drawn from a larger group of 265, for which the Chinese had location histories. Jones and his colleagues did not claim
that none of the selected stations had moved, only that they picked out ones that had moved the least, he says.
Such shifts do not significantly affect results, Jones says, because there was no general pattern to the station relocation: on average, ones moving to colder places were balanced by ones moving to warmer spots. But the Chinese scientist who supplied the station information has now retired and the authorities there have not released the full station-history data — making it impossible for Jones, he says, to provide the evidence to support the statement.
Okaaaayyyy. I call BS on this, because 20 years later, NCDC’s Dr. Matt Menne developed USHCN2, with a change point detection algorithm in it specifically to detect and correct change points in temperature data resulting from station moves. If station moves “don’t significantly affect results”, why did NCDC dedicate so much time and effort to develop such an algorithm? Either Dr. Jones is in CYA mode, uninformed, or both.
Professor Jones apparently hasn’t learned anything except this:
“I’m a little more guarded about what I say in e-mails now,” he says. “One thing in particular I’m doing is not responding so quickly. I might have got an e-mail in the past and responded with an instant thought in the next 10 to 15 minutes, whereas now I might leave it a day.”
In a time-line of the career of Professor Jones, the November 2010 entry is interesting:
Jones tells Nature he is on the mend, but still fears more e-mails could be released in the future.
“Jones and others connected to the CRU fear the hackers may be sitting on more stolen e-mails, but Jones feels confident the worst is behind him.”
Hmmm…
Here’s the article in Nature Magazine (PDF)
h/t to Shub Niggurath
UPDATE: I’ve added this from comments as it is very germane to the story”
I enjoyed this from the Nature article:
The e-mails also triggered several official investigations, including one by the UK Parliament, which ultimately determined that Jones had not committed any serious offences. Case closed.
As my daughter says, “In your dreams, Dad”.
They were more subtle in their timeline, lying by omission.
2005 Britain introduces the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, giving critics a legal route to demand data from Jones and the CRU (above).
July 2009 The CRU receives 58 FOI requests in under a week as part of a blog campaign.
Makes it sound like things were going swimmingly, then suddenly the CRU is bombed with FOI requests.
In fact, I made the first request in (IIRC) 2006 for the CRU data. It was turned down. Other requests were made. We got the list of stations but not the data. They claimed there were secrecy agreements. We said OK, show us the agreements. They refused. We filed FOI requests for specific countries, about six countries at a time. That was to avoid any one of them being rejected because they entailed too much work.
That’s how we got to 58 requests in a week. Because they had blown off all of our FOI requests that had gone in one by one.
You don’t want to get 58 FOI requests, Phil?
Try answering the first one. If he had answered my initial FOI request, that would have been it for requests for the data. He could have avoided a host of grief.
Of course, the emails about the IPCC subversion were a different matter. Those are the ones that mysteriously vanished … Phil says he didn’t delete them, but somehow, they’re still gone.
Curiously, I find I feel sorry for him. He was caught in a paradigm shift, where suddenly his scientific work was being used to justify billions of dollars in expenditures. His knowledge and standards of data handling and documentation were insufficient, perhaps even wildly insufficient, to the task. They were fine when it was just him in his office fiddling with the global temperature. But …
For example, when I asked Phil for the data, I assumed it would be like almost every other database of climate information I’d dealt with. It would be in one single block, with the rows representing years and columns for station identification, monthly data, and the like. I thought it would be easy for him to email me that single block of data.
Instead, as the CRU HARRY_READ_ME file showed, there were hundreds and hundreds of individual data files. In addition, there were often identically named files that were for different stations, there was no semblance of version control, and no overall record of what files were, or where they might be located.
I was astounded when I read that. Everybody puts their data in a single block, with perhaps a second block for metadata … everybody but CRU, it seems …
That’s what I mean about how his skills and knowledge weren’t up to the task.
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All of us have done things which we wish we’d never done and hope no one would find out whether in the public/professional or private spheres of our life.
All of us are equally capable of rationalising away what we did.
I vaguely recall something a sage said some two thousand years ago about casting stones.
you all realize this is the second request to mann to delete documents that may relate to Hollands request…..
Post coming, in’s in the inbox at WUWT
Out of interest, I recently sent an email to the police force local to the UEA (that’s the Norfolk Constabulary), asking how the investigation was coming along. After a little prompting, I got the following response (which appears to be a press release, because of the “Note to Editors” near the end):-
Apologies for delay in responding to your queries but here is our latest comment on the enquiry. Thanks.
Following the publication of e-mails and other data prior to the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, the Norfolk Constabulary investigation into the data breach at the University of East Anglia continues.
With the many different lines of enquiry that officers identified, the workload has varied with specialist investigators/law enforcement partners used when needed.
Commenting on the investigation, Senior Investigating Officer (SIO), Detective Superintendent Julian Gregory said:
“This has been a complex investigation, undertaken in a global context and requiring detailed and time consuming lines of enquiry. Due to the sensitivity of the investigation it has not been possible to share details of enquiries with the media and the public and it would be inappropriate for us to comment any further at this time.”
Note to Editors
It is acknowledged that interest in this case continues, given that the enquiry has now been running for approximately a year and that there is a desire for us to publish further detail. However, the circumstances of the case do not lend themselves to public comment at this time due to the sensitivities of the investigation and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
It would appear that they are having a certain amount of difficulty finding any evidence of hacking whatsoever, which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.
Jeremy says:
November 16, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Insider leakers, btw, would likely not have been so knowledgeable on covering their tracks for this long. The leaker hasn’t been revealed yet a year later. That may be because no one has put funds towards tracking them down, but it’s more likely that the person was simply internet-saavy enough to cover their trail.
=========================================================
I disagree, Jeremy. I believe it much more likely to be an inside job due to the comparative ease of an inside vs outside attack. I could be wrong, of course.
Can anyone verify the networking conditions at UEA? I’d love to play ‘what if’. I seriously doubt Jones pokes away at a dumb WYSE terminal that feeds commands to a mainframe in this day and age. I find it much more likely to believe he uses a Windows laptop/workstation to connect to UEA resources.
If he uses a Windows laptop/workstation or not, it’s still very likely he’s communicating to an Exchange server or other centralized email server for email, and copying data to a shared file server.
The servers will be backed up and written to tape on a scheduled rotation. (Yes, I know he says he lost data, but that was way back then.) Typically, a server is backed up fully once per week with daily incremental backups. Tapes are rotated off-site once per month and retained for up to a year. This is true in a Windows or Unix environment and means the server administrators, network administrators, and backup operators all had access to the emails and home directories.
Copying data on the network for an admin is of course trivial. If the off-site backup tapes aren’t encrypted then copying the data there is trivial. Restoring a backup tape to a new server is trivial.
My assumption has always been that Jones said something demeaning to an admin, and they burned him.
Copying data off the local network/servers would not require hiding their tracks at all as admins would have had legitimate access to everyone’s data. Certainly the account used for the backup service is an administrator on all servers and the credentials for this account would be known to at least some of the admins. An admin could use this account to login to any server and copy any data at any time. And certainly there is a local administrator account on each laptop/workstation for support purposes, and these credentials would have been known by all the support staff.
Universities are typically ‘open’ with regards to network security policy. For these reasons, I suspect it was an inside job and likely not traceable. Outside attacks are possible too, although less likely.
I work professionally as a network security engineer, so perhaps I am seeing it through my jaundiced eye, but I have to say I’ve seen all sorts of private data that users thought I couldn’t. And that’s without even trying.
Remember, this all came from a directory titled ‘foia request’ which would have been an attractive target for an inquisitive admin and not at all likely to reside on the centralized mail server accessible from the Internet, but rather in a personal directory on an internal file server.
I would expect getting Jones’ password would be fairly straight forward if one wanted, and if that was the avenue taken. He doesn’t seem very savvy to me. If I was a helpdesker or admin at UEA and wanted his password I would simply wait for him to call for help (if I got impatient I would do something to make him call). Once he calls, I would go to his office and begin stating all the commands he should enter, network settings to check, directories to switch to, rename this or that file, etc. until he was obviously flustered. Then I’d helpfully offer to ‘fix the problem’ for him while he was at lunch, I would just need him to give me his password…
Alternatively, just dump the password and shadow files in a Unix environment, or the SAM/ntds.dit database in a Windows environment and run them through John the Ripper. John cracks passwords such as ‘banana01’ in seconds.
It’s too easy to get the data as an admin.
To get the data remotely, there would have had to be an exploitable vulnerability in an Internet facing server (mail, ftp, web, etc.) that when comprised gave the necessary privileges on the server to determine the network configuration.
Then network recon would need to be performed (DNS dump, ping sweep, etc) to determine a likely target internal server (meaning the server would have to be accessible from the compromised host and named in such a way to make it an attractive target).
Then the target internal server would have to itself also have an exploitable vulnerability that was susceptible to exploitation by the credentials leveraged on the Internet facing server and exploitable over the protocols allowed for communications between the Internet facing server and the internal server (admin credentials are typically different on Internet servers in a protected DMZ network and internal servers). Next, that internal server would have to have the data the hacker was after, or the hacker would have to hop again.
Finally, a network path out would have to be permitted back to the server the hacker used to dump the files on, which means that the firewall would have had to permit the second targeted server outbound, which is not always permissible. An internal file server simply has no need to dump files out on the Internet, so by default they can’t…so now you’re talking about possibly also hacking the firewall to rewrite the permit rules and hacking the switches/routers to add your intended destination as a route out the Internet firewall.
Whew! And that’s just the 30,000 foot view.
An insider attack seems more likely to me.
Liberals tend to believe everyone else is as unethical and rationalizing as themselves. They are wrong, and they have no clue how they are wrong.
It is unfortunate for Phil Jones people can read ClimateGate emails and understand for themselves.
I much prefer:
“You really sCRUed that up.”
or
“You’re totally sCRUed man!”
Bob Kutz says:
November 16, 2010 at 8:16 am
“Quite to the contrary; if his intent in deleting the emails was to avoid having information subject to FOI requests then that is a clear violation of the law. ”
What exactly are you contrary-ing??
I quoted the fellow and the line of exclamation marks under the quote is my ‘struck speechless’ response;nothing to dispute there.
Mr waltman, if I may be so bold as to ask you to front me some major cash so I can go after DepropagandaBlog with your guilty until proven innocent (isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?) logic, cause they laid out some doozies about a guy I happen to know.
redetin says:
November 16, 2010 at 4:59 am
“The Real Issue” – it is going to be much worse than we all thought.
http://blogs.shell.com/climatechange/2010/10/the-real-issue/ …
David Hone, Shell Oil advisor: “The most recent inter-glacial peak was the Eemian, about 130,000 years ago, which saw both CO2 levels and temperature peak at the top end of the inter-glacial range, but with the CO2 level far below the current 390 ppm. There is good evidence that the sea level in this period topped out at some 7 metres above current levels, before plunging 135 metres as glaciation took hold in the northern hemisphere. ”
—-
I agree that the consequences of natural cycles of the current Ice Age between interglacial warming periods and glaciation periods are going to be much worse than we thought, but access the link provided that produces the above quote, and ask yourself a simple question. Assuming everything in that quote is scientifically accurate, what is more compelling? A very gradual sea level rise during a warm, productive, climate period? Or the utter decimation of life as we know it when the glaciation returns for another 100,000 years and the sea level declines about 400 feet because of all the miles high ice on the northern hemisphere?
I have other issues with the scientific basis of other statements of the linked blog, but this comment hits my major concern of his spin. Gradual sea level rise of 5 mm/year over 1500 years vs. the climatic destruction of northern hemisphere civilization because of yet another period of glaciation.
Pick your poison: celebrate warmth or celebrate cold.
The author wants to scare us about potentially higher sea levels in 1500 or more years, but what follows? A period of glaciation that lasts for 100,000 years. Also, what if the abrupt climate shift occurs before 1500 years from now. The scenario of glaciation becomes a lot more personal.
LOL @ur momisugly walt man
Really? That’s the best you can come up with? Empty, hollow, vague threats?
Apparently you really are clueless about what you are up against…
As part of an FOI request can one legitimately request a forensic examination of a Universities communications system such that emails deleted by a particular staff member, or by several staff, can be resurrected? Are there any knowledgable people out there who can or would answer this question?
Such action probably should have been undertaken by the UK police, even if there were only contracted to find the source of the leak.
galileonardo, I thought the same thing. I’m no expert, but it occurred to me that when your strongest remaining claim on being any sort of scientist is the fact that you wear elbow patches on your sweater, it’s really to give it up.
Phil is a pathetic little man with delusions of grandeur (or even adequacy).
Somebody’s taxes are paying his salary. Awful isn’t it?
walt man says:
November 16, 2010 at 3:35 pm
James Sexton says: November 16, 2010 at 2:00 pm
“Obviously, as a starting point those who post defamatory comments are the true defamers….blah, blah, blather, blather…….”
========================================================
‘Apologies for delay in responding’ but I was shooting pool last night. Sadly, I missed the humor you posted. “On notice”? Are you kidding me? I would, and likely any other skeptic, would relish an opportunity try this in a real court of law. Further, while I’m not entirely clear on the letter of the law in the U.K., I presume defamation laws read similar to the ones here in the States. It is difficult for me to see defamation in reproducing statements made by certain parties and then pointing out the clear violation of law which these people were engaged. So, sis, I would ask you again, please include my name in any defamation complaint. Heck, I’d probably even pay for the plane trip to England just to witness British justice and even participate. Please show all the people reading this blog that your threats were more than idle.
In other words, sis, bring it!
Since humans are stupid, we’ll keep building right up against the receding waterline, grateful for the newfound land as the glaciers destroy Canada, the upper US, Russia, Northern Europe, etc. Then in a hundred thousand years, when the glaciers retreat and the seas return, scientists of the time will blame humans once again.
“I vaguely recall something a sage said some two thousand years ago about casting stones.”
Chris1958,
That Sage also told the person who was supposed to be the recipient of those stones, to: “Go, and sin no more.”
I hope you aren’t forgetting that part.
Andrew
Maybe all that was needed here were some I.T. professionals and an office manager – people who do not do research and do not pretend to – just collect, collate, secure, and archive in a competent manner.
A couple of my favourite quotes from the Climategate/Global Warming fiasco:
“Faking up data here is very time-consuming”
– Mike HULME to Tom WIGLEY – Mon, 9 Feb 1998
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
– Alexander KING, Bertrand SCHNEIDER – founder and secretary, respectively, of the Club of Rome – The First Global Revolution, pp.104-105
Global Government is the motive.
Mike Roddy says:
November 16, 2010 at 7:39 am
How about looking at the science itself, instead of individual scientists’ private emails? “”
Science starts with data. Determining what data has been minipulated or hidden is part of the science.
The emails were not private. The emails were prepared by government funded workers using machines that were at least partially government funded and they concerned publicly funded work.