Osborn jumps the gun - and gets deleted
Nov 26, 2015 Guest post by David Holland
By chance I happened upon a guest blog post by Tim Osborn a few days ago. Its not the way I found it, but if you google "david holland site:climate-lab-book.ac.uk" it is at the top of list today. If you click on the link you get an error message but, as I write this, if you click the down arrow after the link you see the cached version, as of 15 November, which apart from my comment copied below is, I think, how it was when I last saw it.
Tim was reporting on the fact the First Tier Tribunal had upheld the Met Office refusal to disclose any and all historic Zero Order Drafts of any IPCC assessment. I will let BH Readers comment upon the post, but I did not object to it, as I thought Tim came off second best. Perhaps someone leant upon Ed and maybe on balance it could have been wise to snip any comments that were inappropriate. However, to remove without trace of it, a published controversial blog is emblematic of the concerns I have with climate science. Only squeaky-clean consensus views get, or remain, published.
On 18 November, the Upper Tribunal agreed to hear my application for permission to appeal, which will be heard in London next year and I will let you know date and venue when I have it. My comment at Climate Lab Book, which was made after the cached copy, is:
David Holland November 22, 2015 at 6:29 pm
Tim,
It might be a bit soon to signal the end of requests for environmental information on the IPCC assessments. The MO case could end up as marking the end of routine refusals. As I am sure you know that the First Tier Tribunal decisions are not binding and this case has yet to be heard by the Upper Tribunal, the decision of which is binding upon the parties in the UK, but can considered by the Compliance Committee of the Aarhus Convention, which has previously reprimanded several Parties including the UK
The UK transposition of the Convention and Directive into UK law is in error in some important respects such as the ‘emissions rule’, and the application of the regulations. There can be no dispute but that the raison d’être of the IPCC is to relate human emissions of CO2 to global temperature. In its 2012 report to the Council and the European Parliament, the Commission described the ‘emissions rule’ as the “legal presumption that the public interest served by disclosure prevails if the request relates to emissions into the environment”.
Reader Comments (21)
David: the Google cache will flush through in a few days.
If you need a permanent record you need to make a pdf or web archive.
(This might turn out to be a near-duplicate post - using a different browser after the first attempt hung & died)
Gareth,
A pdf is here;
http://www.ventalize.org.uk/FoI/MO/Climate-Lab-Book-on-ZODs.pdf
(I'm having problems posting, sorry if this comes through twice. Maybe gremlins here too.)
David, I don't think there's any conspiracy here. Earlier today, Ed Hawkins @ClimateLabBook tweeted.
David Holland
"A pdf is here"
Thanks, I now recall scanning the post, when IIRC there was only the one comment questioning the point and or location of the post.
No further visits, lots to do, until prompted by this post.
Your pdf showing the subsequent comments provides an interesting interlude. We now await to see if any of the revered commentators to the post actually concur with your concern about censorship via an act of retrospective deletion.
Tim Osborn
Hi Tim, X posts
I really do trust all is well with CLB. At present my limited (extent/ability) inquiries show all posts/comments are available apart from the relevant one. Quite possible via today's technology? SNAFU? I will go along with it and await further explanations?
Green Sand, it looks like CLB is back up but the last ~3 posts are missing.
Tim
Hi. help pls, just for a base, the last 3 are?
Latest pages are listed in this Cache October
This was last post :Connecting climate model projections with the real world
October 9, 2015GCMsEd Hawkins
seems no new stuff was posts in November (only comments)
Please people don't throw around big accusations. Just try to contact people before you accuse them. (unless they have a repuation for cheating)
Site was OK til Nov19th then on 20th it lost itself
First it wound back a little but Now Site wound back to Sept 14th : The site seems to have lost all posts & COMMENTS after Sept 14th
Up until Nov19th it was working OK
So seems no one had jumped to comment further on DH's commentat that time the Recents comments box on page RHS read :
I know the website crisis happened on Nov19-20 cos On 20th Nov Google cached the page "Connecting climate model projections with the real world" but by then that page had lost newest comments ..the latest it now showed was oct 25th
Now some time after then the website wound back even further cos that page doesn't even show today.
Tim should be able to recover the entire site from backup copies held by his ISP (who should have a rolling backup program)
Otherwise he can trawl back through wayback archive
See a list of pages archived then put Nov 2015 in the filter box to see the latest changed pages
Re : the page www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2015/information-tribunal
waybackmachine has a Nov 15th copy of The original & won't disappear
Google cache copy coincidentally is same date..pages seem 100% same
The last update was Oct 27th comment from J Jones
It's a pity wayback didn't scan again after Nov22nd otherwise it would have captured your Nov18th comment
Bing cached it on 16th Nov
They all capture the same picture
People above claimed that page
www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2015/information-tribunal
is back up, but I can't see it
and Searching for "David Holland" on CLB : strangely yields "Nothing Found"
I get a big 404 for that page link too.
The was that the big names in Climastrology play fast & lose with data etc, means that folks are more likely to assume malfeance, rather than mistakes when stuff like this happens.
Tim,
I believe most things are cock-ups rather than conspiracies. I try not to do drive-by posts and had looked at CLB a couple of times after posting at 6:29 on 22 Nov. On 23 Nov I was a little surprised to see that my comment passed the mods. I did not have time to look again until 26 Nov, when your ZOD post was missing but the CLB site was otherwise OK. So I tried the URL, which google showed for your ZOD post, and received a 'database error'.
This was repeatable for some time before the whole site went down with an 'Apache' error message. Later it returned minus your ZOD post and minus all the comments on the other posts. Now it back minus your ZOD post and its URL yielding a proper 'not found' page with a search box. Needless to say my name comes back 'not found'.
You do not need a conspiracy theory to work out what happened. Of all the universities I have made EIR requests to, Reading is far and away the best behaved. Like Muir Russell, you underestimated how slowly grind the wheels of justice. I do not suggest the the sub judice rules apply so strictly to tribunal cases but, possibly even before I did, the MO would have received notice of the Upper Tribunal's decision to hear my request for permission to appeal the First Tier Tribunal decision on the ZODs. I doubt that the MO will see your post as being as helpful as do I.
What I think should now happen is that the 'not found' page should be replaced with a proper statement to the effect that the ZOD case is not finished, as you had assumed, and it was now thought better to remove the post.
I loved this comment from Ed Hawkins, made in response to a comment, although emotionally-based, clearly illustrated the need for comprehensive transparency:
Do those people buried in the IPCC process really truly believe that the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change has not political purpose?
Do those people buried in the IPCC process really truly believe that a process including the explanation: "Governments participate in the review process and the plenary Sessions, where main decisions about the IPCC work programme are taken and reports are accepted, adopted and approved." really believe or just try and deny there are not political purposes at the heart of the IPCC?
At every turn, every action and every utterance by "Climate Scientists" show them to either naive, delusional, disingenuous, or out-and-out Machavellian liars. Who know which is which in each case?
@Geckko Yep the key in the the name, that's why activists often mistakenly say it's the "International Panel" instead of the correct "Intergovernmental Panel"
- That guys obviously not read Laframboises book exposing that half the people involved were NGO workers often not qualified..and as a result a lot of suspect NGO stuff ended up in IPCC reports.
Darn not November 19th and 20th I'll rewrite my 5.45am post
Re : the page www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2015/information-tribunal
waybackmachine has a Nov 15th copy of The original & won't disappear
Google cache copy coincidentally is same date..pages seem 100% same
The last update was Oct 27th comment from J Jones
It's a pity wayback didn't scan again after Nov22nd otherwise it would have captured your comment
Bing cached it on 16th Nov
They all capture the same picture
People above claimed that page
www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2015/information-tribunal
is back up, but I can't see it
and Searching for "David Holland" on CLB : strangely yields "Nothing Found"
#1 So I checked for the page David mentioned on the Internet archive, but that page was archived before his comment
#2 That page is still missing from climate-lab-book.ac.uk, however so are many others
#3 It's like all the pages after September 14 th disappeared
#4 The remaining pages have a recent comments box on the RHS, but I could see that those comments were old
so I started searching for when the last comment was and when the site screwed up
#5 I found evidence that DH's comment existed when I noticed on a page Google cached on November 24th* its recent comments box which mentions DH's NEW comment
* (Previously I mixed up the creation date with the later cached date. Now that page is marked CREATED on Nov 19th 2013, but it was cached on Nov24th 2015)
#6 then I found an even new list of comments from a page cached on NOv 25th
#1 No one jumped to add a comment after DH#2 DH's comment and the entire page disappeared
So it was disappeared after Nov 25th.
...Tim should be able to recover the entire site from backup copies held by his ISP (who should have a rolling backup program)
Otherwise he can trawl back through wayback archive
See a list of pages archived then put Nov 2015 in the filter box to see the latest changed pages
I can see the site had problems on ON 5:37:18 Nov 20, 2015 cos that file was all screwed up then
Climate Lab Book is down again!
Climate Lab Book has now been (mostly) restored - details here:
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2015/website-gremlins/
Ed.
The site seems to be fine now. The article in question is at
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2015/information-tribunal/
There are a few comments from Jonathan Jones who of course has experience with these issues.
Ed,
My comment is still not restored. Will it be and are the comments still open?
If its too difficult at your end I can put in again.
UPDATE:
I have re-posted my comment and it is 'in moderation'.
David - your comment should now be visible again. Let me know if not!
Ed.
Ed,
It is, and I thank you. I unreservedly withdraw any implication of skulduggery that I may have implied. If the comments remain open, and I can find the time, I will add a few uncontroversial comments on what I have learnt on the law and may help your colleagues in understanding the EIR which, like the IPCC, is a child of the United Nations and has very little to do with our FOIA.
Hi David,
Thankyou for withdrawing your implications of skulduggery.
I never close comments on posts so they will remain open and I look forward to seeing them!
Ed.