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…?
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crosspatch has nailed it with the celebrity status-at-risk jibe. Fame has currency.
Perhaps there was a bcc: to someone else who did NOT delete it. Or perhaps deleting the email on his local machine didn’t delete it on the server.
crosspatch says: November 26, 2011 at 2:15 pm […] Well, sort of. The “scientists” in this case are priming the pump.
Certainly, but my thought is much more evil. After many regulations and taxes and structures etc are put in place, most won’t be taken back even after it is found they are founded on an error. It is said that for third world help many countries still demand of the helped country not to use DDT. It’s something that is already in place and the situation change isn’t even talked about. If it is shown that CO2 has little to do with GW, will Australia remove the carbon tax, will the carbon stock exchanges close, will turbines stop being subsidized, etc. Anyway, I think you saw what I meant.
They have admitted criminal activity, albeit too late for any action to be taken about those breaches. Surely at the very least now, they should have all future grants stopped to prevent further criminal activity?
Cross Patch & Gail Combs etc
This was posted on the blog when the first discussions of emails2 were being discussed
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0/#comment-804641
The Malevolent JobHolder
http://www.mencken.org/text/txt001/mencken.h-l.1924.the-malevolent-jobholder.htm
Janet & Matt Thompson, Western Australia, as many others, who spoke up, recount shocking stories.
I believe Australia will remove the carbon taxes after the next national election.
I believe most/all of the carbon exchanges will close.
I believe turbine subsidies will end and sooner rather than later.
But more importantly, CARB (California Air Resources Board) will still remain in place. The US EPA will still keep most of their regulations on the books. The various state agencies will still keep those regulations alive.
I have a proposal:
No regulation from ANY agency can go into effect without simple majority approval from a committee (joint committee where a bicameral legislative body is involved) of the people’s representatives consisting of equal membership of the two political parties holding the most and second most number of seats in those chambers of government. So in the US, any regulation by EPA would have to be approved by a joint environmental committee consisting of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats and a tie means the regulation does not go into effect. In California, it would mean that a regulation by CARB would not go into effect until approved by a joint assembly committee consisting of an equal number of members of both the Republican and Democrat parties.
If something is really a clear and present danger, both parties will likely vote for it. If someone is simply handing cash to political supporters, probably not.
Somewhere along the line a representative of the people needs to be involved in approving these regulations.
crosspatch says: November 26, 2011 at 2:37 pm: Then why not develop Nuclear energy?DING! DING! DING! Because it isn’t REALLY about CO2 and it isn’t REALLY about “global warming”.
Right! They wont even accept hydro power on the basis of biodiversity (which gets along nicely without their help). It’s about removing access to cheap power. Even oil companies are now power companies — as oil wont last forever they must diversify. And if they sell oil drop by drop, they’ll get much more profit as it can only go up (and when arabs see the end of their oil, they’ll eat sand). And if in the meantime they have a wind and solar branch, they get the subsidies too.
The tens of thousands of people who die every winter for lack of the possibility to heat themselves (excess winter mortality) are none of the greens or the power companies concern, that’s a public health problem. But a heat wave killing 3000 is dangerous global warming.
It really boils down to the fact that to these people there is a higher TRUTH, than actual facts. Therefore information that would bring those TRUTHs into question must be suppressed so it does not fall into the hands of heretics.
A long time ago I presented a keynote at a conference in London where I called into question the received wisdom on air pollution, arguing that it was actually improving. In my naivite I hadn’t realised that the conference had been organised in order to present a case for further funding and damn the facts! I ate lunch alone that day. I wonder if you guys actually realise that there actually is most likely a loose conspiracy here and these people are fighting hard to hold onto their funding. Academics can begin to believe their own rhetoric after a while because they live in a closeted environment where all they hear are voices that agree with them.
crosspatch says:
November 26, 2011 at 12:31 pm
“Part of the problem is one of culture. The British have a very deep seated culture of official secrecy. While they did pass a FOIA, that they treat it the way that they do is pretty understandable given their bureaucratic culture.”
We do also have the Data Protection Act which is taken very seriously. Amongst other things one of the main requirements is for all companies to provide all the personal data that it holds on a person making the request in a reasonable time and at reasonable cost. Failure to comply is serious and all companies I have worked for recently put in quite a bit of work to be able to answer these requests fairly easily.
>>
richard verney says:
November 26, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Did Jones delete the email?
If so, why is it amongst the emails that have been released?
<<
These emails look like a (modified) download from a mail server. All emails are logged on these servers. They also log mail that is passing through. If you get a kick-back email due to some failure, you’ll see all the various mail servers adding their time stamps on the message. Deleting an email on your account does nothing to the mail server. The only way you can do that is if your IT person deletes that mail server’s data. That usually violates company/owner policies and may actually break some laws. Because of the logging by intermediate mail servers, you can’t really delete an email on one server. You have to modify all the intermediate mail server logs too. I doubt any IT person would/could perform such a task.
Jim
richard verney says:
November 26, 2011 at 2:54 pm
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?
—————
Phil may have deleted the file from his own computer, but it remained backed up on the CRU’s central server. He did not understand the limitations of the action of deleting files: all he was doing was reducing the clutter in his own personal e-mail archives. Even when files are deleted on the hard drives of personal computers, they may be retrieved if the hard-drive is not wiped clean or the file has been repeatedly overwritten. His action of deleting his own copy of the files did nothing to prevent their later retrieval, so the quality or veracity of the source is not compromised.
vigilantfish is right. And even “deleting” an email doesn’t really erase it, it just puts an “invisible” command at the beginning of the file. A lot of information can be recovered even after erasing it. I have a CD called “Data Rescue3” that I’ve used to find files I deleted a long time ago.
Phil Jones may believe he’s safe. But then, he doesn’t even know the basic programming and statistics that every scientist and engineer should know. If an organization makes the decision to hire an investigator to do a forensic search, it will find at least 99% of its emails. They are all somewhere or other.
I agree with one of crosspatch’s earlier comments. I think, straightforwardly that we are dealing with malignant narcissists, at least with some of the ‘top’ members of the Team and with a number of other prominent agw fanatics (we all know who they are and which blogs they run to promote themselves and bolster their messianic delusions),
‘Malignant narcissism has been described as “an extreme form of antisocial personality disorder that is manifest in a person who is pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioral regulation, and with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism”.
Malignant narcissism is a theoretical or ‘experimental’ diagnostic category; although narcissistic personality disorder is found in the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), malignant narcissism is not. Individuals with malignant narcissism would be diagnosed under narcissistic personality disorder. Malignant narcissism can be partially treated with medications and therapy, helping to reduce aggravating symptoms. As a syndrome, it may include aspects of schizoid and narcissistic personality disorder, as well as paranoia — recent [when?] “contributions have confirmed the importance of malignant narcissism and the defense of projection” in the latter syndrome, as well as “the patient’s vulnerability to malignant narcissistic regression”‘
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignant_narcissism
Projection we all know well enough if we’ve ever been to an alarmist blog where they accuse us of the very things they themselves are/do (Big Oil BS etc. is the most obvious but there are lots of other examples). Paranoia is everywhere (and reading these emails shows that VERY clearly).
These personality disordered types are natural bullies, necessarily so, since their fragile personalities cannot survive unless they dominate; are entirely unable to accept either criticism or the catastrophic fact that they may be wrong. (Our political classes are also packed with sociopaths of this type. ) They CANNOT be wrong, even if everything round them proves to others that they are. They are frightening and intensely combative dominant personalities and will in effect terrorise those who feel compelled to follow them. More passive characters will submit, as happens in many workplaces – and clearly so in Crimatology and its first team.
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.
But the FOI request referenced wasn’t about Jones’ work. It was about John Mitchell efforts, as Chief Climate Scientist at the Met Office, to include the Hockey Stick graph in the 2007 IPCC report. If you are concerned about Phil Jones’ having enough time to focus on “conducting research”, perhaps you can recommend that he avoid spending his time conspiring with John Mitchell to help the Department of Environment. Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) efforts to stonewall David Holland’s FOI requests.
The fact is that Jones wouldn’t plan to delete his emails if he didn’t have something to hide…
What happens when government gets ahold of a new funding source:
http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/24/money-slated-for-health-law-gets-detoured/
It doesn’t matter what the money was stated for, what “noble cause” that we were promised the money would be solely dedicated to. Once government gets a new funding source, it becomes part of the giant slush fund. How many “more-immediate spending needs” would there be if the federal government wasn’t throwing money at the “special projects” of influential legislators, or the administration backing even more Solyndras which, quite mysteriously, benefits big campaign donors? And once it comes time to pay the bills for the US experiment in socialized medicine, from the money that should have been saved up, it will be declared a new crisis demanding new “revenue enhancements.”
If you already have a carbon tax, best of luck getting rid of it, no matter how much fraud and deceit gets revealed in the underlying basis as well as in the implementation. If you don’t have one now, make sure you never get one, because your own government will fight you tooth and nail to keep it.
Oh, and there was another Chevy Volt Li-ion battery fire:
Three battery packs crash-tested, one caught fire, one threw sparks which would be wonderful around the gasoline vapors that may be present after an accident as the Volt also can use gasoline. Oh well, as Meat Loaf put it, two out of three ain’t bad. Isn’t it wonderful that the ‘Bama bailed out the unions in a bankruptcy structured to screw over everyone but the unions, so that Government Motors could bring “alternate energy” vehicles, specifically the Volt, to the market for the great benefit of consumers?
And if you are in a position to “stack the deck” with a gaggle of narcissists and then “stroke” them, you can be in a very powerful position, indeed. There must be a bazillion other universities around the globe studying climate. Why do Mann and Jones “get all the work”? Why are they in a position of being “gatekeepers” for that entire field of science? How did they get there? Now you look at people such as Roy Spencer if UAH and Curry and Ga. Tech. and wonder why they aren’t they in positions of greater influence?
Someone else mentioned it in passing at Climate Audit, I think. It is as if there is not only a push to publish certain papers, there seems also to be a “pull”. There seems to be a “market” for papers with the “right” conclusions. These get rushed to the head of the line and published in short order with only cursory review by friends. Anyone challenging that line of thought is blocked to the extent possible.
Projection also works in a different sort of way. You can tell what a person finds personal most insulting to them by the insults they throw at others. Jones has a pretty obvious pattern when dealing with people who question things. He first tells them that they quite obviously don’t understand the question they are asking and “explains” that the answer is right there but implies they are too dumb to see it. Then, if he must, he tosses out something obscure for them to chase down which also doesn’t really answer their question but he is hoping that either they can’t understand what he has referenced (which sometimes has very little to do with the question they asked) and give up, or that they begin to believe Jones when he says they must be too stupid to understand. It causes people to begin to doubt themselves and give up. Then he plays “too busy” and can’t be bothered with someone so insignificant because he is busy playing world savior. And if his feet are finally held to the fire long enough he will send you on a wild goose chase for incomplete data or data in non-existent locations or the wrong data. Hopefully by then the question you were after is now irrelevant and you will be off onto other subjects but if you are persistent, he will just feed it to his dog and be done with the matter. It simply doesn’t exist anymore, but it certainly did when he wrote his paper! So he can’t be proved wrong now.
Mann, Hansen, Jones, Bradley, etc. are in a very interesting position and I don’t believe they got there by accident. They were selected by someone to be where they are. Who decided to give so much weight to these people? I believe it was Hulme. And interestingly, Hulme as already put down the groundwork for walking back on the issue. He has already created an escape avenue by saying that the consensus was phony, that the IPCC has probably “run its course” and that the Himalayan glacier thing was all a bunch of baloney. He is setting himself up to survive the explosion of “climate science” as we know it today without getting any it on himself. The man seems to be brilliant. He sets things up to greatly profit from things, yet leaves himself an escape route in case it all comes crashing down.
So which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it the AGW “scientists” banging their drums, or was it a bunch of “progressives” realizing they could leverage AGW deciding to cultivate the most narcissistic of the bunch knowing they would do whatever it takes to gain prominence (and keep it once they got it)? So you make some little Princes and rely on their desire to maintain their positions to do most of the dirty work for you.
There are a lot of people in the climate field. Obviously they don’t all share in private the lock-step image that is shown in public. I personally would trust Curry and Spencer more as gatekeepers than Mann and Jones.
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.>>>
Gee. I’ve been reading Dr Jones e-mails and they sound like he spent an awful lot of time inventing the climate crisis and then covering up the fact that it was faked in the first place. You know, “hide the decline”, and having to keep the data “well hidden” and saying that they’d “oversold” their method of looking at frequency data and now “everyone believes it” even though they shouldn’t, things like that. You see, we really would like Dr Jones and his colleagues to be doing their jobs.
BUT THAT ISN’T WHAT THEY ARE DOING!
On another note, I’ve asked you several questions on several threads, and you’ve responded to none of them. That’s called “drive by trolling”. You pop in,make a remark, and f*** off. You don’t respond to the comments people make, or the questions they ask, and I think I know why.
If you did, you’d look even more like pre-recorded press release than you do already. You’ve got nothing, so you run away and hide. You aren’t even a drive by troll, you’re an apprentice drive by troll and all you seem to know how to do is read your lines. You can be replaced by a tape recorder you know….
Do you mean Al (toxic co2 investments) Gore, Michael (tree ring selector)Mann, Phil (FOIA deleting) Jones, James (astronomer Venus to Earth heat activist earning) Hansen, Lord (NO conflict of interest) Oxburgh, ……..???
The list goes on. Follow the money >>>>>>>>>>>>
More and more the warmistas are reminding me of those sad cases of a woman, so desiring a child, begins to stuff her clothing, growing larger for nine months only to produce a pillow filled with feathers. The alarms, having sounded now for some decades, heralding nothing more than 10+ years of CO2 increases, no significant temperature trend, a flat tropo, a cooling ocean, and pictures of Great Britain from space totally covered in snow and ice – a nation recently cautioned that snow would become unknown to the next generation.
Gents – it is time to pull the pillow out of your shorts and expose your inadequacy.
So it appears that Phil Jones was the point person for dealing with David Holland’s information requests, i.e.:
0729.txt
date: Fri Mar 14 13:29:05 2008
from: Phil Jones
subject: April 8
to: Mitchell, John FB (Chief Scientist)
John,
You’ll be able to discuss some aspects of science re the WG
on this day. I’ll send some stuff (or get someone to send something)
nearer the time. I think we will be able to resolve the issues. I
can see where James is coming from. Colin here is doing some
different types of plots.
Keith just mentioned a call from you and the name David Holland.
I’ve helped someone at DEFRA several times respond to his letters.
Another Brit to watchout for is Douglas Keenan. This one accused
Wei-Chyung Wang (who is at SUNY) of research fraud – based on
two papers from 1990 (Wang et al, and Jones et al. in Nature). SUNY
have taken it very seriously, but they will find in Wei-Chyung’s favour.
All related to urban effects on the temperature record.
I’ve also had several FOI requests for the raw station temperature data
we use. I’ve given them a list of the sites. Told them to get in touch
with the NMSs.
All very unsettling at the time, but then that is probably what was intended.
I presume you’ve seen that awful Heartland Institute report from 3 weeks back.
Cheers
Phil
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0729.txt&search=%3Cb%3EHolland%3C/b%3E
Here are threads where Phil is dishing out advice on how to deal with David Holland to Jonathan Overpeck and Kevin Trenberth;
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=1206628118.txt&search=%3Cb%3EHolland%3C/b%3E
Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn;
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0722.txt&search=%3Cb%3EHolland%3C/b%3E
and Ben Santer and Tom Wigley:
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=4885.txt&search=%3Cb%3EHolland%3C/b%3E
And in the email below, Phil Jones appears to be making a false claim to avoid a Data Protection Act Request, as the emails I’ve linked to above would seem to contradict his claim below:
cc: “Palmer Dave Mr \(LIB\)”
date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:59:01 +010 ???
from: Phil Jones
subject: RE: Holland – Data Protection Act Request
to: “Mcgarvie Michael Mr \(ACAD\)” , “Briffa Keith Prof \(ENV\)” , “Osborn Timothy Dr \(ENV\)”
Michael,
All my emails according to Eudora that mention David Holland
also include you or Dave amongst the recipients or the senders.
So you have them all.
I have many others that mention Holland. These relate to
work I’m doing with Dutch colleagues or someone in the Bridge Club
I belong to who has the same surname.
Cheers
Phil
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=4251.txt&search=%3Cb%3EHolland%3C/b%3E
Might be a clue as to why there are emails that Jones says he was going to delete. I believe Eudora is a POP3 client. You can chose to delete the mail on the server when it is deleted locally, or to simply delete the mail locally and leave it on the server. He might have thought he deleted it but maybe only deleted it in his own local computer’s mail store.
crosspatch says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:59 pm
All my emails according to Eudora
Might be a clue as to why there are emails that Jones says he was going to delete. I believe Eudora is a POP3 client. You can chose to delete the mail on the server when it is deleted locally, or to simply delete the mail locally and leave it on the server. He might have thought he deleted it but maybe only deleted it in his own local computer’s mail store>>>
There’s an additional dependency in terms of what the email server software itself is, and how that is set up. A lot of servers are set up to keep everything for a given period of time. If so, the user can set their rules to “delete from server” but that justs deletes it from the user’s ability to see it either on their client (Eudora) or on the server itself. But the email can still exist in the email system itself.
But you may have high lighted an additional issues which brings up some interesting points.
1. Phil says “all my emails according to Eudora”. He doesn’t say that is the ONLY email client he uses. Odd, is it not, that he said “according to Eudora” rather than simply “all my emails”? why the qualifier?
2. What kind of mickey mouse outfit is this? They’ve been served with an FOIA request. That’s a specific set of emails pertaining to specific information. That requires the email adminsitrators to search the SERVER for emails that fit the parameters of the FOIA request, SEQUESTER them, and PROVIDE them as a response. Under NO circumstance does compliance law allow for the end user themselves to perform this search! Unless compliance law is VERY different in Britain than it is in the US and Canada, they’ve broken compliance law simply by involving the end user AT ALL, let alone allowing him to pick and choose what fits the FOIA request and what doesn’t.
The latter is the more serious of the two. In the US, people have been sent to jail for this kind of obvious obstruction. That compliance officer Phil is discussing things with may very well have committed a criminal act. Any compliance lawyers watching this thread who have experience in British compliance regulations?
Hi “Just the facts.” I love your sense of humor. Today I ran across something almost as good:
Never put on a horror video when you’re babysitting!
Another good article by David Rose in todays UK Daily Mail.
Prof Jones
The last line of the article? “Prof Jones was not available for comment last night.” Tsk!