While few have noticed, since hardly anyone but the handful of extreme faithful visit there anymore, it seems that the website run by the climate alarmist cabal of Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Dr. Michael Mann, Dr. Stephan Rahmstorf, and others has gone dark this week. According to the “wayback machine” the last time the realclimate.org website was live was November 17th:
Now, it shows this, what appears to be a default page for a “parked domain”.
The domain is still registered, according to WHOIS:
‘Tis a puzzle, did Gavin or EMS forget to pay the hosting bill, have they given up, or is something else going on?
There’s no hint of why on Gavin’s Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin
Note to Gavin, this really doesn’t prevent me from reading your Twitter feed:
Hopefully we’ll find out the reason soon.
UPDATE: Russell Cook writes via email…
From what I’ve seen, the ultra-handy Internet Wayback Machine site is sometimes a bit slow on archiving current web sites.
Google Cache seems to have caught RealClimate up an running on Thursday the 19th: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eItUrDSLUIgJ:www.realclimate.org/
The current ‘dark’ mystery of RealClimate going dark is a good moment to do a retrospective on RealClimate.
If the creators and main management of RealClimate had a strategy to do a rehearsing of the future, then they did not rehearse very well.
If Michael Mann’s self-serving dominance of RealClimate had a key effect, then he was completely detrimental to the survivability of RealClimate.
Does the lapsing of RealClimate’s domain name signal that there may be a very quiet internal dissent going on within GISS about it’s past and current practices? Like the one going on at NOAA?
John
From FB:
For the first time in its miserable existance, SourceWatch has something useful to say, from http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental_Media_Services :
Whoa – retired in 2005? Has EMS just been coasting since then?
That quote is also at http://www.sciencecommunicationnetwork.org/ which is actively being updated.
The demise of ems.org changes everything. To renew realclimate.org, someone has to login to the registrar, and that requires knowing the account name and password.
Betsy@ems.org certainly had it, but with EMS gone, it would have taken a little while to find Betsy. I bet she doesn’t remember the password. So now they have to get a new password from the registrar who will go along – and Email the new password to betsy@ems.org. Oops. Getting account information over the phone Just Won’t Happen any time soon. The best they can hope for is to be able to renew the domain as a third party, but leave the ownership information intact, as I did with john-daly.com, and that’s not going to happen until Monday because the registrar doesn’t offer that service.
Or, they can get ems.org renewed but then they’ll probably have to get it to point to a new web host so they can recreate Betsy’s email address. Someone at SCN might have the account info for ems.org, but probably not for realclimate.org.
What a great predicament! I don’t think RealClimate will be back this weekend.
The SCN site has had the same announcement about ems.org and the retiring Schardt as far back as 2008. It is not new news.
The mystery is how a defunct organization could keep the domain name alive…and what has happened with it now.
Not a mystery they can pay up to ten years in advance
Dark? How apt, dark?
RC was specifically designed to stop the light of shinning upon salient data.
If a tree rings in the forest does anyone hear the echo chamber?
I’m much more concerned about the fact that Climate Audit hasn’t had a post in almost two months.
Oh, he’s always up to some good.
=============
Most logical reason, they forgot to pay for web hosting. They will soon be back.
Anthony, I can confirm I visited RealClimate after the 17th. I posted a question elsewhere and used this quote from their last posting about a climate bet that they won.
“However, much more care should have been taken to self-critically examine their potential skill and emphasize their experimental nature, and the levels of certainty expressed in press releases and popular media should have been dialed way down.”
That is listed as being posted three days ago, so the site was active on the 18th.
Given the current expiry date “Registry Expiry Date: 2016-11-19T16:39:03Z” my guess is that it expired exactly one year earlier, in the US, that would be the morning of the 19th, plus whatever time it took for the news to propagate to the DNS servers. So, it should have been fine on the 18th.
Perhaps it was taken down to keep Mark Steyn from finding something there…
I’ve just looked at Realclimate’s website and I can assure all that it is a big improvement.
No reason to get excited, yet. Stuff happens on the Internet, and it may be a simple thing like figuring out who is going to pay. If you look at the “Whois”, Environmental Media Services, a left-wing media outfit, is the registrant for the domain. It may be that they are tired of paying for a media effort that has resulted in a decreasing utility for dollar spent. It could be true that Schmidt and company have day jobs, and cannot fight the fight any longer.
In any event the real battle is in the political arenas, and has been all along. It was never about the science of GW because the warmists never had science on their site, or they were not on the side of science.
Or, it is becoming more and more a case of nobody gives a crap. That’s what the polls say.
It’s possible that with the additional scrutiny being applied to NOAA and NASA climate pronouncements, that Dr. Gavin Schmidt’s extracurricular Realclimate.org activities (while on the clock at NASA,) were ended by orders from headquarters.
It is also possible that the RC boys are merely as sloppy with their bill payments and such, as they are with their data manipulations… which means they’ll be back, as soon as they get their stuff together. Well, figuratively together. It’s obvious to anyone with a clue, that they’re a long way from having it together.
I’ve looked at it, I’m 90% certain that it has been taken down maliciously.
See mine below, the domain name has been added to the Expired Domain Names list servers.
Whether that can be done maliciously or not, I do not know. Hopefully not — it would make it far too easy to delete sites from the web — I suspect that these servers are very well protected.
97%, surely?
Thanks, I just did. I went through number of links on the RC pages, at one point the Norton’s anti-virus flagged ‘computer at risk’, after immediately disconnecting broadband link, did quick scan but nothing was found. Now reconnected with full system scan in progress.
Wow, you just scored a big hit against your credibility in my book.
Sorry, it was an accident !!
I would say you are right.
My malware blocks it.
I do recall some rumblings from “Anonymous” that they were going to attack the terrorist web sites.
Looks like someone carried through?
Once more:
So, today here in North East Texas, after more than 50 inches of rain.
Blue Norther we call it, 40 mph winds, some spit like rain, now cold, getting colder, to freezing tonight.
The NWS and news reports tell U S All that this first freeze in right on time, this day is the average date of first freezing.
Set my little thinking, that type of data must be ever where, for every area, easy to find, not subject to fudging and thus a way to say,,, this is all normal.
How hard to gather it all up world wide and make a real data storage and then use that to reach back as far as possible and see if the average freeze dates have been moving about or just doing the average thing still.
Must be to simple and too not in the 10,000 year time scale so that no one alive will know the results.
The rats are abandoning ship !!
Not with a bang, but a whimper. Sic transit Gloria mundi …
Pointman
The DNS lookup tool at http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperToolX.aspx reports:
“PWS3v2 531ms
0 b0.org.afilias-nst.org 199.19.54.1 NON-AUTH 109 ms Received 2 Referrals , rcode=NO_ERROR realclimate.org. 86400 IN NS expired2.active-dns.com, realclimate.org. 86400 IN NS expired1.active-dns.com,
1 expired2.active-dns.com 199.79.61.217 AUTH 0 ms Received 1 Answers , rcode=NO_ERROR realclimate.org. 300 IN A 208.91.197.217, ”
This means that the domain name is listed in the “Expired” list at the highest level domain servers.
The domain expired two days ago ( last Thursday ) as it shows in the post’s image.
[Facepalm]
Denio ==> Doesn’t that say expires…2016….the “Updated on 2015-11-20” would be yesterday……as if the domain name had been cancelled or expired a year early.
Come on guys, can’t people read some of the better explanations above before posting clueless speculation here?
OMG! We are all so guilty here. Our shared micro aggressions directed at algore and Mr. Gleick, combined with large cash payments for the fossil fuel companies have made us into monsters. I need to retreat to a safe place so I can feel guilty about not clicking on realclimate.org
🙂 — gotta love the reference to micro-aggression!
If one had included the whole WHOIS entry, we would have seen the last two lines here:
Domain Name:REALCLIMATE.ORG
Domain ID: D105219760-LROR
Creation Date: 2004-11-19T16:39:03Z
Updated Date: 2015-11-20T01:33:40Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2016-11-19T16:39:03Z
Sponsoring Registrar:Active Registrar, Inc. (R1709-LROR)
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 1090
WHOIS Server:
Referral URL:
Domain Status: ok — http://www.icann.org/epp#ok
Domain Status: autoRenewPeriod — http://www.icann.org/epp#autoRenewPeriod
Registrant ID:AR_40232047
Registrant Name:Betsy Ensley
Registrant Organization:Environmental Media Services
Registrant Street: 1320 18th St, NW
Registrant City:Washington
Registrant State/Province:DC
Registrant Postal Code:20036
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.2024636670
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email:betsy@ems.org
Admin ID:AR_40232047
Admin Name:Betsy Ensley
Admin Organization:Environmental Media Services
Admin Street: 1320 18th St, NW
Admin City:Washington
Admin State/Province:DC
Admin Postal Code:20036
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.2024636670
Admin Phone Ext:
Admin Fax:
Admin Fax Ext:
Admin Email:betsy@ems.org
Tech ID:AR_40232047
Tech Name:Betsy Ensley
Tech Organization:Environmental Media Services
Tech Street: 1320 18th St, NW
Tech City:Washington
Tech State/Province:DC
Tech Postal Code:20036
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.2024636670
Tech Phone Ext:
Tech Fax:
Tech Fax Ext:
Tech Email:betsy@ems.org
Name Server:EXPIRED1.ACTIVE-DNS.COM
Name Server:EXPIRED2.ACTIVE-DNS.COM
Those are mostly uninteresting. To divert realclimate.com from pointing to the real site, the registration needs to be changed to a DNS server that will return the IP address of the parked domain page. So the DNS record needed to be changed to produce the change we’re seeing.
For example, look at one of my domains:
If you go to my web site (and you do – there are links on this page), your browser has to convert wermenh.com into an IP address. The DNS (Domain Name System, I think) does that. The .com top level domain sends the wermenh.com name to one of the name servers at bizland.com, and it responds with IP address 38.113.1.97. This just happens to be one of the systems in Bizland’s domain, which makes sense since that’s where I have my web site hosted. Whew.
Should I forget to renew the domain some year, I think I have until May, yep:
Next May, Melbourne will change the DNS entry for wermenh.com to point to a DNS server that will return the IP address of a web server that will put up a page that will make me panic and rush to get money to Melbourne to restore the link to Bizland. In the meantime, I’m not sure what you’ll see for the ENSO meter, but it won’t be anything like a meter.
Who knows, maybe they use EXPIRED1.ACTIVE-DNS.COM too.
“Realclimate Goes Dark.
It’s been dark for a l-o-o-o-n-g time. No sunshine there, eh?
I believe Climategate happened on 17. November 2009. Maybe they are marking the anniversary.
Superb! +17.
The first story at WUWT was Nov 19, Anthony was vetting the data before he made his first post. The 1616 comments on it may still be the most for any story, I can check after dinner.
http://wermenh.com/wuwt/cat_climategate.html
“The breach was first discovered on 17 November 2009”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
Wikipedia say so, it must be true 😮
Actually, I remembered it myself, the zip file (I still have a copy) was uploaded to realclimate on that date. I am sure Gavin will be able to confirm it.
While Gavin would certainly be able to confirm it, this would be a very bad time to ask him something about Climategate. Go for it. 🙂
I did check – 1616 is the most comments on a post. #2 was on the second Climategate release which didn’t tell us much new, but had 1259 comments.
The expiration date is always an anniversary of the registration date though some registrars offer perks for renewing early which causes the expiry date to advance by the perk value.
The same fate has befallen realclimate.com and realclimate.net. The anti-squatter domains have expired, too.
I’ll speculate the reason the sites down it because mission accomplished, no longer required. The object of the entire enterprise was creating an artificial energy shortage/concentrated ownership/inflated energy prices/carbon credit financial bubble. They never had to prove their case, they simply had to create the impression in media, that a legitimately large proportion of the population were alarmed about the threat. Again, they didn’t have to prove a proportion of the population were alarmed, they had to create the impression they were. It’s all about providing the excuse of legitimacy for a fraud.
Your going to see some truly crappy laws as a result of the Paris conference, meanwhile, the fraudsters will disappear into the woodwork. The grants and funding for bogus climate models and research will dry up/disappear after the laws change, no longer needed. The savvy protest groups will move on to fighting against freedom of speech/expression/due process rights, that’s where the charitable foundation money will go next.
+1
It’s been running on wind.
I googled the question:
“what happened to RealClimate website”
and WattsUpWithThat was at positions 3 and 4 from the top, and the only site among the 168,000 that was pertinent to the question. No, I didn’t look at all 168,000.
You should buy the site and have ti forward to whatsupwiththat.