by Antonio Regalado
The University of East Anglia, whose stolen documents caused a furor of excitement among climate skeptics over the weekend, said today that it had called in police to investigate possible criminal activity.
But university researchers may also find themselves in legal jeopardy if they deleted emails requested under the U.K.’s Freedom of Information (FOIA) legislation, a crime under U.K. law.
The case of the climate hack began last week when an anonymous individual calling himself “FOIA” released hundreds of private emails and documents belonging to East Anglia’s influential Climatic Research Unit.
In recent years, the university had been subject to a flurry of information requests from bloggers and others skeptical of man-made global warming demanding to see raw data used to calculate temperatures, as well as for scientific correspondence. The university has rejected most of the requests citing various exemptions to the U.K. public disclosure law, which took effect in 2005.
It now appears a data thief may have taken matters into their own hands by copying and releasing the documents.
“It’s definitely a crime to do that in the U.K., and we have reported it to the police,” said Simon Dunford, a spokesman at East Anglia, which is conducting an internal probe.
But the emails, which appear to be genuine, though their authenticity could not be confirmed, indicate a concerted effort to fight the FOI requests that may itself have slipped into questionable territory.
For instance, in May of 2008, the school received a legal information request for correspondence of an East Anglia researcher, Keith Briffa, involved in the preparation of the most recent scientific report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, known as AR4. Two days later, according to the alleged correspondence, Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, sent out an email to colleagues asking them to delete any such emails.
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: IPCC & FOI:04:11 2008
Date: Thu May 29 11
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't
have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
According to Hazel Moffatt, a partner in the litigation and regulatory department at the law firm DLA Piper in London, deleting emails subject to a FOI request is a criminal offense in the United Kingdom, punishable with a fine. “It’s quite naughty to do that,” said Ms. Moffatt.
In comments on the apparent data theft at Real Climate, Gavin Schmidt of NASA said: "There is an ill-advised suggestion, but there is no evidence that any email that was responsive to a FOI request actually was deleted. Obviously one would hope that none were."
Jones did not respond to a request for comment. In an email, Mann, a climatologist and statistician at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, said, “I did not delete any emails at all in response to Phil Jone's [sic] request, nor did I indicate to him that I would.”
Mann, the author of a well known paleoclimate reconstruction that has been subject to skeptics’ attacks, declined to comment on whether scientists were justified in resisting FOI requests from skeptics.
According to Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who was among those sending FOI demands to East Anglia on behalf of Climate Audit, a skeptics blog. The May FOI request at issue sought information about whether unpublished scientific data had been used in the IPCC report in ways that could violate the Nobel-prize winning groups’ rules.
The leaked emails show Jones and colleagues feared that releasing information would draw them deeper into disputes with amateur scientists, who would use it to create new controversies and cut into their research time.
However, some scientists expressed concern that East Anglia’s refusals could backfire. In one of the emails, climatologist Tom Wigley, of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, cautioned in an email to Jones that “the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato. ... Yes, there are reasons -- but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something, and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.”
Given the importance of East Anglia’s data and correspondence in shaping climate policy, including via IPCC reports, some mainstream scientists now say they find the evidence of efforts at data withholding troubling. “The problem seems to be that the circling of the wagons strategy developed by small groups of climate researchers in response to the politically motivated attacks,” Judith Curry, a climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wrote in an internet posting this week.
Another potential concern are Jones’ emails stating that he convinced FOI officers not to release data to greenhouse skeptics because they planned to harm the university or setback climate science. “Think I've managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit,” Jones wrote in a 2007 email.
According to Moffatt, the U.K.’s FOI law is supposed to be “identity blind” meaning that requests should be judged on the merits, not who does the requesting.
Eventually, East Anglia’s refusal to approve FOI requests may have played a role in the leak of the pilfered documents. Stephen McIntyre, a retired industry consultant who runs Climate Audit, speculated on his site that an insider may have leaked the documents and could be protected by whistle-blower laws.
A link to an FTP site containing the documents was first posted last week on the Air Vent, another skeptic blog, by the anonymous poster calling himself “FOIA”. The poster’s message read:
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
Steven: how am I a troll for denialists?
Anna: the rise on ocean heat content is well-documented. I discuss this here:
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/modern_day_climate_change.html
Jeff: points #4,5,6 can only be caused by increased GHGs and the effect of increased CO2 has been measured and fits well with the expectations and predictions. The cooling due to ozone loss in the stratosphere effectively ended because the ozone is recovering.
Btw, the troll signing his name 'Scott A. Mandia' and 'Gavin (not Schmidt)' on this thread is a typical example of denialist disinformation tactics.
And the ignorant denialist braying about the code comments elides the fact that these were work-in-progress notes from a four-year project, by a programmer to attempting the tedious task of reconciling disparately compiled and formatted datasets. , See Realclimate.org for this and more rebuttals to some of the more 'cimategate' memes:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/
And to all the engineers and IT workers etc 'with some statistics background' - and there seems to be dozens of you weighing in on many threads about this, as you so tediously often do on creation/evolution threads -- you AREN'T climatologists and you DIDN'T work on this data and you obviously HAVEN'T bothered to engage the authors or the literature in any spirit of serious inquiry to get your questions answered, OK? So stop pompously acting like you're qualified to pass judgement. That's the thing about lots of science now, particularly a theory or model developed over decades, it's complex and you can't just wade in and look at a few figures or read a blog post and decide it does/doesn't wash as if no one in the field has ever considered it before you. Try reading some reviews published in peer reviewed journals instead.
C'mon, Science, let's get more climatologist voices than just Judy Curry's into the mix. She can't possibly be the only one with a view on all this. I'm betting that many are of the mind that the climate science is quite sound, that the skeptics have malicious intent and don't really deserve to be treated as honest agents, but that FOI still *look* bad, as Wigley wrote.
If so (or not) now is the time for the public to hear it, while the denialist blogosphere whips up its predictable frenzy.
There is one point about which we should not be confused. Contrary to the claims of certain media outlets and certain individuals, the CRU emails are NOT private correspondence.
Emails sent at the place of one's employment, bearing the name of one's employer, and pertaining to one's on-the-job responsibilities, belong to said employer.
If that employer happens to be funded with public money, such emails are almost certainly subject to Freedom of Information legislation.
See this link, on the University of East Anglia's website http://www.eua.ac.uk/is/foi/guidance The section titled "5 key facts that all staff should know about Freedom of Information" explicitly advises that all email could potentially be released to the public and should, therefore, be "clear and professional."
As others have observed, none of this email appears to discuss staff meetings, picking up milk on the way home, or the cost of little Johnny's braces.
These are NOT private email. Repeated attempts to suggest that they are is spin, plain and simple.
veryone needs to keep in mind that while the emails are what everyone is talking about, those mainly demonstrate the state of mind of the sender. The real fraud occurred in the models and once forensic analysis is complete, the true picture will emerge:
Go to beforeitsnews.com and look for Climategate CRU Computer Model - The Smoking Gun
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/0000000000000590
As to the current media claim that "this was only one of thousands of studies", CRU's studies were cited many, many times in many of the other studies. Already, a group in New Zealand has uncovered the Southern Hemisphere's version of Climategate from a similar group there (you will see a familiar graph here as well):
Go to beforeitsnews.com and look for Climategate: NZ's NIWA Accused of CRU-like Climate Fakery
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/0000000000000637
People who understand science the and the scientific method will immediately grasp the obvious implications. Lawyers, the news media and other untrained people will have a difficult time understanding the way math, science and truth have created the power of science that we take for granted, at least until this situation occurred.
Today's headlines
***UN: Success in Copenhagen in sight - Al Jazeera
***Climate fund to help poor nations - BBC
***SEC Should Compel Carbon Risk Disclosures, Investor Group Says - Bloomberg, Nov.23.
In light of these headlines I submit that this attempt by Science Magazine to cover the story is weak and ineffectual.
Their next (paper) issue will include more of the science of Michael Mann.
Unless Science Magazine can turn back those headlines, I will continue to count it among the "junk science" journals who have nurtured this nightmare.
Professor Mandia would have you think that an increase in traffic accidents is proof of AGW.
His bullet point list alone is hogwash, let alone as proof of AGW.
I hope there is a day when all the pointy head academics that bullied others with AGW catastrophism, lose their credentials.
I wonder if Professor Mandia has any clue that all the claims he makes above are not necessarily tied to man-made global warming, even if we stipulate they are true or relevant (which many are not).
The Earth has been in a warming trend since the end of the last Ice Age. Ocean levels have been rising ever since. Nothing new there. Ocean temperatures rising? Not according to the best evidence, collected by thousands of probes sent down a thousand feet, then surfaced to transmit data to satellites.
Species may be going extinct, but anyone who thinks a degree difference in atmospheric temperatures could "cause" that needs to ask himself why only temperature INCREASES "cause" extinctions, but declines (as during the Little Ice Age) do not. If warming is "bad" then why did life flourish in much-warmer Jurassic? Fact is, life has flourished the past 500 million years, even with far greater temperature variations and an occasional asteroid to hit the Reset button.
The maxim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" applies with particular force here. If Mandia wants humans to curtail their freedoms he and the CRU ought to be making a very clear and transparent case for the A in AGW. THEY HAVE NOT. Instead they chose to stiff, stonewall, obfuscate and destroy evidence.
Should Science call in Scotland Yard to investigate this crime committed on their own patch?
Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly
Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, and Fenbiao Ni
Science 27 November 2009: 1256-1260.
How do they get away with it?
re: STEVE
The Information Comissioner's office released a note addressing your question on the details of the law, including cases where deleting is OK.
ICO said "Destroying requested information outside of an organisation’s normal policies is unlawful and may be a criminal offence if done to prevent disclosure. The ICO has specific guidance relating to the destruction of requested information that can be found on our website."
The link is.
http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/freedom_of_information/practical_application/fep004practicalguidancedestructionv1.pdf
Yes the emails are a big problem. But the real problem is in the other files attched to this 61 MB file, the code in particular. There are frank and explicit discussions of the way that the data was forced into agreement with the models. "Fudge factors" were applied to the data to get rid of data that failed to agree with the AGW theory.
This is all set out in comments in the code placed by one or more of the programmers who seems to be a prime canidate for the position of leaker.
These demonstrate pure and simple fabrication. That is the real reason that these people fought for years to prevent the code and data from being publicly released.
Scott Mandia and other blind believers need to free their minds: http://video.google.ca/videosearch?q=monkton+updated+with+slides&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enCA219CA219&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=G8gOS4-NFIaZ_QbQxeWuBQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBAQqwQwAA#q=monkton+updated+with+slides&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enCA219CA219&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=G8gOS4-NFIaZ_QbQxeWuBQ&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBAQqwQwAA&qvid=monkton+updated+with+slides&vid=-2075148321543718929
"free your mind, your ___ will follow" - george clinton
Years ago, a much older and wiser engineer pointed out the obvious to me. If nearly all research funding comes from one place, sooner or later the funder will get the science he pays for. Corrupt individuals will always be with us, in every walk of life. When the sources of money for research are diffuse, corrupt voices are more likely to be lost. On the other hand, once funding is concentrated, particularly in the hand of government, we will get the science government pays for. As we see, the corrupt voices then have an easy way to drown out all others.
We are on the brink of consigning our futures to global elites who have no problem buying the science they want. The Copenhagen Climate treay openly calls for global government justified on the basis of this kind abused science. If the people behind the political gambit are callous enough to manipulate the academy, aren't we justified in suspecting their motives? They aren't likely to give up should Copenhagen fail.
It's well past time for everyone engaged in research to take a critical look at your benefactors. Government funding is convenient, but are you trading a comfortable life of easy money today for a future of global slavery?
Consider - The emails were not a result of a hacker's activity. They were also not going to be produced under a FOIA request.
Rather, they are the residual emails comprising those which had already been *sanitized* from the CRU systems to illegally prepare an incomplete reponse for a future (likely successful) FOIA request.
Note that there is a very small percentage of personal chatter that typically make up close colleague's communication. Therefore, it points to a previous culling.
Theory: These are deleted emails from a sanitized batch which were foolishly or purposely archived and/or discovered by an insider (perhaps the sanitizer himself). The insider then had pangs of conscience or an axe to grind and released them surreptitiously.
Also, data fabrication and algorithm manipulation are not at all the important issues here.
The travesty is that they were peer-reviewing each other's work! They had control of their own process. It was a closed-loop system comprised of several dozen researchers in an incestuous, self-affirming academic relationship.
If they would show that they can't find anything wrong with the climate, they wouldn't get as many grants. Besides, non-significant results don't get you published as easily, so they are all biased towards showing that there IS an effect.
Re:
".....If I was the victim of the kind of attacks these scientists had been receiving, I know that I would be at least as defensive."
---- By thomas on November 24, 2009 4:12 PM
Problem is Mann, Briffa, Jones, and Schmidt were DEFENSIVE to begin with. McIntyre and McKitrick had been requesting access to their data and code for years. But they were stone-walled. What are Mann, Briffa, Jones, and Schmidt trying to hide?
Re:
".....If I was the victim of the kind of attacks these scientists had been receiving, I know that I would be at least as defensive."
---- By thomas on November 24, 2009 4:12 PM
Problem is Mann, Briffa, Jones, and Schmidt were DEFENSIVE to begin with. McIntyre and McKitrick had been requesting access to their data and code for years. But they were stone-walled. What are Mann, Briffa, Jones, and Schmidt trying to hide?
Skeptics and conspiracy buffs need to understand that even without any CRU data nor the publications of it scientists, there are MULTIPLE lines of evidence for AGW:
1) UAH, RSS, and GISS show warming
2) Rapidly warming Arctic
3) Rapidly decreasing sea ice extent
4) Rapidly thinning sea ice
5) Rising ocean heat content
6) Cooling stratosphere
7) Net increase in downwelling LW
8 ) Net decreasing TOA LW emission
9) Increased species migrations/extinctions
10) Increased severe weather occurrences
11) Glacier mass loss and retreats increasing
12) Rising sea levels
13) Most importantly: rapidly rising human emissions of GHGs that have not been seen in millions of years.
None of these things read emails and have decided to play along in a massive international conspiracy.
Scott A. Mandia, Professor - Meteorology
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/
Antonio, did you give Ms. Moffatt an accurate picture of the FOI situation?
First, as the purloined correspondence makes clear, prior to the deletions (if they actually occurred) the scientists were discussing the matter with the UEA FOI officer. On the face of it that would be an unusual step for people intent on breaking the FOI law.
Second, it's also clear from the correspondence that it was being questioned whether the materials were exempt from the FOI law. Looking at the law, in particular I.1, I.2 and II.41, it's clear that confidential communications have an "absolute" exemption. I believe this means that once it is established the the emails were confidential, something that in turn appears to be contingent on whether the correspondents (Mike Mann and Caspar Ammann) believed them to have been so, there is a non-rebuttable presumption that they cannot be released.
That being the case, the question for Ms. Moffatt is under what circumstances would it be illegal for such materials to be deleted. I was unable to find any FOI law provision saying that there were any.
Finally, as a journalist you should question why there's a two-day gap (May 27th to May 29th) in the FOI string, and in particular whether there was other discussion in that period that would have made the whole thing appear to far more innocent. I suspect there were, and that our hacker deleted them in the hope that journalists wouldn't ask too many questions before running with the accusation.
I am not a climatologist, but I have a university degree in engineering with a heavy bias towards statistics and fundamental dynamics.
For years I have been looking at any raw temperature data I could get my hands on (I never use data that has been filtered/interpreted, and I guess you now know why that was).
Frankly, I was beginning to doubt my capabilities: I never found any evidence that temperatures were rising significantly compared to historic data. I always wondered about where the other data these people used came from, because obviously it must be very special data indeed. As a side note, I often wondered about the methods they used and something along the lines of "if you torture your data long enough, it will always confess" often came to mind. I just never could make myself believe that serious scientists would stoop this low...
With carefully crafted (biased) "statistic" methods it is entirely possible to make data look as damning as you want. It certainly is possible to make it smell like real science while it is not. This is difficult to disprove, especially if no one has access to the raw data to do their own math. All I can hope is that we have learnt from this epic fail. Scientific data and methods MUST be open to peer review, or it may not be trusted at all.
Actually, this ridiculous trend of secrecy has been in this field from the beginning, starting with Michael Mann, whose research (hockey stick curve) has been under fire for decades and whose methods and raw data still haven't been released. In hindsight, that should have tipped us off.
I would like to suggest, that all data on this subject be brought in the open, re-evaluated and re-analysed by mathematicians and statisticians. Not by biologists, environmental researchers or weather specialists or the like. They have proven not to be trustworthy (or equipped) enough for this research.
Only after this complete re-evaluation of the facts should we start thinking about ways of solving the problem. If there is a problem left. And I think there will not be.
The damage these people have done to our economy, mobility and politics is beyond words. If it is proven that this was on purpose, I would suggest barring them from their work permanently.
So many comments about the fraud exposed, or an end to the scam, etc. etc., and yet not one - nil - actual examples revealed of fraudulent, criminal, or scientifically dishonest behavior (the bad FOI stuff doesn't look good, but does not relate to the science at all).
I think the skeptics are in for a mighty disappointment (yet again!) when it turns out in the end that the science done across the globe on climate is still upheld. Of course, for most it will just be more evidence that the conspiracy is Even Bigger than they thought, thousands and thousands colluding against the wealthy...
The whole issue is how to 'tease out' the ACTUAL net effect of greenhouse gasses ---- they have some effect, we just don't know how large. We don't know the negative and positive feedbacks and forcings.
The climate has been warming naturally since the LIA (Little Ice Age).
What we don't know is whether any recent warming (over trend) is due to an anomaly or due to some other effects (AGW etc).
There is cherry-picking but if you are generous and want to give the benefit-of-doubt you will say that the believers are genuinely interested in saving humankind from our own folly ----- that they 'know' that AGW is true, and they want to move more expeditiously to the political stage to stop AGW (that there is "no time to waste").
If you are not so inclined to be generous, then now you have a bit more ammunition provided to you by the AGW scientists that does seem to indicate some collusion and the creation of some obstacles to what you would hope is the dispassionate pursuit of science.
But don't be too fooled —— dispassion is in short supply when egos are involved. You only have to read about the egos in the story of the discovery of the Double Helix and other such science stories.
Science is done by humans, with all the complex human nature that these scientists invariably bring to their pastime —— egos are never "checked at the door to the lab".
THE CITIZEN SCIENTIST will be profiling some of the amateur and citizen scientists whose FOI requests may have led to the withholding and destruction of e-mails and documents by some climate scientists directly involved with the IPCC. If you are among those who made such requests, please send the particulars to editor@sas.org. Thank you.
Forrest M. Mims III
Editor
THE CITIZEN SCIENTIST
http://www.sas.org/tcs
http://www.forrestmims.org
At this point any talks of any kind of legislation on CO2 should be aborted.
The debate was supposedly over even before it began. It reeked of fraud since the beginning, and I for one will not let lying politicians loot the economy on bogus science.
If you have any ounce of decency in you, on whichever side you are, you will demand that any legislation be postponed until an open and public debate actually happens, and the proof be made that if trillions of dollars will be sucked into a phony carbon credit ponzi scheme.
Climate Science will survive this mess -- and be made stronger for having lived through it.
Although I will hazard a guess that there will be more 'messes' to be made public before this is all over.
What gives me hope reading the entries here is the impressive professional tone in the posts.
While I am a skeptic, I believe that Climate Science is very important, for both possible GW and GC outcomes.
For that reason, which sentiment I know most rational people agree with, we should hope that this incident serves to eventually improve the process of Climate Science and its transparency. Indeed scientists should seize this opportunity to make the Science more open and rigorous. There is nothing wrong, and much to praise, with having Climate Research subject to audits, due to its criticality to human welfare. Steve McIntyre suggested as much many years ago.
Even before this brouhaha the image of Climate Science was in trouble. It had an image that was too political and too factional and seemingly too money-corruptible. It even seemed tainted by influence peddling, given the stubbornness with which skeptical views of even professional scientists were often met. Let's be honest -- its legitimacy was being brought into question.
If AGW is to be convincingly proven, then perhaps this incident is the first step to fully reestablishing the legitimacy of Climate Science and making that goal achievable. As living beings we all have a vested interest in the truth of the matter.
Let's also give the most prominent and capable skeptical climate scientists their due -- they would not stand in the way of findings that unambiguously proved AGW. Nay, in my opinion, they would assist in proving it, if that is the direction in which truly dispassionate and impartial Science led them.
After all, the children of the Skeptics will share our Earth with the children of the Non-Skeptics. Both groups want their descendents to survive and flourish.
I trust and firmly believe that this is the first step to bringing Climate Science back to full repute and thereby helping all of Science burnish an image that has much suffered, in my opinion, in recent years.
Let's all work to make this objective a reality. Let's work as a Real Team.
Yesterday I spent 15 minutes reading (the first very small bit of) the Harry_Read_Me.txt file. It's been over 40 years since I wrote FORTRAN and didn't realize FORTRAN compilers still existed.
The sense that one develops without knowing any computer language is that the effort described is a total hack and a poor one at that. Renaming variables to get a clean compile, manipulating data to get results that would seem reasonable, substituting files to satisfy an arcane file-naming convention employed in the program, a litany of frustration to make undocumented and impenetrable code produce any kind of a number that might be deemed acceptable,... If this is a basis for CRU's research and findings, the unit should be shut down, the academics involved should be fired in disgrace, or barring that, at least be required to take undergraduate courses in proper scientific research methodology.
Not only has the Nobel prize for peace been tarnished by naming Gore and the IPCC, but the whole field of climate science is on the verge of being discredited.
In an email, Mann, a climatologist and statistician at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, said, “I did not delete any emails at all in response to Phil Jone's [sic] request, nor did I indicate to him that I would.”
So, Dr. Mann - If you didn't delete them in response to Jones, Why exactly did you delete the email? And when did you stop beating your spouse? :-)
-chrisj
Yet another salvo launched in the war against legitimate climate scientists.
The torrent of libelous comments against these scientists here and elsewhere is evidence of just how fevered these people are.
If I was the victim of the kind of attacks these scientists had been receiving, I know that I would be at least as defensive.
Hopefully the Journals that were, at best, taken advantage of; or at worst, colluded with the effort to remove editors and reviewers will try to right the ship and salvage their reputations.
It is troubling that these few "scientists", even if absolutely correct in their finding, had the influence to pressure so many Journals. These researchers will come and go in time, but the Record should be respected and trusted. Today, that trust has taken a big blow.
Refusal to engage "amateur scientists" with actual argument and evidence is why the numbers of those who accept "the consensus" on "climate change" are dropping. Maybe this is a good time to revisit that strategy, because the stonewall strategy obviously isn't working.
There is no question this is a terrible scandal. The CRU cabal have committed serious crimes against science in general and climate science in particular.
The emails show they have punished any effort at independent thought, driven journal editors from their job, stifled the publication of skeptic papers, excluded peer-reviewed papers from consideration in IPCC's AR4 and fudged data to meet certain goals.
What is to be done to make amends for these crimes? Is James Saiers going to be offered his job back as editor of GRL? Is Science Mag willing to be more proactive in the publication of skeptic's papers?
Science is supposed to be self-correcting. It cannot be if the corrections are excluded because of confirmation bias, group think and outside pressure from the CRU cabal.
It seems to me Science Mag should issue gold embossed invitations to Steve McIntyre, Roger Pielke, John Christy, Roy Spencer, Anthony Watts, Craig Loehle and Richard Lindzen to publish any paper they feel was unjustly rejected or needs to be published.
It would also be helpful if Science editors would welcome and publish stories by people who were pressured by the cabal. We need to understand how they did what they did so it will never happen again.
Science is not supposed to be a consensus. There is supposed to be a free flow of data and competing theories. What are the editors of Science Magazine going to do to make things right?
What a great page this is. Wonderfully done introduction to the criminal mess, letters that are intelligent and balanced. I think I have stumbled on the seedbed that will restore the horribly tarnished scientists reputation.
Ian Gilbert who describes himself as a member of "the great unwashed middle uncovinced by either extreme" makes a good point; if evidence is hidden it is assumed to be injurious to the party refusing to disclose it. I and a colleague were also among the unwashed middle and decided to do something about it. We set up a web site to try and give a blanced point of view. It is at:
www.climatedata.info
We would be grateful if you let us know if you think we have succeeded.
What does the Weather Channel, which promoted the idea of global catastrophe for years, and then hired someone to shut up opposition, have to say about all of this...let's go over to their site and have a peek...
Ah ok, not a word.
"The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe."
Hmm, ruining people in a very angry and horrible who might disagree with AGW.
And now we find AGW was a bit of a scam from top to bottom.
Tar and feathering might be too good for some of these nice personalities. This is quite out of 1984.
Why is it that when these sort of documents come from oil companies the distributors are called "brave whistleblowers", but when they come from "environmental organizations", they are called "theft"?
RE: Dave
CRU thinks they were stolen, although you may be right that other explanations are possible that could fall short of theft, such as someone having left the files in a public folder. CRU's IT staff is looking into it --- a forensic search that may identify when and by whom the copying was done.
AR
If emails and documents of this type ha been stolen from an oil company or a tobacco company or a nuclear energy company, the media and the environmentalists would have gone apoplectic(sp?) over them, and they would be printed on the front page of the NY Times. However, when they show that a key reporter on environmental affairs at the NYT and many other in the communications industry are colluding with "scientists" to produce a political message that has little/no basis in real science, we get silence, from the NYT, from the BBC, from the Guardian, and especially the "respected science journals" that aided and abetted this fraud.
We are lucky that Al Gore invented the internet so that we could all learn about this travesty.
What is most astonishing about this entire story is the reaction of the media.
There has been a global effort to down play the entire thing. The BBC even shut down a Blog for three days because there were comments that referred to material in the leaked emails.
That a few scientists were manipulating data and the peer review process in order to gain funding and obtain notoriety in their field of research is hardly all that surprising.
That the majority of the world's free press was and still are a major party to this fraudulent manipulation is a travesty.
I´m shocked, hiding data, collusion to delete data, hiding behind FOI requests, intent to delete data rather than having it made public, bullying journals to censor papers, redefining what peer-reviewed is to avert criticism. "Good" scientists, a prestige press...
How can science be so corrupted?
Antonio: the data has not been stolen (I´m sure it´s still there) and it´s not private, they are CRU emails. If you think I´m being pedantic think of this way: if someone had read these emails and relayed the info to someone else, would you consider it stealing? The only difference is that the data has been digitally transferred. Also worth considering that the zip file might be called foia for a reason (although this is speculation on my part), data collected under an foia request that someone decided should be made public because he doesn´t think the temperature in Belgrade in 1915 should be a state secret?
I suspect that most readers of this blog are unaware of the "dog ate my homework" incident with CRU FOI's earlier this year.
The short summary is that CRU claims that they no longer have either the raw data used to generate the global average temperature history that is used widely to prove global warming.
Initially they refused to provide the raw data to Steve McIntyre because he "isn't an academic" (in spite of him having published peer-reviewed articles and comments in climate journals.
Then when an academic requested the raw station data, they said that they couldn't provide the data because of confidentiality agreements.
When requested to provide the confidentiality agreements, they said "too many to provide. too much work".
So several individual, including myself, each asked for confidentiality agreements with 5 different sources of raw temperature data.
In mid August this year the Univ of East Anglia responded to our approximately 50 individual requests with "Not only can we only provide two or three confidentiality agreements, we also have just discovered that we no longer have the raw data".
Amazing.
All of the above is well documented on various posts last summer on wattsupwiththat.com and climateaudit.org
The people responsible for these leaks, and the ones spreading this information around illegally need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. These are probably operatives of big oil and deserve to be thrown in jail. People need to know that these sort of leaks will not be tolerated and you people should be ashamed for spreading it.
Once the people responsible for this are prosecuted I don't think you'll see these kind of leaks happen again. This is a battle for public opinion and this leak is a turncoat in that war.
Thank you for taking this issue seriously. I have been appalled to find apologists crawling out of the wood work to excuse the indefensible actions of these "scientists." Should they lose their university positions, I suggest politics. They seem to possess the skill set required for "success" in that profession.
I agree, as you wrote these are not any scientists caught in their fraudulent act. These are some of the main players in the IPCC scam. Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth are the lead authors of one of the most important chapters in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report.
If this doesn't lead to a thorough investigation of the whole scientific basis for the AGW-hypothesis, we might as well declare the whole concept of science dead. Then it should merely be regarded as an appendix to politics, to be used simply as a tool to justify execution of ideology.
These climate scientists have been caught RED-HANDED engaged in fraud, data manipulation, collusion and displaying intent to defame and discredit scientists whose research contradicts the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
This is no small matter. These scientists were key to the IPCC's pushing of this fraudulent climate change agenda. They are the very core of this entire edifice and we find that it is rotten to the core.
These scientists need to be investigated and charged. The entire concept of AGW needs to be re-evaluated with REAL SCIENCE and we need to stop the Copenhagen Treaty from going forward as it is clearly based on lies.
Just like Iraq was based on lies and these climate researchers are the moral equivalent of George W Bush.
Is this not indication of a crime?
From: "Mick Kelly"
To: Nguyen Huu Ninh (cered@xxx)
Subject: NOAA funding
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 14:17:15 +0000
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Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Ninh
NOAA want to give us more money for the El Nino work with IGCN.
How much do we have left from the last budget? I reckon most has been spent but we need to show some left to cover the costs of the trip Roger didn't make and also the fees/equipment/computer money we haven't spent otherwise NOAA will be suspicious.
Politically this money may have to go through Simon's institute but there overhead rate is high so maybe not!
Best wishes
Mick
____________________________________________
Mick Kelly Climatic Research Unit
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ
United Kingdom
Tel: 44-1603-xxx Fax: 44-1603-xxx
Email: m.kelly@xxx
Web: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/tiempo/
1056478635.txt
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By focusing their attention on their most vociferous opponents, the coverup conspirators forgot that revelation of the coverup would damage them in the eyes of the great unwashed middle who are still trying to sort through competing claims.
The American legal principle of withheld evidence is simple: If the party who controls the evidence refuses to provide it, it is permissible to infer that the evidence is contrary to the withholding party's interests.
As a member of the great unwashed middle, unconvinced by either extreme position, I believe that global warming is happening and that human activities contribute to some unknown degree. The great e-mail conspiracy called ClimateGate means that I will doubt any claims of impending catastrophe not accompanied by full public disclosure of data and methodologies.
In an email, Mann, a climatologist and statistician at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, said, “I did not delete any emails at all in response to Phil Jone's [sic] request, nor did I indicate to him that I would.”
In response to Phil Jones May 29th E-mail to Mike Mann asking him to delete E-mails pertaining to IPCC AR4 and ask Gene to do the same Mann responded the same day:
"I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx"
Beyond the obvious is it a crime to destroy documents under the Freedom of information Act...YES.. Is it a crime to promote FALSE information that will affect everyone on the planet and create personal profitability under false prestences..YES IT IS CALLED FRAUD which at the least is what these e-mails and codes report.