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.
davidmhoffer says:
November 27, 2011 at 12:37 pm
You ignorance is showing again, as usual. A record of emails going back 10+ years isn’t captured on routine server backups. These at best capture only what individuals have chosen to save. Archiving all emails whether individuals choose to save them or not is pretty common in commercial settings and it doesn’t matter if you own the mail server all you need is adminstrative rights and then there are many ways to do it so your lecture about the video tutorial using an external mail provider (gmail in his example) is irrelevant.
You’re right my experience is dated but both my son and son-in-law are certified IT gurus so I’m pretty much still in the loop. FOIA acts now force archiving of emails for predefined periods of time. My wife runs a small medical practice. You wouldn’t believe the regulatory burdens on IT in her little office for HIPPA compliance. It’s awful. Anyhow, its worse now than in the past because corporate and government entities are required by law to archive email – it’s no longer a choice – although in my experience it was usually done to aid in potential litigation.
Please stop talking out of your butt. It only makes you look stupid and makes me waste time correcting you.
Gail Combs says:
November 27, 2011 at 1:01 pm
“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.”
This is like you saying that if I can grow tomatoes then it should be snap breeding horses. The one provides very little insight into the other and no one familiar with both would say such a thing.
MMM – someone should run that Photoshop alteration detective routine on that photo, the face looks familiar. 😉
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.
The nuclear power plants in the U.S. have an estimated cost per kilowatt hour across the fleet of $.0183 per kwh, cheaper than coal. The Palos Verde plant in Arizona has a cost per kw/hr at $.0123 per kw/h
Look the numbers up.
I have submitted several experiments for consideration that would measure specific model parameters, no USAF interest. No one wants to open Pandora’s box.
I would bet quite a lot that the USAF already has the numbers, based upon decades of “upper atmospheric research”. I have a book by DARPA and the University of Michigan from 1964 that I found in a used book store that goes through a lot of what they knew back then. It is a quite interesting read.
Dave Springer;
You ignorance is showing again, as usual. A record of emails going back 10+ years isn’t captured on routine server backups.>>>
Yes it is. Standard backup architectures are daily incremental and weekly full written to an off server media such as tape. How long back emails can be recovered is entirely dependant upon the data retention plicy of the organization. If they retain their backup tapes for ten years, then any email that was backed up ten years ago can still be recovered.
Dave Springer;
These at best capture only what individuals have chosen to save.>>>
Wrong. They capture all data that the backup system is designed to capture, regardless of of what the end users do or don’t do.
Dave Springer;
Archiving all emails whether individuals choose to save them or not is pretty common in commercial settings and it doesn’t matter if you own the mail server all you need is adminstrative rights and then there are many ways to do it so your lecture about the video tutorial using an external mail provider (gmail in his example) is irrelevant.>>>
My point was that the methodology demonstrated in your video is not practical from a technology perspective and doesn’t meet the legal reqquirements of compliance law, privacy law, or FOIA requirements.
Dave Springer;
You’re right my experience is dated but both my son and son-in-law are certified IT gurus so I’m pretty much still in the loop.>>>
Your experience is not only dated, it was plain wrong and doesn’t apply to anything in the context of the email systems at CRU and CG1 or CG2. Having a son or a son in law “in the business” means nothing for your competency, and everything you write is either wrong or very wrong or just plain misleading.
Dave Springer;
My wife runs a small medical practice. You wouldn’t believe the regulatory burdens on IT in her little office for HIPPA compliance. It’s awful.>>>
It is quite manageable if you understand the regulatory requirements, how email systems are architected, and what tool sets are available to simplify administration of these. Your wife needs to get in a consultant who has experience in these areas which clearly your son and son in law do not have or I presume they would have helped her with it already. There are also service providers who specialize in provisioning email and other administrative systems to small healthcare offices that include the implementation of the required compliance systems.
Dave Springer;
Anyhow, its worse now than in the past because corporate and government entities are required by law to archive email – it’s no longer a choice – although in my experience it was usually done to aid in potential litigation. >>>
Wrong. The law in the Unites States requires that companies have a data retention policy and adhere to it. This may include archive systems as a method of meeting the data retention policy. Most of the financial justification for archive systems before Sarbanes-Oxley (commonly called SOX) came into force in the United States was cost reduction as it allowed older email to be removed from the email system and housed instead on lower cost storage media such as low performance hard drives and/or arrays, or media such as tape and optical media. After SOX, the additional capabilities of most archive software to respond to court ordered search as well as FOIA requests made the business case to implement archive systems in support of compliance and litigation requirements even more attractive.
Dave Springer;
Please stop talking out of your butt. It only makes you look stupid and makes me waste time correcting you>>>
The largest email system I ever built was 200,000 users. The most complex compliance project I ever did was for a $5 Billion per year private company with operations in 22 countries. The largest backup system I ever built was for a medical organization with 20 hospitals, over 100 secondary care facilities and 28,000 users. Oops, that was the largest one that was HIPPA compliant. My largest ever involved a provincial government and a tape library that at the time (about 5 years ago) was the 2nd largest tape library every deployed in the world. The most secure data protection system I ever was involved in was for a NATO organization that required CIA Orangebook B2 class security and was active in combat operations for the war in Bosnia.
Frankly Dave, your arrogance and ignorant debating style is beginning to wear thin. I’ve responded to you with civility, and facts. You want to argue from authority, then read a few snippets from my background and experience above. You really want to put your credentials up against mine? If you really want to take the gloves off, by all means. Of course, I’m not a circus clown (or was it a rodea clown? I forget) that you can challenge to a fist fight and then not show up. Nor do I shoot my mouth off about what a good scienist I am when I’m just a bully moderator at Uncommon Descent where RC like moderator practices are used to advance the “intelligent design” pretend science as a cover for pushing religion. BTW, I was doing cpu design win work for Intel when you were programming primitive graphics systems for Coleco. I was doing design work on military command and control systems for naval battle ships and system control for communications satellites about the time you were proudly proclaiming that the Dell desk tops you were marketing had the best Quake benchmarks on the market.
Stuff your head back up your butt sir, because that’s where it belongs.
One of the crucial assumptions seems to be that CO2 is “uniform” through out the atmosphere. As a chemist who dealt with real world mixing problems in industry, I have a major problem with that assumption.
Can you shed any light on that point???
From what I understand wet chemists have found considerable variation in CO2 concentrations in laboratory experiments, from the low 200’s to the 500 ppm range. Indeed early measurements of CO2 atmospheric concentration were done by wet chemists and they have major variations in concentration. In the 1964 DARPA book that I referenced in a previous email I read that the military’s measurements of CO2 concentrations found that below 100 meters altitude there is a wide variance in CO2 levels that would tend to confirm the work of wet chemists.
If this is true, and have have no reason to not believe this as it is from two separate disciplines of experimental findings, then the computer models have a major problem when assuming uniformity, especially at the crucial ground/atmosphere interface.
I think that Anthony had something on this here on WUWT a couple of years ago and I know that Chris Monckton was interested in this as well.
J Martin says:
November 27, 2011 at 12:56 pm
“and got $0.16 twice as high as I was expecting.”
I’m going by 2009 worldwide prices from a table in Wikedpedia which is $0.19. Point still stands as that’s still 50% higher than US price.
“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.”
Progressive tax rate would be my guess. If you use very little you pay a very low rate. Some states, notably California, are like that in the U.S.
“Perhaps the French electricity companies are milking their customers for whatever they can get. Or
perhaps they also now have a windmill tax.”
I think it’s the government doing the milking.
“$0.11 that’s cheap.”
Not as cheap as eastern Europe.
“Diesel here is £1.40 per litre.”
Highway robbery. Canada is like that too and has been for as long as I can remember. It’s less than half that here. Taxes again. It’s no mystery to most of us conservative small government yanks why Europe’s economy is going down the tubes. The only mystery to us is how it lasted this long without collapsing. Socialism doesn’t work and that’s the direction western Europe has been heading in for at least a few decades. Eastern Europe on the other hand has been going in the opposite direction. Which has shown the greatest improvement? Thirty or even twenty years ago I’d have never imagined that eastern Europe would become better allies than western Europe but by golly I’ve changed my mind since then. Eastern Europeans have a little more appreciation for self-rule under some flavor of democracy I guess after having lived without it for so long.
“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.”
What can I say? You’re still some form of representative democracy, right? You get exactly the government that you elect. We’re in process of housecleaning right now. It only took a couple years for the consequential reality of liberal majority to make itself evident. Stuff happens. Last time a mistake like this was made was Jimmy Carter. Every generation has to make the mistake one time I guess.
“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.”
I hope so.
And to be honest, if this were so simple an experiment to perform, and if it were to validate the AGW I would assume that it would have been done and published. My guess from the fact that it hasn’t been published is that maybe it has been done but didn’t validate the hypothesis and so has been suppressed.
I think that suppression is a strong word. In my NASA world which is dominated by planetary scientists, the science missions are all geared toward answering planetary science questions and the funding goes to planetary scientists who want to answer those questions. It is a fairly closed loop fraternity and this is the reason that for those of us who’s focus is the economic development of the Moon and solar system, we almost never get our desired missions funded.
I think that the same thing is afoot in the climatology area. It is dominated by these paleo types and of course they want paleo studies funded, which funds people who are of like mind and who want like questions answered.
Science is not some large amorphous entity with a multidisciplinary approach to answering questions and or solving problems. This is one of my major problems with the climate alchemists as I am now calling them in that this closed community thinks that they can answer all the questions AND provide guidance for policy makers on what to do. These guys should have no role whatsoever in writing these IPCC TAR documents. It should be done by a multidisciplinary JASON type group who can see beyond the narrow focus of the team.
Anthony;
If you’d like, I could knock off a high level article on email systems, backup and archive systems, and compliance intended for a lay audience in a few days if that would be of value for your readership in terms of understanding the terminology and issues regarding CG1 and CG2. Just send me an email.
DaveH
davidmhoffer says:
November 27, 2011 at 2:46 pm
“Yes it is. Standard backup architectures are daily incremental and weekly full written to an off server media such as tape. How long back emails can be recovered is entirely dependant upon the data retention plicy of the organization. If they retain their backup tapes for ten years, then any email that was backed up ten years ago can still be recovered.”
So ya think some hacker outside the university or even a whistle blower on the inside had access to offsite tape backups? And could pore through them assembling an archive of email spanning over a decade? That would take an awful lot of effort and an awful lot of tapes.
You just can’t help yourself digging a deeper and deeper hole of stupidity for yourself can you?
Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 27, 2011 at 3:08 pm
Was there ever a time when you did get those missions funded? This was never more than a dream from what I can determine that made great science fiction plots but never seriously moved towards science fact. I shared the dream and maybe even still held onto it as late as the end of the Apollo program but then it became pretty apparent that LEO was the only thing that was going to be developed and that was strictly for spy and communications satellites. Even the space stations turned out to be sideshow attractions. Now even the space shuttle is gone too. Very sad.
Was there ever a time when you did get those missions funded? This was never more than a dream from what I can determine that made great science fiction plots but never seriously moved towards science fact.
We got Lunar Prospector funded. I was one of the very early members of that team. There has been a tremendous advance in this science in the last couple of years with the results of the Indian Chandrayaan mission and the NASA Lunar Recon Orbiter mission. The community has finally proven pretty much beyond a reasonable doubt that there is billions of tons of water on the Moon and my own pet hypothesis of the plentiful nature of Platinum Group Metals on the Moon has received bolstering as well.
We are going to have a major move into space, this time from the private sector.
Dave Springer;
So ya think some hacker outside the university or even a whistle blower on the inside had access to offsite tape backups? And could pore through them assembling an archive of email spanning over a decade? That would take an awful lot of effort and an awful lot of tapes.
You just can’t help yourself digging a deeper and deeper hole of stupidity for yourself can you?>>>
I knew you would be stupid enough to take your head back out of your *ss.
You made bold statements as to how email systems and backup systems and archive systems work that were completely false, and I corrected your blatant misinformation. Rather than admit you spouted off in total and complete ignorance, you instead come back with a saracstic remark about how you think… that I think… the hacker or whistle blower got the email.
If you are so stupid as to continue announcing to the world the depth of your arrogance and incompetance on the subject, then I shall be gald to oblige you.
In a best practices backup implementation that relies upon tape as the long term storage media, data is copied to a local tape library. If possible, the tape library is located outside the main computer room itself in order that any disaster that is limited to the computer room leaves the tape library intact and available as a first line of recovery resource. The tape library while possibly being outside of the computer room itself, must still be close enough that the network communications links can operate properly. In the case of fibre channel, that may be several kilometers while in the case of ethernet it would be measured in hundreds of meters.
The “off site” copy I referred to in my previous comment was in regard to a SECOND tape copy. This SECOND copy is sent “off site” to a storage facility at a distance from the main computer room large enough to remain intact in the event of a disaster with sufficient radius to destroy both the computer room and the tape library.
Returning now to the point I made about data retention policies, best practice is for the tapes retained in the local library to be retained for a period identical to those retained in the off site facility. So, Mr Smart *SS, whatever tapes exist off site ALSO exist ON SITE and will have all the emails ever backed up and still retained based on the organization’s data retention policy.
You’ve got poo in your hair. Go wash up.
@davidmhoffer
“Frankly Dave, your arrogance and ignorant debating style is beginning to wear thin.”
Oh I feel so bad now!
“I’ve responded to you with civility, and facts. You want to argue from authority, then read a few snippets from my background and experience above. You really want to put your credentials up against mine? If you really want to take the gloves off, by all means. Of course, I’m not a circus clown (or was it a rodea clown? I forget) that you can challenge to a fist fight and then not show up. Nor do I shoot my mouth off about what a good scienist I am when I’m just a bully moderator at Uncommon Descent where RC like moderator practices are used to advance the “intelligent design” pretend science as a cover for pushing religion. BTW, I was doing cpu design win work for Intel when you were programming primitive graphics systems for Coleco. I was doing design work on military command and control systems for naval battle ships and system control for communications satellites about the time you were proudly proclaiming that the Dell desk tops you were marketing had the best Quake benchmarks on the market.”
LOL! Awesome. Mad skillz! Usually some sort of Ninja powers go along with that. Did you train with Bruce Lee?
Don’t forget to search usenet for me. You missed some of my best and longest flamage. The OpenGL wars in alt.games.programmer.
Funny thing though. I can’t find any reference to you in your claimed area of expertise. That’s no great surprise. I mean I’m not any great shakes but I do at least show up in google scholar search.
Feel free to provide some verifiable links to what you actually did for a living. I’m prepared to believe you were a manager which is what you claimed in another thread. That doesn’t mean you know jack diddly squat about the technology and your writing here certainly reflects that.
Dave Springer;
Feel free to provide some verifiable links to what you actually did for a living. I’m prepared to believe you were a manager which is what you claimed in another thread. That doesn’t mean you know jack diddly squat about the technology and your writing here certainly reflects that.>>>
I don’t debate people with poo in their hair, and I have zero interest in “proving” my credentials to you. I’ve never shot my mouth off about my credentials like that in several years of commenting on this blog and I only did so to try and bring you to some sense of reality. I don’t argue from authority, nor do I denigrate those I disagree with by make disgusting insinuations. I don’t challenge people to fist fights and then not show up. I don’t threaten to shoot people with the gun I carry if they do show up. I don’t make pronouncements about what people do and do not know based on comments that are entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
I’ve added one more “don’t” to my list.
I don’t respond to complete jerks. Consider yourself on “ignore”.
@davidmhoffer
If no continuous email archive was being maintained in a fashion similar to the method outlined then how many backup tapes would need to be consulted to create a continuous record over a period of ten years? There would be 120 monthly backups. That’s a lot of tape and it still wouldn’t be a continuous archive because it would only capture those emails that hadn’t been deleted by the owners during the previous 30 days. There would be 480 weekly backups and 3,650 daily backups. Pick one of them and describe how a complete email archive over a period of ten years could be reconstructed from it.
Or just admit that UEA was most likely archiving email separately and purposely for the same paranoid reasons that so many other institutions do it. I don’t particularly care but you might because other people are going to be wondering how someone could, without notice, go through hundreds of individual archives reconstructing the record.
You mentioned privacy concerns. What legal right to privacy do people have when they are sitting in an office that someone else owns, working at a computer that someone else owns, using an email address that someone else owns, using a network that someone else pays for, and under a contract that everything they do or create relevant to the performance of their job is owned by their employer?
You are incredibly naive if you think they have any right to email privacy under those conditions. These were all work related correspondences and are implicitely owned by the university. At a minimum for a reasonable expectation of privacy under those conditions you DO NOT USE your employer’s email domain. You use a domain that you pay for yourself.
@davidmhoffer
Random sampling of companies offering email archive solutions:
http://www.messagesolution.com/Linux_and_UNIX_Email_Servers.htm
http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/archiver-overview.php
http://www.smarsh.com/email-archiving?gclid=CIuf_o6Q2KwCFWJntgod-BjKjA
There are scores of them competing for the privilege of being your email archive solution.
A longish discussion of the topic:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/10/27/did-jones-delete-emails/
Several mentions of how common it is to archive all emails and discussion of software that finds duplicates of large attachments sent to multiple recipients, strips the duplicates and saves one copy, marks each email to indicate which emails had the attachment, and automatically restores the attachment when the archive is consulted.
It should be noted that attachments are preserved in the FOIA file although I have not checked to see if there are duplicates of the same attachment. Maybe Hoffer, if he’s done googling me for ad hominem ammunition, can actually exercise some of his mad ninja network skillz to investigate the actual question at hand.
The UEA claims that the archive was taken from a single backup email server not from periodic backups. The emails span a period of 13 years from 1996 through 2009.
So, as I suspected and so rudely took DavidMHoffer to school about, these emails didn’t come from periodic backups. That’s just silly. That would be a huge job to extract 13 years of email history from routine periodic server backups. These were taken from a live email backup server. The question is now whether Jones, Briffa, Schneider, and about a score of others kept 13 years worth of emails on purpose or it was just SOP at UEA-CRU to archive email like a million other institutions do and for which a good number of companies produce third party software to assist in the very task. My money’s on the latter and UEA isn’t going to admit that they were keeping copies of all the researcher’s emails. Not telling anyone their email is being routinely archived isn’t uncommon either. There’s no legal compulsion for an institution to inform individual employees what information the institution owns is being retained or discarded. The naivety being displayed by Hoffer in thinking otherwise does not square with his claims of expertise on the subject. Emails are routinely archived and held in a single point of access not scattered across scores periodic tape backups. This done for the express and proverbial purpose of the institution being able to cover its ass (CYA) in case of accusations of sexual harassment, theft, fraud, wrongful termination, or any number of other situations where that may arise where they need to know exactly what transpired.
@davidmhoffer
The clincher. I was right of course. Maybe you’ll learn not to argue with me. For me that’ll be like a dog losing a favority chew toy. Please don’t stop.
http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
This is the official government
whitewashinvestigation into Climategate I.My emphasis.
Wow. Who’d a thunk… UEA IT department was keeping extensive, long duration, backups of email on a centralized server housed in the IT department. It seems no one responding to FOIA requests was aware that it was really easy to recover all the email traffic from any individual or group of individuals employed at UEA. And obviously Jones, Briffa, and the rest of the usual suspects had no idea that when they deleted emails from their personal folders this didn’t delete those emails from the unpublicized backup server the IT department was maintaining.
I’m here to tell you folks that this is COMMON practice. I merely assumed it was done at UEA by a brief review of the circumstances. I put the odds that this was an inside job at a higher confidence level than IPCC assigns to human activity accounting for most of the recent warming within an hour of when I first got wind of it 1999. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows what’s actually happening int he real world. It was patently ridiculous to believe this was painstakingly assembled from periodioc backups. This was taken from long term single point of access archives which are a whole different animal than periodic backups. Periodic backups are able able to restore a server to any point it was at in history, or at least at one instant in time each day or whatever interval the backups are taken. These email archives are done differently and few employees are informed it’s happening although if they ask around or read enough policy manuals they might stumble across it. It generally doesn’t go over well with the troops when you tell them they’re being recorded for posterity and things they write in emails could come back to haunt them 20 years later. Not well at all. Trust is a two way street. If you don’t trust me I don’t trust you is usually the way it works. So it’s more or less a don’t ask don’t tell policy when it comes to email archiving.
So here is my standard advice so YOU don’t get your emails recorded where you work. Get a personal email provider and use that for all correspondence you don’t want the IT department at your company going over for entertainment purposes. They can see it all for company-assigned email addresses. It’s a helluva lot harder for them to eavesdrop on your personal ISP.
Perhaps appearing as the sign-off or approval signature in the title blocks on (proprietary, company-owned) engineering drawings (including, but not limited to, design specification, design documentation, test plans and procedures, specification control dwgs, parts lists, requirements, etc) maybe?
Oh, gee, not Google searchable yet …
.
_Jim;
Oh, gee, not Google searchable yet …>>>
Neither is anything CIA Orange Book B2 level security 😉
A few months ago I got into a disagreement with a sales engineer on how a particular storage array manufactured by Springer’s former employer would deal with large scale single threaded applications. I said performance would suck (the technical term applicable in my opinion) and she disagreed. After some back and forth I speed dialed a friend of mine who was her boss’s boss’s boss and also in charge of all the SE’s for half of North America. After a short discussion, he told her to be quiet and listen to me. Not as funny as the time the 2IC of NORAD told one of his PM’s to listen to me or be court martialled, but close.
Sorry, you can’t google either of those either.
Physics not discussed? But catastrophic climategate 2 is suppose to be the final nail in the AGW coffin. How can it be the final nail without any physics? Is this catastrophy being overstated on this blog without any physics to back the overstated catastrophy?
…and lest anyone think I was slagging the products made by Mr On Ignore’s previous employer, I was not. That vendor has multiple products, and there was a different product they made that was more suitable to the task at hand (in my opinion).
_Jim says:
November 27, 2011 at 6:39 pm
“Perhaps appearing as the sign-off or approval signature in the title blocks on (proprietary, company-owned) engineering drawings (including, but not limited to, design specification, design documentation, test plans and procedures, specification control dwgs, parts lists, requirements, etc) maybe?”
Hard to say although in my experience managers get their name on a fair share of the patents which originate in their departments. It’s a simple matter of trading favors. I put my boss’ name on a patent he had nothing to do with and it makes him look good and he remembers it when my performance review comes along. It works the same way in academia with publications. To be fair not all companies pursue patents and keep things as trade secrets but Intel sure as hell isn’t one those companies. Dopey claims he was designing CPU’s for Intel. NO ONE who is involved in design work at Intel doesn’t get named on a patent. Whatever he was doing there, if anything, it wasn’t CPU design.