More from Norfolk Police

Readers may remember that I asked for Norfolk Constabulary's correspondence regarding the Russell inquiry - this was centred around the extraction of emails from the CRUBACK3 server by the police's forensic IT contractors, Qinetiq.

Although much correspondence was released, there were many redactions, few of which made any sense. I therefore launched an appeal and when this was (bien sur) rejected appealed to the Information Commissioner.

Although I have had no decision from the Commissioner, today I had another letter from the Constabulary:

We have engaged with the ICO throughout their consideration of your appeal.

As part of this engagement we have returned to the relevant third parties, the UEA/Muir- Russell Inquiry and the company Qinetiq, to again seek their views on whether information about the negotiation between them for the provision of a service should continue to be treated as information that attracted a duty of confidentiality. The parties advised that there are two significant factors that have come into play since the original response was made; the passage of time and a change in the commercial functions of Qinetiq. This has led to both third parties removing their objections to the release of information originally refused under section 41. Therefore, the Constabulary no longer has reason to apply the exemption and we can release the information. A further set of emails is attached.

The release is here. I don't see much of interest yet, although I need to check this to the first release. I don't recall that I was told that any emails were withheld completely. I'm also not sure that the gaps - the redactions - have now been filled in.

A letter from the future

This was provided to me by Phillip Bratby.

Letter from Bob Ward Junior (chief scientific advisor to the Department for Climate Change and Energy (DCCE)) to the Secretary of State for Climate Change and Energy, Ed Miliband Junior.

December 2031

Dear Ed,

First of all congratulations on being the youngest ever MP appointed at the age of 16 and, following your degree in political communication, being appointed the youngest ever Minister of State at the age of 19.

Click to read more ...

No news at the NYT

The New York Times reports on the raid on Tallbloke Towers and considers what more we have learned about the identity of FOIA. Conclusion: not very much.

Update on Jan 2, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Tallbloke has responded here.

BBC local news on Tallbloke

BBC East have published a story about the seizure of Tallbloke's computers.

Police who seized computers as part of the Climategate inquiry involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) have been accused of being "heavy-handed".

A Norfolk Police inquiry started after emails from the UEA's Climate Research Unit (CRU) were hacked in 2009.

Last week six police officers went to the Leeds home of a blogger and seized two computers.

Blogger Roger Tattersall said he was "shocked" by the incident. Police said the inquiry is continuing.

It's a longish piece, but frankly there's not a lot we didn't know before.

Update on Dec 21, 2011 by Bishop Hill

The video is here - from 11 mins

Back to the haystacks

Perhaps overwhelmed by all their recent activity, Norfolk Constabulary have handed over the investigation of the Climategate affair to another, as yet unnamed police force. Tallbloke has the story.

Update on Dec 21, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Tallbloke has issued a correction:

I’ve got my wires crossed on this it seems. Apparently the Norfolk Constabulary, along with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police and the National Domestic Extremism and Terrorism unit (Golly!) are to revue the evidence so far assembled in order to decide the future direction of the investigation

Speechless

Steve McIntyre points us to email 3939, which frankly leaves me speechless:

cc: Keith
date: Mon Oct 12 12:07:03 2009
from: Tom Melvin
subject: Keith Email
to: Mike
Mike,
For Keith's Email :
1. Copied the full C:\Eudora directory to my portable.
2. Deleted the 12000 temporay .gif files from C:\Eudora\Embedded.
3. Copied 3.5 gig of attachments (1 year or older) from C:\Eudora\Attach to C:\OldAttach - this will need to be copied back to his PC
4. He is left with a 1.5 gig C:\Eudora directory on my portable which can be copied back to his PC and readily be moved from PC to portable etc.
5. When using my portable (via yellow cable (in office) or various WiFi networks) Keith logs in to VPN.
Tom
PS. I need to take my portable to a conference w/c 26th Oct

Strangely, the identity of "Mike" is not clear from the email in question. This message is dated just one month before Climategate.

The Palutikoff email

Updated on Dec 18, 2011 by Bishop Hill

This is a guest post by David Holland.

Last time I googled 2526.txt to see if this email had been commented upon I did not find any. This is as near the smoking gun proof as we will get, that Professor Phil Jones’ instruction to delete all emails “re AR4” was complied with – at least using the team definition of the word “delete”. Note that on 29 May 2008 Jones had emailed,

“Mike [Mann], Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith [Briffa] will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email [Eu]Gene [Wahl] and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar [Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!! Cheers Phil”

Click to read more ...

Pump up the volume

My view of yesterday's raid on Tallbloke Towers is that it is a storm in a teacup. Aware of the new disclosures, it was necessary for the police in the UK to see if they could get any new leads from RC's electronic trail. They were preposterously heavy-handed of course, but it seems clear that Tallbloke is not a suspect. Reactions by those who think this is the start of a war on sceptics seem overwrought to me, although perhaps not quite as daft as those who seem to think that Tallbloke is RC.

However, the involvement of the police does seem to have ramped things up a notch or two. Some people have been prompted to think much harder about legal avenues, in particular Christopher Monckton, who seems to think that a charge of fraud can be made to stick against the denizens of CRU. I can't see it myself, but I will watch with interest.

Meanwhile, SM notes that the police who raided Tallbloke may be on dodgy legal ground.

Norfolk Vice

Suddenly, as if by magic, Norfolk Constabulary, asleep atop their haystacks, have been transformed into something out of Miami Vice. Tallbloke reports:

An Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though.

I waved the first three in and bid them head through to the sitting room, where there was less of an chill near the woodburner. Then they kept coming, being introduced by the lead detective from Norfolk as they trooped in. I thought I’d been chosen to host the secret policemen’s ball or something.

Mann bashes Dellers

In his normal slightly overwrought style, Michael Mann has written a response to James Delingpole's article about Climategate 2.0 in the Wall Street Journal.

(H/T Dr Crinum)

Cicerone on Climategate

Ralph Cicerone is best known to readers here as the man who diverted the NAS panel away from what they had been asked to look at onto areas that were more congenial. He has now shown up again in an article about the state of climate science at the Atlantic. He seems be presenting an, ahem, mistaken view of what the Climategate inquiries looked at.

“The science at East Anglia was fine,” Cicerone says. “But I think [the East Anglia scientists] were just angry. They were too poorly equipped, scruffy, and informal an outfit to show everyone all their data all the time. On the scientific consensus, there’s no impact at all—although on public opinion there was an impact.”

Weekly Standard on CG2

GWPF reproduces an excellent summary of Climategate 2.0 by the Weekly Standard.

If Climategate II does poor box office, it won’t be because the various internal reviews exonerated the CRU from the narrow allegations of fraud in Climategate I, but because the whole show has become a crashing bore. The latest U.N. climate summit that opened last week in Durban, South Africa, is struggling to keep the diplomatic circus on life support. Yet there is one more tantalizing detail that has been largely overlooked in the commentary so far. According to “FOIA,” the online name of the hacker/leaker behind the release of these emails, there are another 220,000 emails still out there, blocked by a heavily encrypted password that “FOIA” vaguely threatens or promises to release at some future date. Stay tuned for -Climategate III.

On monoliths

Alan Kendall, the UEA geologist whose first-year course incorporated slides taken from Climate Audit, has defended the university's reputation in the comments on my post highlighting his scepticism.

I am entering the debate now because my university (UEA) is becoming subject to unnecessary scorn being branded disparingly as "a third-rate university" or the old tag repeated that it is the "University of easy access" in this and other blogs. This derision being made by those who are incensed by a small number of UEA employees, notably in CRU

Click to read more ...

Climategate 2.0 in context

This is a guest post by David Holland

Quite often things are mischievously quoted out of context by one’s critics and the press and, when faced with an embarrassing but partial release of what they had said, or written, the first response of many people is to dismiss it as being out of context. This was the claim made by innumerable supporters of the orthodox IPCC view of climate change science when, in November 2009, over 1000 emails were released in 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It was suggested that the release was highly selective, cherry picking only the apparently discreditable emails and omitting their proper context. For many making it, however, it was a claim based on heartfelt hope and belief rather than on any knowledge of the rest of the emails or even those that had been released.

Click to read more ...

Hulme's Greenpeace and UN consultancies

Email 2099 is from Helen Wallace, a senior "scientist" at Greenpeace to Mike Hulme.

I am wondering whether you could help us with some urgent (paid) work we need doing for Kyoto. Or perhaps you can recommend someone else?

We want to produce a briefing that replies to all the usual climate 'sceptics' arguments, in the form of short questions and answers.

Later in email 2187, money gets discussed again. This time the questions come from Iain Reddish of Greenpeace, again to Hulme.

Click to read more ...