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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Why all the cloak and dagger? – How else would you expect to run a world-scale scam?
Meanwhile, Prof Jones may not be “available for comment”, but Christopher Booker in the Telegraph has an exquisitely written and detailed “comment” today telling it like it is in Britain:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8917737/Is-the-global-warming-scare-the-greatest-delusion-in-history.html
A must-read, especially for Brits.
Not only the CRU refusing to discuss the BBC sent me the following email:-
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I asked on a climate blog site, Paul Hudson, for an answer to allegations in The Daily Mail that Roger Harrabin had received £15000 from the CRU to steer the BBC the ‘correct’ climate alarmist way. Any explanation or rebuttal would have probably closed the matter but this reveals the smell of rotting fish.
Hi, e-mail sysadmin here. 15 years of experience. Unix and Win.
There are some misconceptions on e-mail systems here.
1) E-mail servers typically do NOT keep copies of e-mails passing through them on their way to another server. The logging that takes place is in the form of transactions; “Hello I am server MANNHANDLER.COM and here is my sender, recipient, and data” “OK MANNHANDLER.COM, I am JONESING.COM and I have accepted your data” (abbreviated). Never does actual message content get logged at every point. This only takes valuable computer resources.
2) But there are “tapping” mechanisms. Either this is explicit — as in a setting that allows the server to store all messages passing through the server, typically on secondary storage — or done through simple scripting, where a program operates on every message (such things are done for virus scanning etc) and that program/script can of course save the message, perhaps stripping any attachments for storage efficiency. This is done because of FOI issues, but also of internal accountability, fear of litigation based on “who said what, when” (I’ve seen this happen), IT delusions of grandeur, or any possible cause. This is now VERY common (it wasn’t — at all — when I started out).
3) Undeleting of e-mail isn’t that easy. To begin with, yes, deletion of a message only marks the file system pointer for the file as vacant, but that means that this area is free to overwrite. In a busy mail server, this can occur pretty soon. If the server uses the ancient mbox format and an expunge has occurred, undeleting single emails will be nigh impossible.
To me, these releases bear every sign of a “tap” where a directory used to store the complete mail flow sans attachments has been released in some way or another.
Given that there are still plenty of poor, deluded, fools willing to spring to the defence of these charlatans isn’t it time to re-define the term ‘denier’?
If the identity of the source of the Climategate 1 & 2 e-mails is ever revealed, I think he or she should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. That might re-instill some respect in the Nobel organization.
Do you realize which two words makes this statement so hilarious and illogical?
Repetitive :: There never should have been a need for a second FOI request! Perhaps more than a hundred years ago (before computers, internet, copiers, telephones etc) at a time when each person might need a separate copy from the ‘Team’. But not a couple years ago when the *first* request, answered promptly and thoroughly, would have been the *last* request because of the posting of the data to a website like CA would have been enough. The ‘Team’ is solely responsible for repetitive requests! Willis or Steve McIntyre would have done all the work for them by mirroring the data everywhere. Jones could then have gotten right back to work wasting no more of his precious time on this thing. It was his choice to go down this road. To quote the Knight guarding the Holy Grail, ‘He chose Poorly’.
Unnecessary :: Have you even read the emails or the excerpts here and abroad both in 2009 and now? We’re the ones saying this was unnecessary. We have always said that. Do you think that Willis or Steve wanted to receive the data, or did they really want to be turned away and mocked? They wanted the data, just read their remarks then and now. They certainly did not want to get into a worldwide p!ssing contest with the megalomaniacs on the ‘Team’.
What’s ‘necessary’ is that you find a way back to reality. What’s ‘unnecessary’ is for you to make a fool out of yourself by parroting talking points: (“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.”) presumably with a straight face. Unless of course the suspicions of Robert E. Phelan are correct that you are a skeptic performing PsyOps, in which case I would simply say: ‘My bad, well played sir!’
Would it possible, with your consent of course, for us in the States to trade, say 3 to 5 of our liberal socialists for every one of you good folk? Understand that is only an opening lowball offer, we could possibly be convinced to increase our offer to 8 or even 10 liberal socialists.;-)
Looks like a win-win all around. The weather here is of your choosing, you could even find a place that mirrors Great Britain. We value people that think for themselves. On the other side, the European Union would welcome an influx of non-thinking fools that would support any and all of their feudalistic intentions. I understand that there is ‘free’ healthcare there also. Our liberals are begging for that. Let’s git’er done.
Rasmus, my guess: David Palmer. The team tried to play him.
@Hugh Pepper
“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.”
How many times in recent years have we seen this infantile argument?
It boils down to, Jones is too busy, too special, and too important to deal with these requests, many of which are “unnecessary” or “repetitive”.
Once and for all, Hugh, please get this into your head. FOI obligations are legal obligations. Complinace is not optional. By all means make arguments based on the exceptions provided by the various FOI regimes, but compliance is NOT OPTIONAL depending on who you are or your perceived importance or value. Is, as you appear to suggest, FOI a PR exercise? What a ridiculous assertion. FOI regimes are some of the most enlightened and important legal frameworks introduced into civil society in decades implementing a specific aim of encouraging citizen participation in government. If they are a tad inconvenient for some public servants, then that is the price legislators were happy to impose in exchange for transparency and more open government. Anyone who objects to this must be mad, or Stalin, or something.
There is NO account taken of a requester’s motive, for obvious reasons. There is NO account taken of the fact that Jones might have been busy or unimpressed with the requests that he received. Any ICO or judge met with opposition based on such considerations will just raise an eyebrow, make a mental note that the person maling such an argument has no idea what he is talking about, and probably insist that his representative move on and stop wasting the tribunal’s/court’s time.
I am entirely unimpressed every year with my own obligation to prepare and file my tax returns – so what? Do you really think that Jones had to deal with FOI alone? He had a whole department of managers and lawyers standing with him. If he had to search for a bit of data or track down emails, so what? That is what the law says he has to do. The ony reason it caused such inconvenience with him, so far as I can see, is that his records were in disarray.
So he should just do it and people like you should stop this pathetic whining that he shouldn’t have to comply with his own leagal obligations because, “the world needs him” doing something else. Strewth, what an utterly pathetic statement. If you think it has any merit then take it to your MP/Senator or whatever and seek a change in the law, but don’t use it here as a defence of someone subject to a legal obligation that by its design deliberately has no time for such whining.
great write up…..!
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.
______________________
Is Michael Mann British?
Briffa in 1438.txt
And here we have an “underhanded trick!” but not sure if it was ever played. Tom Wigley to Mike Hulme discussing Michael Grubb in 5173.txt
So I would take this to mean Wigley doesn’t see himself as a “greenie” bit sees Grubb as one. Good to know.
Closing the policy loop with Tyndall Centre 1659.txt :
Tyndall is where the profit is made from the research. CRU produces data that is fed to IPCC then from there to UNFCCC. From UNFCCC policy suggestions are fed to DEFRA (and other government agencies around the world) and then UEA’s Tyndall Centre is standing there ready to profit by helping DEFRA implement the policy recommendations generated by CRU’s research. Absolutely brilliant.
I don’t think an institution should be involved in both policy and research, particularly when it stands to profit from implementing policy as a result of its research. It could create the temptation to skew the research to generate policies to increase the cash flow of the institution.
Reading through 5089.txt (Briffa to Edward Cook on Esper) I find this pretty important:
This is *extremely* important in my opinion because it basically says that the IPCC report is written in a “code” of sorts. In other words, the language is circumspect with caveats “therein” in a way that a scientist might recognize but a lay person or politician might not. Also, many of these are buried deep in the report and a policy maker may never actually dig that deeply into it. So they get buyoff from a wide array of scientists by using “circumspect” language that doesn’t sound “circumspect” at all to a lay person reading the report almost as if it is written in two different language at the same time. An academic would read it one way, and the average citizen would read it in quite a different way. Apparently Esper didn’t get the “walk through” of the document to explain these code words, where they were, why they were there, and what they were really saying.
@crosspatch This is why the Catholic church stopped saying mass in Latin.
crosspatch, really appreciate your efforts regarding the emails. Felt that you should be thanked. Keep up the great work, whatever you may find………. DB
Anthony Watts says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:18 am
@crosspatch This is why the Catholic church stopped saying mass in Latin.
————————————————-
[SNIP: Chris, you promised. -REP]
Chris B says:
November 27, 2011 at 11:27 am
Anthony Watts says:
November 27, 2011 at 10:18 am
@crosspatch This is why the Catholic church stopped saying mass in Latin.
————————————————-
[SNIP: Chris, you promised. -REP]
________________________________
REP,
My apologies. I said: “Perhaps next time I should just respond that I don’t agree, and that theology and religion are best left off this board.”
I didn’t want to say I didn’t agree, in case I misunderstood Anthony’s intention with his point.
Maybe I’m not smart enough to understand.
You’ve a tough job, and all your efforts are appreciated.
All in good fun.
crosspatch;
This is *extremely* important in my opinion because it basically says that the IPCC report is written in a “code” of sorts. In other words, the language is circumspect with caveats “therein” in a way that a scientist might recognize but a lay person or politician might not.>>>
Well said! When I first began wading through the IPCC reports themselves, long before I discovered WUWT and CA and other skeptic sites, that was my EXACT reaction to AR4. I’ve spent 30 years in the technology industry and I have to wade through reams of technical documents setting out how various products work and what the benefits of them are. I coined a phrase a long time ago that “the performance of the product rarely meets the peformance of the brochure”.
I know a document written for the express purpose of misleading an uninformed reader while not actually saying anything specific that is incorrect when I see it, and IPCC AR4 simply screams “guitly” in regard to your accusation. IPCC AR4 has “marketing spin” written all over it. It is chalk full of “caveats” and “circumspect” comments and “fuzzy” definitions of certainty, not to mention obscure references that when checked simply refer to other obscure references that turn out to refer to still other obscure references in an endless trail that culminates behind a paywall or a paper that can’t be found at all.
Why all the cloak and dagger stuff ? I dont know.
I have tried relating all this to my own field, where reputations and big rewards are at stake, and it just doesn’t jell at all. Noone treats the law with such ill-regard, and everyone can plot a trend.
The only thing that makes sense to me, is that the whole edifice is shonky, and the thing is only kept afloat by a mutual support system of backslapping.
What strikes me most, in this whole affair, is that not only can Willis not replicate Jones’s work, but Jones can’t either
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?”
Emails are only deleted from the local machine – not the Email server. Deleting Emails from the server is quite a lengthy process and due to statute of limitations laws, which vary from country to country should not be deleted until that period has passed. My guess is that noone even bothered deleting old Emails from the UEA mail servers. MAybe they couldn’t afford a decent IT guy since they pay big bucks to employ incompetant climate scientists.
@ur momisugly Steve B
“My guess ……MAybe they couldn’t afford a decent IT guy since they pay big bucks to employ incompetant climate scientists.”
Email 3989 covers a consultancy tender by CRU staff. The tender is for AEA, an environmental consultancy. We learn that the day rates are as follows:
>> Phil: £750
>> Tim, Rachel, Anthony, Aldina, William, Clare: £550
>> Maureen: £450
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/26/coining-it.html
davidmhoffer;
“AR4 simply screams “guitly””
What? Is it dyslexic, too?
;p
😀