Reader “just the facts” writes in comments:
Here is an example of Phil Jones trying to avoid a FOIA request, but he apparently struggles with the implementation…:
2577.txt
“date: Thu Sep 25 15:24:48 2008
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: CONFIDENTIAL: Response
to: “Mitchell, John FB (Chief Scientist)”
John,
I’ve called Jo to say I’m happy with their response.
I’ll also delete this email after I’ve sent it.
We’ve had a request for all our internal UEA emails that have any bearing on the subject, so apologies for brevity.
See you in November!
Cheers
Phil”
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=2577.txt&search=CONFIDENTIAL%3A+Response
I wonder why Phil planned to delete this email. Here is the response from Jo that Phil was happy with:
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=5122.txt&search=CONFIDENTIAL%3A+Response
The Daily Mail covered this issue in 2010, i.e.
“Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years.
And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.”
“Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office.
He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming.
The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers.
Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job.
Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings.
Why all the cloak and dagger stuff if this is all settled science…?
Why all the cloak and dagger if they are being honest?
Re Hugh Pepper on November 26, 2011 at 12:36 pm:
Once again Hugh Pepper delivers a blanket denial of wrongdoing suitable for release to the media, as would be expected from a professional damage control consultant.
‘Hugh Pepper says:
November 26, 2011 at 12:36 pm
It’s easy to understand how Professor Jones would be reticent to respond to FOI requests. He’s a scientist, not a PR person. His work is available on line and and in Journals. Many of the requests are repetitive and unnecessary. The world needs Dr Jones and his colleagues doing what they do best ie conducting research in an effort to clarify the world’s emerging climate crisis.’
Yeah, that explains it all. Dream on and go back under your bridge. ‘Doing what they do best’ … fooling the gullible.
Can you imagine today any “cloak and dagger stuff” in relation to the theory of relativity? “I’ll delete my emails relating to mass, I will inform others to do likewise.”
The science is definitely not settled. We were told to expect to see more of the human fingerprint of warming as the decades proceed; now we are told to wait and see for the next 30 years, all in the face of flat temps for over a decade.
Follow the money. >>>>>>>>>
And if there is anyone who I feel kind of sorry for in all of this, it is Keith Briffa. He seems to reluctantly go along in order to get along but has serious doubts about the quality of the data that is being used as such a key part of everything.
ThePowerofX says:
November 26, 2011 at 12:55 pm
…..A lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike for the people that request data (i.e. sceptics who too often allege “fakery” and “fraud”). That is why, when the same data is requested by a respected university, they have no problem supplying the information.
Climate scientists hate you. Simple as that.
_____________
No it is not that simple.
The scientist at the “respected universities” are all part of the you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” clique. The sceptics, some from well known Universities, are not only hated but FEARED
You can see in the e-mails that the CAGW group was not happy with Mann’s “Hockey stick” but NONE of them were willing to stand by McIntyre and McKitrick. Also remember Ross McKitrick worked in the Department of Economics, University of Guelph.
Hugh Pepper: What part of “it is against the law” do you not understand?
Still want to know who put both ClimateGate and ClimateGate 2.0 out!
If you grep for Teri, now Tata, you will find another cloak and dagger story. I just read it diagonally and don’t make head or tails of it, but it’s full of secrets.
crosspatch says: November 26, 2011 at 12:06 pm: If there is a “puppet master” in all of this, it appears to be Hulme.
Ah-ah! My growing notion indeed, although he was not the only one. Lots of the most doubtful stuff appears to go through him.
The problem is systemic and global. Organizations have learned to game the system to their own advantage. They really do believe the ordinary citizen has a duty to unquestioningly step up and pay the bills and not complain:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-government-agencies-20111125,0,1389031.story
crosspatch says: “…If CRU were to say “we were all wrong, CO2 has some but possibly a negligible impact on temperature changes we are seeing” then thousands of bureaucrats lose their jobs and thousands in academic “centers” do as well in addition to losing billions of dollars of government funds that pour into those various “centers” in countries around the world…”
Climatology: too big to fail.
They remind me of a bitch killing her whelp to protect it from another dog, better to destroy the data than to let i fall into the hands of the unanointed. Now the next step the cabalistic machinations to cover their tracks. They have obviously left the domain of science and entered the domain of clericalism; and they call us deniers!
crosspatch says: November 26, 2011 at 11:28 am […] If CRU were to say “we were all wrong, CO2 has some but possibly a negligible impact on temperature changes we are seeing” then thousands of bureaucrats lose their jobs and thousands in academic “centers” do as well in addition to losing billions of dollars of government funds that pour into those various “centers” in countries around the world.
It is likely, at the current point, that even if Phil and the entire CRU and even Mike said that, politicos would rather replace them than say the last decade’s policies and huge investments pushed by the CAGW idea were based on an error — oops, we’re sorry. As someone said (reference will not be given) from a certain stage on scientists are no longer needed. Everybody but the taxpayer sems to have an ongoing interest in this.
PowerofX writes:
“Question: Why all the cloak and dagger stuff..?
Answer: A lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike for the people that request data (i.e. sceptics who too often allege “fakery” and “fraud”). That is why, when the same data is requested by a respected university, they have no problem supplying the information.
Climate scientists hate you. Simple as that.”
Duh! Surely the main reason FOI laws were designed (and needed) was for precisely the cases where information that should be in the public domain was being withheld from a “hated” party!
Well, sort of. The “scientists” in this case are priming the pump. It is apparently Hulme who saw all this coming and configured UEA to take best advantage of it (e.g. founded Tyndall Centre). At some point this crop of scientists will no longer be “needed” but will retire in high status as “founders” of an entire new cash stream employing lots of people whose entire product is inefficiency in the name of “environmentalism” and “saving” the Earth.
But when that time comes, nobody inside will be able to raise their voice because they will be squashed. If they appear skeptical in school, they will be given bad grades, they will see their theses shot down, they will not be published, they will be silenced. If they change their stripes after becoming successful, they will be portrayed as having gone “Whacko”, they will be called names and ridiculed. The culture in climate science will become much as it is now with political science and journalism departments at many schools … only the “correct” point of view will be tolerated and all other points will be weeded out and/or suppressed.
Robert E. Phelan says:
November 26, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Hugh Pepper:
Your comments are really beyond parody. Are you sure you’re not a secret skeptic trying to make
honest warmists look bad?
====================================================================
Is it possible that someone invented a “parody post producer” and that’s the most wicked one they could generate??
Here is my essential issue with the Warmistas. Let’s grant the Warmistas all their assumptions, global warming is real, it’s here, and it’s going to have massive economic consequences, millions will be killed, wars will break out, etc.
Then why not develop Nuclear energy? There’s so much Uranium, we make bullets out of U-238, which can be converted through an admittedly slow process into Plutonium like the French do. And we could also invest in developing Thorium based nuclear power plants, and export the energy technology to the world. Instead, the US hasn’t built a nuclear power plant in the US in decades.
Somehow, though, the most obvious non-c02 producing energy producer is off limits. The arguments that apply to green energy are not allowed for nuclear, such as “productizing it will make it better and cheaper,” but is off limits to the Warmistas. Their solution is to make expensive energy, alla Solyndria, and other worthless wasteful Green projects that seem to reward their friends and large corporations.
It makes little sense to me, the complex mind of the Warmista. I think I’m missing something essential in the equation.
Thank you for all your work trying to uphold what I was taught was the essence of science; theory, experiment, observation, followed by revision of theory as necessary in the light of those observations. Since most commenters here are from North America, it might be useful to be reminded that ‘ First Amendment Rights’ are something of which we Brits can only dream.
The fact that our current head of the Royal Society (which I fondly think of as the fons et origo of modern science) is a Warmist makes me despair.
crosspatch says (November 26, 2011 at 12:06 pm)
If there is a “puppet master” in all of this, it appears to be Hulme.
———————–
Perhaps, but the message from so many of the mails is that the egomaniacal, bullying, manipulating Grand Vizier in all of this is Mann, urging the team on to ever more dubious levels of nefarious activities. If Jones and his CRU had made public their doubts about Mann and his work the history of the last decade in terns of climate science would have surely been very different.
To misquote Hamlet:
“What a piece of work is Mann, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god!”
Well, a ‘piece of work’ anyway….
DING! DING! DING!
Because it isn’t REALLY about CO2 and it isn’t REALLY about “global warming”. It is about making people AFRAID of CO2 and “global warming” so that they can implement their other strategies. Nuclear power plays poorly to their political base (ever seen a Green Party member of any consequence that was in favor of nuclear power?).
If this REALLY was about CO2, sure, they would be bending over themselves to actually cut CO2 production but they aren’t. What they are about is MOVING the CO2 production from Europe and the US to China, India, and Brazil (chiefly, among other places). All of the rules and regulations won’t change CO2 production one iota on a global scale but it will change it locally in the target countries. What this is about is making energy production much more expensive in developed countries, hamstring their economic development, force production to less developed nations and do so under the direction of unelected bureaucrats (various UN agencies, “centers” such as Tyndall, even CARB in California etc) who can’t be thrown into office by the voters and were not put into office by voters.
If we faced such a drastic danger from CO2, they would be beside themselves in demanding that we switch our power production to nuclear NOW, but they aren’t. It is about creating a centrally managed global economy and using the fear of CO2 as the mechanism for getting people to accept it. Nuclear would require no new bureaucracies, no centers, no lifestyle changes, no “radical” activism. It would pretty much mean life as usual with much cheaper electricity without major changes.
It isn’t REALLY about CO2 at all.
Nothing “cloaked” about non-compliance with FOI in this exchachange (text 4911) between Phil and Mike ….
Phil: “This was the first thing I tried in order not to comply back in Feb.”
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=4861
Phil Jones wrote:
Mike,
I think many people at IAMAS will be a long way from the conference centre.
I’d just go along to the session and enjoy Umbria the rest of the time. You
might find wireless there, so maybe add an extra hour or two to get some
decent connection time.
For the UK FOIA, anybody can make a request. The UK Act isn’t limited to
UK citizens. It seems this isn’t generally realized even within the UK. This was
the first thing I tried in order not to comply back in Feb. Our Act also applies to
all data – regardless of where it comes from, so is not restricted to UK data. The
Canadian Act is also this wideranging.
So if I’d written a paper about some Martian data, then a person from Venus could
ask me for it !!!! The Act in the UK clearly wasn’t designed that well!
Ciao
Phil
What we have here is a case of two very powerful “useful idiots” (Mann and Jones) who seem (to me) to rate pretty high on the narcissism scale. Their narcissism is being stroked. They love it. They are now famous. Briffa, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be nearly so narcissistic and seems troubled that the science really isn’t all that settled.
Mann and Jones (among others) are being used but they are being stroked and they like it, actually, they THRIVE on it. As long as they find a source of that narcissistic energy, they will feed on it.
Actually, toss Hansen in with Mann and Jones.
Phil Jones says “I’ll also delete this email after I’ve sent it.”
Surely, Jones could not have forgotten to press the delete button once the email had been sent. I understand that he has problems with Excel but surely he knows how to use email and the delete button on the keyboard!
Did Jones delete the email?
If so, why is it amongst the emails that have been released?
What does this say about the source of these emails, by which I mean the server on which they were stored?