With apologies to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, here’s a a comment worth repeating from the Hit and Misses thread.
What I find interesting about the entire email corpus is the focus on the minutia of the statistics and the different proxies. In none of the emails from the core team members do we see any physics of radiation. It seems that if it were your role to “prove” the positive feedback of CO2 you would want to actually do some physics of radiative and convective transfer of energy in the atmosphere. This is where the rubber meets the road.
It seems that the entire consensus group have taken an assumption (positive feedback of CO2 increase) and are going deeper and deeper into the details of the proxies in order to show what the results of their assumption are.
I think that this is why as a discipline, more and more physicists are dismissing AGW.
Briffa is a likely candidate to be the whistle blower.
I, too, thought that in 2009 but after reading some of Gail Combs’ posts, I lean more towards Alan Kendall
J Martin says:
November 27, 2011 at 9:44 am
Hmmmmmm…what do they call the trapeze artist that hangs upside down in the circus??? 🙂
Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:06 am
I just want to thank you….I enjoy your posts filled with information 🙂
kim2ooo says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:05 am
Dear Mr Watts,
Since I have a hard time telling Mr Mann – Mr Schmidt – Mr Black apart in their pictures…could you please post Mr Manns’ upside down for me?>>>
That’s THREE times I’ve had to clean a keyboard this morning. Not to mention that my sides hurt.
pat says on November 26, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Which gives us an opportunity to point out to people just how irrelevant the MSM are, n’est pas?
davidmhoffer says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:13 am
Awwww…your poor keyboard.
But I’m happy if I brought a smile into your day! 🙂
J Martin says:
November 27, 2011 at 9:44 am
Personally, I’d like to see them ALL in service to the environment…hmmm….. pickin’ up trash???
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 27, 2011 at 1:39 am
…..Until the analysis of the direct data is undertaken and we quit fooling around with the proxies, we are never going to gain an accurate understanding of the issue.
________________________________________
And that is WHY none of this has been done and anyone who tries gets frozen out.
What we have is MSM propaganda supported by hand wavy corrupt “Pscyence” and that is exactly what is wanted. A definitive experiment that proves or disproves the CAGW theory would be death to all the trillions of dollars of easy money. It would be death to all the political power.
Even if you got the experiment done it would be shouted down just as Dr Jaworski’s papers on ice cores were shouted down.
I am glad you grabbed that data by the way, guard it well.
“NOW the thing about such email servers is that they can EASILY be set up to place a COPY of EVERY email passing through into a continuous stream file – this is simply a file the can be used later as an audit trail. The users of the system do not even know that every email sent and received has had a copy stashed. Pulling such a file apart later is a tedious and boring process, but quite possible.
My speculation is that this is what has happened.”
As a 25 year Unix sysadmin (as well as physicist) I would disagree. None of this is standard of practice, or common, or likely. It is far, far more likely that the mail spool directory e.g. /var/spool/mail on the primary server was religiously backed up in one of the usual “reliable” (to 3-4 9s) methodologies, e.g. a full backup once a month or thereabouts (periodically stored offsite), followed by incrementals that track the day to day diffs in the individual user spools. In that way the mail spool file as of any given day could be reconstructed from the full overlaid with the incremental.
Typically the backup process will not pick up any mail received during the day and deleted on the same day, although over the last 5+ years many sites have adopted a much more aggressive mirroring and incremental system that backs up the primary spool to a DISK on a secondary (large) backup server, as often as every X hours. I don’t know of any systems that journal EVERY change — one hits information theoretic problems that make it very difficult to provision enough storage with too fine-grained of even a differencing scheme, especially with binary files.
There are thus two possible explanations for where the list came from. Most likely is that somebody hacked into the system OR abused their pre-existing privileges on the system to run e.g. cat /var/spool/mail/* > cru-spool.txt. This is fast and easy and records an instant snapshot of everything all jumbled together. Personally, I wouldn’t do this — I’d do tar cvf var-spool-mail.tar /var/spool/mail and then compress it and copy it out of there — that would make it a lot easier to sort things out by user later (basically it makes an archive copy of the entire mail spool). This would explain why there are holes — any mail deleted from the server as of the time the copy is made is not in the individual mail spool files.
A second (less likely) possibility is that the hacker/cracker/sysadmin had and used access to the full/incremental backups and built a COMPLETE record of the mail spool file ex post facto, including files that were deleted by the users sometime AFTER they were recorded on an incremental (on whatever schedule the incrementals run). Even this is probably not “complete” — I’d guestimate that 20-40% of all incoming mail never makes it into a incremental (in my own case it is more like 80%, given the effectiveness of my spam filters and instant deletion of junk mail, but others are less vigilant or don’t know how to use procmail filters) but people in research tend to save IMPORTANT letters from their friends in their mail spools and not delete them so rapidly. Some of them they might, however, copy into personal mail folders in their local system space and although this would also have been backed up it would be VERY tedious to go through all of userspace looking for it. In many cases saving a message to a local spool deletes it from the primary spool.
If I were a forensic computer cop (and I am a bit of a security expert, although not a cop), I would first be giving polygraphs to the systems admins, then to the e.g. grad students, postdocs, faculty, staff. I’ve seen appallingly poor practice — the root password literally posted on a bulletin board in the server room so that postdocs can “self-service” certain problems — and then, depending on the operating system used on the server and how it was maintained, it may well have had easily exploitable and well-known holes that permitted unauthorized people to gain root access to run the tar command (e.g.) above. For example, if /var/spool/mail was exported via NFS, users may have been able to mount it on their own LAPTOPS with root access. Terrible practice, incompetent sysadmins, but FWIW there are plenty of incompetent sysadmins in the world and even the best of them has a hard time patching every possible leak in the security-dike.
FOIA is, from the look of it, not an idiot. He/she chose a competent encryption, for example, going out of his/her way to do so. Using zip suggests that he/she is more of a windows user than a linux user — a linux user might have been more inclined to use tar or bzip, possibly with gpg to do the core encryption. OTOH, to be able to copy the entire contents of the mail spool directory, either as a snapshot or from backups, bespeaks a nontrivial knowledge of Unix/linux as well.
The really interesting question is: what led them to do what they did? Were they a legitimate root user who was going through mail for some other reason who saw something that shocked them so much that they interpreted it as a “crime” and motivated them to violate the privacy of these users? Were they a grad student or postdoc who had a strong (if somewhat fluid:-) sense of “ethics” (and who was a bit of a hacker) who got pissed off at the blatant cherrypicking and general assholery going on and who used their diabolical skills to root the system and “out” the damning emails? Were they (still possible) an OUTSIDE cracker — a member of this very blog, perhaps — with mad skills who found an exploit that permitted them to get to the mail spool from outside? The latter isn’t insanely unlikely — again, general incompetence in systems staff often leaves exploitable holes, especially if Windows-based systems form a significant part of the server infrastructure.
A secondary question is how much access they had to the individual userspace directories of the people involved. Yes, if they had the time and the means they could have copied the entire filesystem out of the premises including all of the home directories and backed up research space. I’ve seen it done before, by an Evil Postdoc who was seeking to steal a copy of an entire research “snapshot” to go through later looking for patentable/stealable IP. I’m sure there is lots of bandwidth in and out of CRU, although there is a bit of a risk with logfiles revealing whodunnit if they were at all sloppy (again evidence that FOIA is smarter than the average bear — most dumbasses would leave unmistakeable traces in the form of e.g. IP numbers and/or login records or would do it at a time that a vigilant sysadmin would be likely to notice (for example) that the server was sluggish as it works to make a copy of a TB or so of data and move it over the network).
None of this matters very much, not really. Most sysadmins follow a code of ethics that explicitly prohibits this sort of thing — they are not “participants” in what goes on, they are an essential part of the infrastructure that permits it to happen, and the whole infrastructure suffers to the extent that individuals using it cannot rely on its security and privacy. This has the feel of somebody with passion, a participant or a disgruntled employee with a serious grudge (or both, a disgruntled employee who IS a participant, e.g. a postdoc who was screwed or badly treated by one of the hockey team and who got fed up with the arrant hypocrisy of the entire self-serving system). But it could be that FOIA is a complete outsider, an uberhacker funded by an ultraconservative shell foundation that is a front for the oil industry for all that we can tell. So what? As long as the spool is genuine, it is genuine. It’s wikileaks city — criminal according to the letter of the law, offensive to anyone who respects privacy, and yet it “outs” abominable, despicable behavior and deliberate deception in a process that is supposed to be the EPITOME of honesty, scientific research.
At the end of the day, this is what all of the leaks have revealed. Many of the participants do indeed believe in the religion they have helped found. Jones, in particular, has a long history of being swept along by this almost against his will. His OWN temperature reconstructions prior to IPCC 1 showed the LIA and MWP, and (IIRC) he expressed some serious skepticism towards MBH and the hockey stick at the beginning, before allowing himself to be convinced and even to participate using the “new” method of cherrypicking the data. His angst has become even more pronounced — although he still “believes” that AGW is taking place and may still be catastrophic, he acknowledges that the evidence is getting thinner and thinner and that the early papers upon which the “catastrophic” part was based e.g. the hockey stick were bullshit.
He is not alone, even among those that still “believe” in AGW. This too is clearly proven in the email messages.
The sad thing is that the language of the entire debate has devolved, moving far, far away from the language of science. The idea of padding scientific committees intended to review science upon which hundreds of billions of dollars worth of policy decisions are supposed to be based with hand-picked members who will deliver a pre-agreed upon conclusion is offensive to any scientist — even if you truly do believe that some “skeptics” are just as religious as hockey team “believers” seem to be, there are plenty of real scientists who are skeptical (like me). I’m even a physicist, with no dog in the fight. I may not be an expert on dendroclimatology, but I can detect bullshit science and confirmation bias and lying with statistics when I see it. I can also make perfectly reasonable suggestions for ways of improving the science — DRW’s empirical studies being a perfect case in point; directly measuring nighttime cooling rates over time in arid climates (as I’ve suggested on other threads) being another.
I’m even sane enough not to knee-jerk reject the idea that there is SOME anthropogenic component to global warming since the LIA because I don’t “like” the hypothesis or want to get paid off by giant oil companies or because I like driving an Excursion and having electricity and refrigeration and air conditioning and plenty of food and all of the other things that plentiful and cheap energy provides me. The big question is, however, how much?
To answer this, one has to begin by determining the temperature that we SHOULD be experiencing outside, less the increased CO_2. Without an accurate knowledge of this baseline — accurate to well WITHIN the marginal temperature increase supposedly attributable to CO_2 — it is not possible to transform OBSERVATIONS of global temperature (no matter how accurate) into an estimate of the MEASURED effects of the CO_2 increase. With some readily available confounding variables that are perfectly capable of explaining all or most of the observed temperature variation even before looking at CO_2, this is not easy.
This is where Mann’s hockey stick has done the world an enormous disservice. Because it was so very, very badly done, it was far too easy to falsify. Everyone who was merely rightly skeptical of any far-reaching hypothesis such as AGW has now — equally rightly — become even more skeptical, and Climategate I and II only reinforce that by revealing that the primary participants in the game have been WILFULLY lying, WILFULLY manipulating the data, KNOWINGLY engaging in cherry picking and confirmation bias, hell, openly stacking the supposedly fair deck of their committees and refereeing process to prevent any real scientific challenge to their foregone conclusions from emerging. The theory is, in their mind, not falsifiable, it is “given truth”, as obvious as the truths that the world is flat and at the center of the Universe. All evidence supports their hypothesis; evidence that appears to contradict it is not permitted to reduce their degree of belief and is ruthlessly suppressed.
None of it matters. Economics will, slowly but surely, push the world away from burning as much “fossil fuel” because it is a scarce resource with a high cost of recovery and a high environmental cost associated with its use OUTSIDE of the possible cost associated with “CO_2. and AGW”. In fifty years I will be dead, but atmospheric CO_2 will be on the way back down from a peak that will have been well short of 600 ppm. Most of the hype and religious dogma associated with the current “crisis” will be a short, somewhat shameful chapter in the history of science, and grad students will write theses on how it could have all been avoided if only.
Perhaps — and this is something that all of the skeptics on this list need to openly recognize as well, or else you are indeed just as dogmatic and religious as the hockey team — the AGW >>hypothesis<< will have proven to be true, and some fraction of the world's global mean temperature will be directly attributable to the increase in CO_2. Perhaps that increase will have had bad effects that outweigh its good ones. Perhaps it will have had good effects that outweigh the bad ones — if we begin a Maunder-type solar minimum and global temperatures try to DROP by 1-2C, a 1-2C CO_2 enhanced warming might be just what we need to stay "normal", whatever that means.
The important thing to do is keep an open mind, one that does indeed change its degree of belief as OBJECTIVE evidence is accumulated that supports or does not support any given hypothesis, including AGW. The relatively UNBIASED temperature records, reconstructions that predate IPCC 1 and MBH altogether, show an entirely believable temperature increase from the LIA onward, one that is fairly clearly associated with a significant change in solar activity over that time up to the 9000 year 20th century Grand Maximum. That same time frame coincides with a steady increase in anthropogenic CO_2 in the atmosphere. PERHAPS some fraction of the former is caused by the latter — I rather think it has been. Roy Spencer, somebody that seems fairly rational about the whole thing, estimates order of 0.5C, but even if one goes to 1C it hardly implies dire consequences UNLESS you simultaneously assert a large climate sensitivity that just isn't there; it makes no sense. If our climate didn't have neutral to negative relative sensitivity, it would be even more unstable than it already is, unstable enough to run away to catastrophe without our help.
This is one thing that the climatologists really could learn from physicists. If there is a "hole" into the phase space of possibilities (state configurations) that leads to disaster, sooner or later random chance will carry your system into that hole and the disaster will occur. The fact that no such catastrophe has occurred in the past is thus de facto evidence that there is no such hole. It is why one shouldn't lose any sleep when people argue that the next generation of supercollider will create micro black holes and the earth will collapse into them, or the explosion of a nuclear bomb will "ignite the atmosphere" and turn the earth into a star.
Cosmic rays hit the earth every day with more energy than we will EVERY create in an accelerator. Asteroid collisions create temperatures and pressures EVERY bit as large as those in a nuclear bomb. If there was a catastrophic hole in the space of possibilities, we would have long since fallen in, so there is no such hole. If there was a catastrophic hole in climate such that a mere doubling of (very low concentrations of) atmospheric CO_2 would "veniform" the planet, transforming it into a hot hell-hole of desert and drought, it would have happened long, long ago and we'd still be there.
rgb
“This touches on another important point that I never see addressed. As CO2 concentrations increase, the absorption of IR at ground level only increases logarithmically since the principal spectral lines are all saturated and only the wings and very weak lines come into play. But at the altitude you describe as “the blinds become transparent” the radiation to space by the CO2 increases linearly with concentration since it will always occur from the strongest spectral lines. The net effect should be extra cooling of the atmosphere, not extra heating.”
Or, as the good old 8-ball used to say “Answer cloudy, try again later”
We seem so utterly terrified of acknowledging that the system is really rather complex and that we might not KNOW how to construct an accurate model of the effects of atmospheric CO_2 from the top to the bottom of the atmosphere (where they are likely to be very different at different levels). Down low, UHI suggest that there is quite a lot of anthropogenic LOCAL WARMING caused by CO_2 and water vapor and anthropogenic causes like paving parking lots. I am a very strong believer in ALW.
That sounds scary and bad for the globe until you realize that land is only some 30% of the surface of the globe, that one whole continent and major parts of several others are more or less unpopulated because they are too cold, too hot, too dry, too mountainous, and that even in the most populated countries, the bulk of the population lives in something like 20-10% of the available land space. For every square kilometer of urban heat island, there are perhaps 100 square kilometers of countryside, desert, mountain, ocean, lake, icepack, forest. Too bad, really, that MOST of the thermometers that have contributed to the global temperature record up to around 40 years ago were located in populated areas if not cities.
Beyond that, we don’t really know enough to build really good MODELS of global heat trapping due to CO_2. The models one ends up with depend too strongly on what you put into them, and that in turn reflects your beliefs. We don’t have the data needed to build models that don’t depend on belief and assumption, and we don’t have any laboratory where we can test the models we build outside of the earth itself. And for better or worse, the GCMs have no skill; they simply don’t WORK to explain the past or predict the future temperature of the planet (assuming that one could get something approximating agreement on the temperature series oin the past that they are SUPPOSED to be fitting. They cannot explain the simplest of things — like why northern and southern average temperatures don’t behave the same way, like the MWP or LIA or Dalton miminum, like ALL of the thermal fluctuations visible in the thermal record of the Holocene, or over the last 5 million years of the current “ice age”. 5 million years ago, the world — which WAS warm, globally warm — began to cool, cool enough to flip into a series of period of severe glaciation interrupted by relatively brief interglacials. We don’t know why this happened. We couldn’t have predicted that it was going to happen. We cannot predict when, or why, it might stop and warm up again. We don’t know if the current warming isn’t an early signal that this entire 5 million year epoch is coming to an end because of things WAY beyond our control that have nothing whatsoever to do with CO_2.
Overall, our ignorance vastly exceeds our knowledge when it comes to the climate. We don’t even do all that well with the weather, and the weather is easy compared to the climate (the latter is in some sense the integral of the former). There are KNOWN timescales as long as 1000 years in the heat transport mechanisms that contribute to climate, and climate is the result of chaotic dynamics where small fluctuations sometimes amplify over time to dominate future state — and we don’t know the times over which these fluctuations are stored and amplify!
It’s a shame — there is so very much good, interesting science that could be done here if one could lose the politics and the confirmation bias and the cherrypicking and the “saving the earth” crap. To REALLY save the earth, it helps to understand it, and we have a long, long ways to go before we do.
rgb
Robert Brown,
Going by basic human nature, it is very unlikely that an outside hacker leaked the emails, because some were selectively withheld. Probably to protect the leaker, or threatening to blackmail the principals with even more damning emails in case he was identified. Why would a casual hacker post most, but not all the emails? It’s pretty clear that it was done by an insider.
Michael Mann is an arrogant little pussy who suddenly realized he’d gotten a lot of power and influence following the IPCC publication of his hokey stick chart. In both Climategate email dumps we can see that he lorded it over any perceived opposition, and stepped on a lot of toes in the process. It is only natural that someone with the knowledge and access to stick it back to him would do what FOIA did.
Robert Brown says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:53 am
……………………… ” ]
Good read!
How about a guest post?
J Martin says:
November 27, 2011 at 9:44 am
“Has anyone got any ideas to help rehabilitate the team to become useful members of society ?”
The first step is to give each of them a lengthy treatment for testosterone poisoning. Mann would need surgery.
pat says on November 26, 2011 at 6:13 pm
o/t but the MSM’s refusal to expose the public to the contents of Climategate II emails is nothing short of a disgrace:
__________________________________
Richard Sharpe says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:21 am
Which gives us an opportunity to point out to people just how irrelevant the MSM are, n’est pas?
___________________________________
If the truth of this hoax (with details) ever does make it to the general public, the MSM is going to be in really deep Kimchi. Newspapers are already in financial difficulties Tell me how the TAX PAYER supported BBC is going to weather this hoax if and when their active collusion surfaces.
It was fine and they could silence sceptics up until Climategate 1.0, then things started falling apart but they recovered. Then Climategate 2.0 hit. Once all of this extra material has been raked through it is going to be real hard to bury the truth a second time.
The August 3, 2011 Rasmussen poll showed “69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming …” http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/69_say_it_s_likely_scientists_have_falsified_global_warming_research
Give it another six months for these emails to impact and I wonder what a new poll will show?
A more current poll (November 23, 2011) “Sixty percent (60%) of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat favor building the pipeline which President Obama has delayed until at least 2013 because of environmental concerns. Just 24% are opposed. …” http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/november_2011/60_favor_building_keystone_xl_pipeline
And just out of curiosity…
Looks like Fukushima, despite MSM hysteria has not completely torpedoed the Nuclear industry. Support is down from the 65% of the general population favoring of New Nuclear Plants in 2004 http://www.nei.org/filefolder/publicopinion_04-06.pdf
The US voters polled do not seem to be as brainwashed as some might hope.
I think it helps to keep an eye on what the public actually thinks because it is not the same as what we see in the news reporting.
Robert Brown says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:53 am
“NOW the thing about such email servers is that they can EASILY be set up to place a COPY of EVERY email passing through into a continuous stream file – this is simply a file the can be used later as an audit trail. The users of the system do not even know that every email sent and received has had a copy stashed. Pulling such a file apart later is a tedious and boring process, but quite possible.
My speculation is that this is what has happened.”
As a 25 year Unix sysadmin (as well as physicist) I would disagree. None of this is standard of practice, or common, or likely.
=====================================================================
Say what? As a 35 year veteran in the computer networking world I have to say this is really easy to do and quite common in industry. I’ve no idea how common it is in academia where principle may override CYA and corporate espionage concerns. Perhaps your experience isn’t quite as broad as you imagine it to be.
Here’s how it’s commonly done. Even found a video tutorial for you:
Two maxims are applicable here, rgb, that I learned decades ago.
1) The network never forgets.
2) Never put anything in an email you wouldn’t want to see appear in the newspaper.
Had these yahoos (Jones, Briffa, Mann, Santer, Schneider, etc.) any real experience in intranet or internet they’d know about the two maxims above and surely I’m not repeating them for your benefit but rather for the benefit of others reading this. The hockey team pikers learned the hard way.
To nit pick:
[1] “UNIX” is an operating system not a language. Under UNIX a number of native utilities as well as various installed programming languages (e.g. FORTRAN, COBOL, C etc) and environments (shells) are available.
[2] BASIC was not so much ‘invented’ as developed over time at Dartmouth as part of a ‘bigger picture’ for interactive usage (i.e. a ‘time haring’ environment among several users) of their computer hardware.
Initially BASIC was developed as a compiled language (at Dartmouth, and later elsewhere as an interpreted language) *BUT* Dartmouth went one step further and had created an environment for BASIC that was part of the “Dartmouth Time Sharing System” (DTSS) where BASIC was natively supported via interactive OS (operating system) commands (e.g. NEW, OLD, LIST, SAVE, RUN, etc); note these commands differ form statements *within* BASIC (e.g. DEF, DIM, FOR, NEXT, GOSUB, etc. as well as arithmetic and comparison operators and various functions).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC
.
Robert Brown.
Nice post.
Re the UNIX stuff. What about Rsync as a candidate. It’d be rather obvious to any sysadmin, but as it was just a backup server it may have hardly if ever been looked at. Indeed, Rsync may have already have been on the server. Though I guess there are endless ways to do it.
With any luck the people advising the police are the people wot dun it. I would think the day the police make an arrest the missing password will enter the public domain. If it was an internal thing then the police have a chance of pinning it on somebody in which case the password should immediately become public knowledge. But if the job was external, especially if foreign, (perhaps a media organisation ?) the police will get nowhere and then we will just have to wait until FOIA.org decide to release the password.
Re co2 physics. I have seen two physics papers on the internet that both conclude that co2 has no warming effect whatsoever, and that if anything it may have a cooling effect. Degree level maths and beyond. I’ll try and find links. Though others here may have such links more to hand.
Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 11:50 am
The economics of nuclear power is its own torpedo. It’s just too expensive compared to coal and natural gas. France has the largest percentage of nuclear generated electricity in the world at almost 80%. The average price per kilowatt hour there is $0.19. The average price in the United States, which gets only 20% from nukes is $0.11.
Got it? Write that down!
kim2ooo says:
November 27, 2011 at 11:23 am
Robert Brown says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:53 am
……………………… ” ]
Good read!
How about a guest post?
_______________________________
I second that motion… All in favor?
Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:06 am
“If Jones can not even run Excel, I VERY much doubt he was running Unix or any other of those more difficult languages. That is why “BASIC” was invented. A simple language for us dumb scientists to use. I had a ONE HOUR lecture on BASIC during my training in undergrad Chemistry in 1970.”
Good grief. Excel is an application. Unix is an operating system. Basic is a language. Dumb is on a case by case basis.
Dave Springer;
Say what? As a 35 year veteran in the computer networking world I have to say this is really easy to do and quite common in industry>>>
So, you must have bee retired now for what, 15 years? Your answer is only partly accurate and totaly obsolete.
1. The video you link to explains a procedure in the context of an outsourced e-mail system. The CRU ran their own email system. What they could and could not do would depend entirely on two factors. The first would be the specific e-mail software they were running, and the second would be axactly how that e-mail system was implemented. Unless you have knowledge that pertains to both of these issues, you cannot say how easy, difficult, or even possible, any particular approach to preserving email might be.
2. The technique described in your video would be of little or no use in any venue with the volume of email that CRU would generate. Logging all incming and outgoing email to a single account would create a single email box with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of entries. Just opening the folder would take hours, perhaps days, let alone searching it for keywords in anything amounting to a timely fashion. Further, we can likely surmise that this is in fact NOT what was done as the various e-mails refer to the end users themselves searching their personal email rather than the compliance officers searching all the CRU email.
3. Complance law and FOIA law and privacy law all overlap to some extent. The techniques suggested in your video do not meet the legal standards for any of these, in private organizations or academic ones.
4. In general, anyone who runs central comuter systems of any sort is aware (or ought to be) of the basics of regular backup to protect against data loss. This applies to email in spades. In more modern email systems, archive software is run in addition to backup systems. In the case of a “hacker” trying to make copies en masse of an email system, the backup and archive systems would be a far easier target for someone on the “inside” than would be the email system itself.
_Jim says:
November 27, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Gail Combs says on November 27, 2011 at 10:06 am
____________________________
Jim, I stand corrected, but then I am “Computer Challenged” I think many of these guys in my age range may also be “Computer challenged” and relied on young grad students to do the actual work. Hiring the 12yr old computer savvy nephew as it were…. Come to think of it the last company I worked for DID hire a 16 yr old high school student to do a lot of the computer work and that company was a multi-million dollar corporation selling for over $150 per share.
Dave Springer;
France has the largest percentage of nuclear generated electricity in the world at almost 80%. The average price per kilowatt hour there is $0.19. The average price in the United States, which gets only 20% from nukes is $0.11.
Got it? Write that down!>>>
Yes, the retail price of something is a 100% accurate indicator of the cost of production. NOT!
Gasoline costs more than twice as much in France as it does in the US. Are you seriously going to argue that a refinery in France costs more than twice as much to operate as one in the US? Did you even bother to compare costs at point of production in order to eliminate factors such as taxation regimes and environmental regulation that can substantively alter the end user price? Did you break down the other sources used in the total average to eliminate the cost advantage available in North America from hydro?
France exports a lot of that nuclear generated electricity. Are you suggesting that they sell it at a loss? Or perhaps you are suggesting their customers are so stupid that they pay more money for nuclear generated electricity than they do from other sources?
“write that down” indeed. NOT!
Dave Springer
I was surprised that you reckoned that the price of French electricity was so high. So I looked it up
http://bleuciel.edf.com/abonnement-et-contrat/les-prix/les-prix-de-l-electricite/tarif-bleu-47798.html#acc52401
and got $0.16 twice as high as I was expecting. I’m sure when I was visiting a friend in France two years ago that it was half that amount. I remember that she got her electricity from the same company in France that I got mine from in England and her cost per kwh was half mine then.
Perhaps the French electricity companies are milking their customers for whatever they can get. Or perhaps they also now have a windmill tax.
$0.11 that’s cheap. Diesel here is £1.40 per litre. But what annoys me most as we approach a series of cold winters is that the cost of wholesale gas in the US has halved, but over here in the UK they are putting up gas and electricity prices, claiming that the cost of wholesale gas has increased. Yet we know that a there is a vast amount of readily accessible shale gas here.
Time we had a bitterly cold winter followed by a general election, and we can vote out some of the religious co2 muppets that pose as members of parliament.
Dave Springer says:
November 27, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:06 am
“If Jones can not even run Excel, I VERY much doubt he was running Unix or any other of those more difficult languages. That is why “BASIC” was invented. A simple language for us dumb scientists to use. I had a ONE HOUR lecture on BASIC during my training in undergrad Chemistry in 1970.”
Good grief. Excel is an application. Unix is an operating system. Basic is a language. Dumb is on a case by case basis.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Dave,
Excel is EASY even for a computer dummy like me. If you can handle a computer operating system like Unix, especially the older version, then Excel should be an absolute SNAP. All it takes is a bit of poking around. You do not even have to take a course or read a book to be able to deal with Excel.
I think what a lot of you are missing is that those with degrees dating pre-1975-ish do not have the bone deep computer skills that those growing up with home PCs have. We forget the ready access to computers really did not happen until the mid 1980’s and the era of cheap PCs, before that is was Mainframes and the first to get access to new technoligy were the bean counters. Also once you become a teaching professor your GRAD students do the actual work at your direction. You are better off thinking of these guys as mid level managers because that is what they actually are.
That is the point I was trying to make but messed up, sorry.