Mr. David Palmer Explains The Problem

I agree with you Willis, that the silence is deafening.
These so called scientists indulged in this behaviour (and continue to do so) for many years.
There is evidence of corruption, conspiracy and other illegal activity in the first batch of E-Mails and that has lead to ,,well nothing nada from the establishment.
We appear to at the stage where the scientists could declare that white was black and they would be supported the Royal Society and the rest of the so called institutions.

Jones mindset.
From #5303
Ian,
I have too much on to think about this. This meeting isn’t really about my area – the
science of climate change. It is more about doing something.
I know there are climate change deniers trying to malign some of the research going on.
They do not write any of this in the scientific literature, only on right wing blog sites.
All the climate scientists I know though are fully behind the conclusions of the last IPCC
Report in 2007. There is no doubt the world is warming and will continue to warm.
Cheers
Phil

“but unfortunately, it’s a shame he didn’t say the same thing publicly. ”
From just a quick look at many of the excerpts that I have seen posted, it seems that applies to many of the scientists as well.
All is not well in the CAGW camp.

Palmer: “We don’t know which data belongs to which station, correct?”
Was it Palmer’s official function to enable the FOIA to be complied with fully or to help the institution to thwart FOIA requests?
The tone of that comment suggests that, whatever he was supposed to be doing, he was doing the latter. After all, he wasn’t saying “Are you sure we can’t figure out which data belongs to which station?”. It sounds more like “this is the excuse we could use, nod, nod, wink, wink.”

#0344 is a great e-mail chain on UAE and FOI strategery.

As Jones so beautifully projects: “These people are self appointed.”

Palmer: “We don’t know which data belongs to which station, correct?”
No surprise about that, if you recall the Harry_Read_Me file from the earlier Climategate release. Harry was a UEA employee (an insider working with the station data), and his frustration was evident in his running commentary.
The Harry_Read_Me file documents that Harry was not able to duplicate the CRU TS2.1 result using CRU’s own programs and data files! Then he documents his efforts trying to get the data files to work for Version 3. No wonder Jones didn’t want anyone else to see them.
Harry says –
* “am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!
* “But I am beginning to wish I could just blindly merge based on WMO code.. the trouble is that then I’m continuing the approach that created these broken databases.”
* “So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”
* “Here, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING – so the correlations aren’t so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no ’supposed’, I can make it up. So I have :-)”
… more details on his frustration with trying to work with the temperature data files, starting with Australia …
Harry says –
“getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren’t documented. Every time a cloud forms I’m presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding sites, some with references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look up the station metadata with one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will be wrong (another station will have it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too.”
“I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.”
“Wrote ‘makedtr.for’ to tackle the thorny problem of the tmin and tmax databases not being kept in step. Sounds familiar, if worrying. am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!”
“…and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

After reading this I am beginning to sense a pattern as to why these climategate releases are happening over such a long time frame and in the way that they are. Excuse me whilst I don a ‘tin-foil hat’ and please indulge me in wild theorising for a moment but, perhaps these leaks are coming from the team themselves?
The first tranche caused a stir, had several whitewashes exonerate them and so they carry on…. What was revealed in the first tranche was prima facie evidence of bullying of journals and dishonest reporting within scientific publications and much else besides. Nothing that obviously rises to the level of outright fraud, but stuff that is clearly wrong, but with the right corporate, political and media spin, could be harmlessly ignored. It has hurt “the cause”, but not fatally and they had time to prepare for further releases.
This second tranche offers much more damning context, and shows alongside the first tranche, motivation to mislead, lie, obfuscate in publications and mislead the public. They wanted to present a wholly false level of consensus and absolute certainty, yet in these emails many of the key players express exactly the same doubts as those who they maliciously insult as ‘deniers’, then they go on to deny those doubts in public and present a false impression of the “science” in order to materially benefit from further research grants and the pursuit of academic prestige.
Had both tranches been released at once, then the investigations would not have had as easy a time covering these things up.
I am now more sure than ever that the remaining 22,000 emails and accompanying data in the encrypted file will show the whole picture and be much more damning and the mainstream media, the mainstream politicians and corporate interests who are making a fortune from this climate con, will continue to cover up and claim that these new releases are simply “malicious leaks from deniers which actually show nothing new” in the hope to distract everyone from what is actually being released.
Yes this is a high-risk strategy, but the alternative could be far worse for them.
Having parts of the picture released in this way allows the team to deal with each bit of new truth as it emerges with minimal damage to their “cause” (which is what they are confusing real science with, BTW) Had all this information come out, including the as yet non-public 22,000 emails, all at once due to the original lawful freedom of information requests, then the team would not have been able to contain the full extent of how utterly unscientific they have been in promoting and protecting their “cause” and how dishonest they have been. It would most likely be game over for the team and their acolytes.
This is how they get the information out whilst causing as little damage to their cause as possible as they hope each new tranche will have less and less impact as their co-conspirators in politics and the media keep covering up for them.
We are seeing much more of the same spin from the media and the alarmists as during climategate 1.0. Now with the addition of constant reminders of the whitewashes, cover-ups, inquiries. The “nothing to see here” meme is sure sign that actually there is lots to see here, but they are desperate to avoid mass-public discovery of their deceit.

A very big thank you Willis, I just wish I had your style.

As I said on Revin’s site, If I had to pick just one email which demonstrates the sheer nasty ill-intent of some of these people, I’d pick this one by Michael Mann: “I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and
discrediting them.”
Wow. Now bear in mind that it’s more than likely than Mann well understands McIntyre is no more motivated by “fossil fuel interests” than the man in the moon. This is exactly what it looks like, a petty, nasty human being who’s willing to destroy someone’s reputation in order to protect his own, discredited work.

One old prosecutor trick is to confront the person with only a part of the evidence, let them get on record with their response, and then compare it to the balance of the evidence. Hence you expose them as a liar, making excuses for the entirety of the case transparent and unreliable.

My question to all the real scientists and researchers out there is – If the raw data supporting your research and conclusions is lost, how can those conclusions be considered valid without redoing everything? And if the lost original data invalidates the original research and conclusions, doesn’t it invalidate any subsequent research and conclusions based on the original?
And by the way, the U.S. IRS doesn’t buy the “I lost my original records” excuse. They just redo your tax form based on the information they have, meaning all your deductions disappear.

Just out:
>>Google pulls plug on renewable energy plan<>Search giant quitting non-core projects, including solar power<<
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45409951/
Could this ditching of RE projects by Google be a result of Climategate-Season 2?

“as though me laughing at his transparent dodges were a valid exemption to an FOI request.”
It is to a diagnosed psychopath. But Phil Jones isn’t one, is he? Or is he?

Can someone please answer this. Do they now know which data belongs to which station? How could apply corrective factors like Heat Island Effect if they don’t know where the data comes from? How is this even possible, and is it not totally a smoking gun?

In my field (drug development), inability or refusal to provide raw data and appropriate supporting documentation would result in complete failure of the project. No regulatory agency would even consider approving an application that lacked this kind of fundamental documentation. Falsification of these records can result in criminal convictions (and has in fact recently had that result). The AGW people cloak themselves in the mantle of scientific respectability while consistently failing to observe the basic practices of good science. They are pathetic.

What I’d like to know (among other things) is this: who thought up the notion that CO2 was responsible for AGW in the first place? I guess terrarium experiments in high school are no long in vogue.

“I bet you’ll get many more accusations of manipulating the data. The
skeptics don’t seem to want to accept that techniques get better and new
ideas come along.”
Isn’t the burden of proof on the person who comes up with techniques (that) get better and new
ideas (that) come along? Instead of thinking about whether Steve McI is a shill, maybe that effort could go to meticulously detailing these techniques and ideas so that no arguments will hold up?
I would think that the worst critics of data, techniques, and “new ideas” would be those on the inside since they know it will be scrutinized, criticized and questioned. That is if you really wanted to shut down the “deniers”.

It sounds to me more and more that the truth is as I have suspected all along since Climategate Mk 1. Long before the temperature series came into the public spotlight, Phil Jones (and others) muddled along very happily for years and years in their unremarkable backwater building their academic careers. In those days it simply didn’t matter whether they preserved the original raw station data (and meta data), or how they processed it, or how they re-tweaked it subsequently whenever any particularly embarrasing issues came up. It was just all part of the general muddle of acedemia with Phil Jones (and others) in charge and no one ever for one moment expecting anybody else to be in a position to gainsay them because they were, after all, the world authorities.
That this is a cockup rather than a conspiracy is evidenced by ‘Harry the programmer’ being so frustrated with the mess he was being asked to sort out. If Jones et. al. has been up to skulduggery from the beginning they would have surely been far more careful to cover their tracks against the day when outside people would inevitably start lifting a few stones and questioning their information processing methodology (or, as it transpires, lack of it).
I suspect Jones isn’t really scared about others getting hold of the raw data but he IS scared of people finding out how incompetently he tweaked it because he now realises just how sloppy, subjective and unscientific his procedures actually were. So he fights to withold (or make difficult to obtain) both station data and processing method to thwart people who suspect the veracity of his results and want to reproduce his calculations precisely.
The BEST obvious recourse therefore is to undertake the huge task of getting hold of all the raw temperature data (and metadata) and carrying out a complete reprocessing of it using an openly declared set of statistical processing rules and then publishing the whole thing on the web for all to see. Oh dear, I forgot. That’s already been recently tried and has failed entirely to resolve the matter.

Well done, Willis, for explaining the background on this.
As I commented on the original Climategate 2 post ing on WUWT, this guy could be playing a patient waiting game of softly, softly. The first tranche raised questions, although relatively easily blocked through inept & incompetent enquiries, very likely the good old Civil Service rule of “never have an enquiry unless you the know the outcome beforehand” routine! Which is what we got. Those invovled at Penn State & CRU/UEA were seriously rattled but the establishment stood by them. This second tranche seems far more detailed & should lead to more investigations. The final pasord protected maywell be the coup de grace, of undenyable luminousity that they will have to come clean in the end. I don’t know, but is seems that way to me, this is your second chance, the next shot will be right between the eyes!
I will contact my MP, one Mel Stride, & ask if he is going to rattle his sabre to push for a fuller enquiry into all this or not!

“I do not want to make the raw data available, as it will involve more and more requests.”
Even though once you make it ALL available, there will be nothing more to request?

Willis,
While I might want to believe there is more to the story because of the existence of the AES-encrypted file inside the zip, I don’t. It’s not because I don’t want to believe there’s more juiciness from it, I do. However, the size of the encrypted zip was suggested at what, 200,000+ more emails? The size alone tells us that those are likely personal and/or irrelevant. Any e-mail box might have millions of messages. A significant portion of those (from Phil’s generation especially) are likely spam they didn’t know what to do with. This is not to mention all the personal correspondence, travel itineraries, meeting schedules, etc… The contents of that file is most likely all the mundane stuff that has nothing to do with climate science. Their release might be embarrassing personally for the scientists, but our goal is not to personally humiliate them. It’s likely a veiled and perhaps empty threat that all that personal correspondence is available publicly behind a password. I’m guessing the purpose of the person who released it was not to hold out on releasing ‘ever-more incriminating’ evidence, but rather to stop short of personal attacks while pressuring those men to do what is right.
As such, I believe this is the last release we’ll see about Climategate. It should be enough.

I said at the time of Climategate 1.0, and I’ll say it again. I shake my head in disbelief that these (allegedly) highly intelligent scientists don’t have any clue about how email works. Simply deleting email from your computer does not delete all of the uncounted copies of the email that exists on various servers and archives that are out of your reach. Email is not like pen on paper. You can’t tear it up and think it’s gone forever.

“Whether it constitutes a warning or a message, and to whom it might be addressed, is unclear.”
Perhaps more mileage can be obtained by NOT releasing the rest just now but by merely threatening to do so. Several years ago, an article appeared in our paper that police have 22 license plate numbers of men who sought the services of prostitutes. The men were told that if they showed up at the police station to pay their fine, no one would come knocking on their door at home. As I recall 25 showed up!

ClimateGate 1.0 got me interested CAGW – until then I just blew off AGW as “that Al Gore thing”. I’ve read up on the topic (Donna’s book makes the 12th book I’ve read with the Mosher/Fuller book being number 1), hang-out on blogs, I’ve downloaded temperature reconstructions, bought a logger from Anthony and measure my local UHI (mind-blowing here in Phoenix AZ), cancelled subscriptions to magazines, written my congressman and senators repeatedly and routinely bore my friends and family to tears describing this thing. In other words, Climategate 1 forever changed my outlook and changed my life.
One can’t help but ask the question, “what were they thinking?” If the whole thing is an organized fraud/conspiracy wouldn’t any reasonable crook/conspirator at least do something a bit more careful like keep two sets of books – one for FOI and one for “Climate Science”. Or are they simply incompetents.
If they are incompetents wouldn’t they be subjected attacks from inside academia – after all; isn’t science a “blood-sport”. If they are incompetents, it also helps explain why they were unprepared for FOI requests. Let’s see here, you are making pronouncements to alter modern society, and you think no one is going to want to have a look at the raw data? No anticipation of “self-appointed” investigators?
Wouldn’t the climate crowd, flying around the world, making earth-shattering pronouncements to media, think that somewhere out there in the voting public, there would be scientifically/mathematically inclined people that would exert extreme scrutiny of their work? Even “self-appointed” ones?
Bottom line question: Why weren’t they ready for FOI requests because it appears they really weren’t ready. Had they had simply provided the data, some data, anything at all, wouldn’t it just have remained in the realm of a nit-picking squabble because after all, these temperature anomalies are counted in tenths of a degree delta. So it seem to me that running the clock back, it would have been far better to comply with FOI requests from the beginning.
But that would have meant they would have had to spend time on the requests. No sweat. Call a meeting with the FOIA officer and simple build a little organization within the department to do just that – a nominally paid grad-student and make it a little PR cottage industry.
Willis, thanks for all your hard work and for this post – this must take a tremendous amount of your time and if you are doing this as a hobby; you have chosen quite a demanding hobby

How does this e-mail from July 2009 fit into this story of the raw data:
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=1527
date: Tue Jul 28 09:19:16 2009
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: FOIA requests for ‘confidentiality’ agreements
to: “Palmer Dave Mr (LIB)” , “Colam-French Jonathan Mr (ISD)” , “Mcgarvie Michael Mr (ACAD)” , “Ogden Annie Ms (MAC)”
Here are a few other thoughts. From looking at Climate Audit every few days, these people are not doing what I would call academic research. Also from looking they will not stop with the data, but will continue to ask for the original unadjusted data (which we don’t have) and then move onto the software used to produce the gridded datasets (the ones we do release).
CRU is considered by the climate community as a data centre, but we don’t have any resources to undertake this work. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
(…)
Some of you may not know, but the dataset has been sent by someone at the Met Office to McIntyre. The Met Office are trying to find out who did this. I’ve ascertained it most likely came from there, as I’m the only one who knows where the files are here.

“Alex the skeptic says:
November 23, 2011 at 6:40 am
Could this ditching of RE projects by Google be a result of Climategate-Season 2?”
Unlikely. I’ll bet Google has had this in the works for awhile. As a public company Google has shareholders who find wasting money not to their liking. My guess is that Google’s leaders were taken in by all this green energy nonsense – this isn’t their area of expertise. Others, whose knowledge does include energy and economics, and are large holders of GOOG (stock; see the 5-year chart):
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/goog
have not been pleased.
Almost as soon as they started this plan there were critics:
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/03/05/05greenwire-google-ceo-fires-at-critics-defends-its-energy–9995.html
And the world has learned a lot in the past 2.5 years. “NoTricksZone” by P Gosselin has had recent posts. Here is one:
http://notrickszone.com/2011/11/22/german-ard-public-television-green-energy-in-germany-threatens-to-be-biological-and-environmental-debacle/

Just for fun, I remembered where I’d heard the University of East Anglia mentioned before:
sometime after 2.40 – if you cannot be bothered to watch it all…….LOL

Another possible explanation for the encrypted archive is that it would discourage the authorities from pursuing an arrest. Suppose they figured out who it was, who had the remainder of the emails – their priority would be to make a surprise arrest and impoundment to capture any further damaging data before it can be released. It would be a strong motivation to actually make a quick arrest. But a passphrase would be easy to get out – virtually impossible to prevent. There’s now no benefit to the climate community in prosecution, and a potentially massive risk. It’s like a hostage situation.
The police, probably, would not let that stop them. If they have evidence of a crime, they have to prosecute. (Although there can be ‘public interest’ considerations.) But the academics and politicians now have a very good reason for wanting Mr/Ms FOIA to be left alone. Whether this is in response to events happening in the background or a simple precaution there’s no guessing.
It could also be a way to reduce the risk inherent in future disclosures. Had they simply released another block, I think further releases would have been expected, and they would have been watching for them. This tactic could be read either way.

I wonder if FOIA is playing a long game or just woke up in a bad mood. Two years is a very long time to wait, they could have kept the pot boiling with more interim releases. Maybe they felt threatened and wanted to protect their position (if that is the motive they succeeded, the warmist don’t want to bait FOIA)
Also how much work have they done selecting these emails. If I were planning a second attack for two years I would spend some of that time collating the emails. For instance pick out a selection to do with data manipulation, or focus on hide the decline, and put them out together as as single release, and then make another selection about corrupt pal review for another hit later.
The Climategate 1 failed to have more impact because the information was sporadic in nature, and each scandal relied on isolated pieces of the jigsaw. This allowed the warmists to say it was an isolated quote taken out of context.
It seems these new emails are just a random pull from a very big library that has not been looked at in much detail by FOIA. They back up and build on what we already know, but do not provide an audited narrative (yet). I wonder how committed FOIA really is.

Perhaps someone should submit a Freedom of Information request to the Freedom of Information Commissioner, enquiring if he considers CRU-UEA has completely & truthfully provided all relevant information in all the responses CRU-UEA has provided to every FoI request it’s received?

Willis Eschenbach says:
November 23, 2011 at 12:19 pm
… “Does anyone but me think that his answer and the question come from different planets? He’s asked about deleting emails, and he answers about whether we need to know who wrote the IPCC report.”
People need to know. If their is urgent need for action, we need the data, we need to know, we are free citizens in freely operating democracies and we need complete transparency. We need the truth, not someone’s version of it, in order to support urgent action as called for by the CAGW crowd. I find it either disingenuous, or dangerously naive to think otherwise.
Phil and company have demonstrated time and again they operate with half a brain and no moral compass resulting in poor judgement as pertains to the public impact of their work – resulting in FOI requests and finally Climategates 1.0 and 2.0. They brought this on themselves.
Their and their institutions failure to respond to FOI requests in accordance with law, let me repeat, in accordance with law, was a bad call and has provided massive ammunition for their opponents, whomever they may be, and forever tarnished their reputations and legacies. No matter how all this plays out in the near-term, they will go down in history as villains; if earth heats up catastrophically for bungling the message; and if not for being fooled by confirmation bias. “The Cause – good grief! Can you imagine Einstein referring to the Theory of Relativity as “The Cause”? I cringe at the thought.
I also don’t buy the argument that they were hapless, harassed, honest, academics being besieged with requests for data. Come on. Phil could have got back up from the institution and got enough funding to put a mini-red team together to cobble some sense into his data and handled the immense traffic in data requests (/sarc) from what; a half dozen “self-appointed” parties.

Latimer Alder says:
November 23, 2011 at 3:47 am
Exceprt from a post I made at Judith’s place
‘We already know that Phil Jones – along with Mike Mann – believes that as a ‘Climatologist’ he has been granted some special immunity from adhering to normally accepted standards of professional behaviour and integrity. And in the case of FoI – the law of the land as well…..
____________________________-
As a chemist, I think referring to this bunch as ‘Climatologists’ vs Climate Scientists would be a good idea. What they do is NOT science by propaganda generation and it will eventually taint all the sciences with its stench.
I can not believe that the scientific societies are actually standing behind this bunch and lending them their good name because when the ‘Climatologists’ finally fall it will take down all the rest of the groups who “bought in” to turning science into a propaganda generating machine.

Willis Eschenbach says:
November 23, 2011 at 12:19 pm
“(…)“Why do people need to know who wrote what individual paragraph?” Jones said.
Latitude says:
November 23, 2011 at 12:31 pm
“He’s not that stupid…..no one is that stupid”
I cannot reconcile these two sentences.

I suggest the self-named ‘we’ who released the info of climategate 1.0 (Nov ’09) and of 2.0 (Nov ’11) did not time both the releases based on upcoming IPCC conferences.
For the 1.0 climategate release it was likely timed wrt to the climatic buildup to the Copenhagen IPCC conference. Since Copenhagen there have been IPCC meetings/conferences prior to the upcoming Durban with no releases and the imminent Durban conference looks to be impotent at best. So, Durban does not appear to be a significant reason for the major 2.0 climategate release.
For this current 2.0 climategate release the timing, to me anyway, appears more likely based on the intervention by Mann in the court case of ATI’s FOI request for Mann’s info while at UVa. The evidence of this reason for the timing of release 2.0 is suggested because many of the emails are focused on Mann and cover the period Mann was at UVa; as well as other periods and other ‘Team’ members.
As to whether ‘we’ is a single person or a number of people. Looking back at the professional cool execution of the releases and the patient strategy then I find it more likely ‘we’ indeed is a number of people.
John
PS – this was also posted on CA

John Whitman says:
November 23, 2011 at 4:56 pm
“As to whether ‘we’ is a single person or a number of people. Looking back at the professional cool execution of the releases and the patient strategy then I find it more likely ‘we’ indeed is a number of people.”
If the [unintentionally?] hilarious “Occupy” hippie nonsense in the ReadMe file is genuine and not a cover, e.g.:
“/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///
…“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels”
(yeah, right. Let me just get out my invisible checkbook here, and with this invisible pen, I’ll write a $37,000,000,000,000 invisible check, payable to Gaia. There you go. And don’t take any wooden Carbon Credits)
if that’s “FOIA’s” true sentiment, I suggest this could indeed have come from willie leaks (oops, typo. I meant wikileaks).

John-X says:
November 23, 2011 at 5:52 pm
…“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels”
if that’s “FOIA’s” true sentiment, I suggest this could indeed have come from willie leaks (oops, typo. I meant wikileaks).

John-X,
You should re-parse what ‘we’ said in “/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///”.
The thrust is that spending that $37 trillion is stupid.
John

Max Hugoson says:
November 23, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Willis:
“”I recently paid $70 for the 1925 to 2005 station data, day by day, high and lows..for Chaska MN. (Obviously I’m engaged in an “apples to apples” comparison using the Chaska to bounce off the DISMAL (since WWII) Mpls data, which comes from…the middle of two runways at the Mpls Int. Airport.) This was a 1.5 MB file. I did a quick calc, and figured the WHOLE USA data set would cost me $100,000.””
Willis says it is here free [Max, go here, the data is free. You’ll have to navigate to the location you are interested in.]
w.
Reply;___________________
if you are interested in the whole national sets of data, it can be had compressed onto DVDs is several formats, for about what you paid for one station, here is the link to the online store I bought the TD3200 Coop data set I use.
http://ols.nndc.noaa.gov/plolstore/plsql/olstore.prodlist?category=C&subcatc=01&groupin=CDV

David Socrates says:
November 23, 2011 at 8:43 am
“The BEST obvious recourse therefore is to undertake the huge task of getting hold of all the raw temperature data (and metadata) and carrying out a complete reprocessing of it using an openly declared set of statistical processing rules and then publishing the whole thing on the web for all to see. Oh dear, I forgot. That’s already been recently tried and has failed entirely to resolve the matter.”
I think the BEST thing to do would be for someone to collect all the raw data, identify where it came from and how it was measured (metadata), etc, and release it to the world as the true uncorrected raw data. Then and only then should anyone embark on the arduous task of correcting and analyzing the data. I think it’s a tad presumptuous of Phil to believe that his method is the best and only method. This is what Berkley’s BEST should’ve done. Maybe once we have 12000 independent studies of the same raw data set, we can get consensus on the true global temperature over the past 100 years and its probable error.
That beats trusting Phil, NCDC, Berkley and NASA to do a proper job of it.

Summary by SteveM in 2010 http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/21/inquiry-disinformation-about-crutem/ Scroll down to Mosher’s comment, is the UHI influence on CRUTEM issue resolved?

WE and All,
First, i wish to thank Anthony and Willis for hosting such a compelling discussion. I’ve no real background in hard science, save for schoolboy stuff years ago, but I do have a background in investigative reporting. In other words, the E-mails themselves are quite illuminating and suggest a coverup, or more broadly put, an attempt to obscure and misdirect. Are the Emails snipped/ cut or otherwise incomplete, as their defenders assert? I ask because having read through caches of discovery and Emails, some otherwise scintillating and compelling messages, when put into context of the entire thread and what was plainly being discussed, often become quite pedestrian.
In thanks.
Rod

The Portland Oregonian, a pretty leftist outfit, just today (Nov 25,11) editorialized about how we must prepare for the coming heat wave. Prepare, as defined by the Big O’s editorial staff means accepting socialistic rulers with dictatorial powers.

Two years ago I posted a snarky comment on SfGate the website of the San Francisco Chronicle. Something to the effect of “Slaps forehead, has revelation, there never was any data, the guys at EAU bought some cool lab coats, castoff sets from “The Avengers” and ginned up the whole thing” Little did I know.

It’s possible that the encrypted package includes video or audio messages.

My conclusion after all this time is that Phil truly didn’t get it. He actually didn’t understand.
Oh, I think actually Phil “got it” all right. If his data was now corrupt and untraceable, any conclusions drawn from it worthless. Admitting to that fact would be a professional faux pas rising to scientific fraud, likely the end to his career and possibly the entire CRU climate science train.
Conversely, just failing to follow FOI requirements might be a slap on the wrist, first time offence and all, which is about how it turned out. With Associate Palmer’s complicity of course.
The dog ate my homework. Bad doggy!

The long game may simply be phased salvos, especially prior to formative alarmist conferences.
Ken Hall’s theory is far too much of a conspiracy theory. At this point it is early to guess.
Last time theories abounded, the only ones of much credibility in my reading of theories and known parameters was an assembly of documents prepared for an FOIA request that was denied, with an insider a strong possibility as the releaser.
BTW, what is Keith Briffa’s status? Did he have health problems a couple of years ago?

So, it’s confirmed: not only did they (CRU, et al.) not know from whence the data used were derived in the past, and by their own admission they dumped original data due to “storage” capacity problems (I STILL can’t get my head around the idea that a “leading” research institution did not think it both necessary and prudent to find a way to maintain such data ad infinitum), and they apparently did not really track what they did, how the did “it,” or why and when “it” was done.
Thus, one of the traditional hallmarks of [reliable and ethical] scientific research — reproducibility — is toast. There would be, apparently, no way on God’s Green Earth to even hope to assembly “raw” met data and create a new set of values that might be highly similar to what Jones, eta al., have foisted upon us. Very poor judgement, weak ethics, and a high degree of overall irresponsibility.
Unbelievable… All those millions of dollars spen,… errr … wasted by “top scientists,” and nothing left to show for it. Sounds like the usual games in Congress and the White House.

Perhaps the third tranche, when it comes, will not be the entire encrypted file, but another selected chunk of it. The existence of the entire file in public hands is thus mainly a guarantee it won’t be disappeared, but doesn’t necessarily imply it will be opened all at once.
BTW, the “boys will be boys” is clearly more like “malefic brats will be malefic brats”. >:}