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.

New working practices

David Holland's post on email 2526 has deservedly got a lot of attention, enabling sense to be made of many of the statements put forward by people as diverse as Jones, Acton and Russell. 2526 dated from the middle of 2008. A year later, however, there is another email that appears to suggest that Jones had adopted new working practices after his brush with FOI the previous year. Email 0021 involves a discussion between Jones and Manola Brunet, a Spanish climatologist. The important bit is the start of Jones' message.

Hola Manola,

I've saved emails at CRU and then deleted them from the server. Now I'm at home I just have some hard copies. 

Interestingly, the topic of the email thread appears to be nothing more suspicious than efforts to compile a new temperature dataset, so it's not obvious why Jones would be telling Brunet that he had deleted emails from the server - earlier emails are not obviously among the CG2 disclosures (If anyone wants to check more thoroughly and to look in CG1 as well, that would be useful.) Brunet is somewhat indiscreet in her response, so it may be that she is nervous that correspondence with Jones might be disclosable under FOI.

Closing the taps

The Ministry of Justice has produced a report for the Justice Select Committee on the impact of FOI legislation in the UK.

There is a great deal of discussion of the cost to the civil service of compliance. There is a lot of talk of introducing charges for FOI requests.

A lot of talk.

I think it would be wise if readers here wrote the the Justice Select Committee - chairman Sir Alan Beith - and told him that it would not be a good idea to introduce charges for FOI requests.

Upwardly mobile

The C3 Headlines site has an interesting analysis of the adjustments made to NOAA's surface temperature records. We have seen this kind of thing before: the adjustments to the series produce cooling at the start of the series and warming at the end.

I think this kind of thing must set alarm bells ringing among reputable scientists.

(Of course, this doesn't mean that it hasn't warmed; only that the trend may be being exaggerated.)

Tallbloke legal fund

Tallbloke's solicitor has written to Anthony Watts:

Roger has been publicly libelled and abused across the world to the detriment of his reputation and has suffered distress, inconvenience and damage to property. The worst such offender appears to have been a contributor at ‘Scienceblogs’.

Read the whole thing at WUWT.

A fighting fund is being set up in order to mount a proper legal response. Donate here.

Update on Dec 18, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Note also the comments by Tallbloke's solicitor at WUWT, outlining the legal action that is possible. My guess is that the police may have a problem here:

i) Potential libel claims against Laden and Mann and any others who might be found to have stated, suggested or implied that there was criminality on the part of Tallbloke.

ii) Potential malfeasance by the persons responsible for the obtaining of the Warrant in the form deemed appropriate (but actually wholly inappropriate) and for the heavy handed treatment of Tallbloke who would always have been prepared to assist voluntarily.

iii) Various damages claims under UK law for distress, inconvenience, invasion of privacy and damage to property.

iv) Possible injunctive relief preventing examination, copying, cloning or any unauthorised use of Tallbloke’s private data.

v) Requests for immediate return of Tallbloke’s property and rectification of damage done during the process.

vi) Investigations into the sequence of events that led to this farrago and the identities of the person or persons responsible.

Other possibilities may come to mind in due course.

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 ...

David Colquhoun on the data debate

David Colquhoun has posted some thoughts on the data openness debate the other day, and is clearly rather taken with Josh's cartoons.

Fox picks up the Climategate baton

Fox News has run a Climategate story, suggesting there's still quite a lot of mileage in the new disclosures. The emails of interest are the ones in which Phil Jones suggests that the US Department of Energy has told him that it is acceptable to withhold climate data:

“Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,” Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.

Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data "has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

Read the whole thing.

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.

Helpful notice for the workplace - Josh 136

Following the Norfolk police raid here is a helpful notice for the office, corridor, train, airport, waiting room...

Click to read more ...

A mountain of evidence - Josh 135

Cartoons by Josh

On Her Majesty's public service

From the Telegraph:

Civil servants to be forced to publish Gmail emails

Civil servants have been warned that using private email accounts for official business in an effort to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests is a criminal offence.

...The statement [by the Information Commissioner] has reportedly worried many civil servants, many of whom communicate more informally using private webmail accounts believing they were exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. Campaigners have claimed Gmail and other services are used to conduct official business without public scrutiny.

I wonder how the ICO views reports of the IPCC setting up back-channel communication networks?

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.

IPCC declares itself above the law

Richard Tol reports from the IPCC WGII lead author meeting in San Francisco:

...the IPCC member states have ruled on freedom of information legislation. Specifically, it has been decided that FoI does not apply to IPCC material. This is false. FoI is national legislation. These laws can only be interpreted by the relevant courts. These laws can only be changed by the relevant parliaments. The civil servants that speak on behalf of their countries have no right to usurp FoI legislation, and the IPCC has no say in this matter.

This of course is a continuation of this story.

George Monbiot was winning considerable plaudits on the Dark Matter thread for his strong stand on freedom of information. He is also, of course, a fan of the IPCC. It would be interesting to see what he makes of this.

Dark Matter: What's science got to hide?

Billed as the "Data debate: Is transparency bad for science?" the event was held at Imperial College and the speakers were Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, George Monbiot, Guardian columnist , Baroness Onora O’Neill and David Colquhoun, UCL. Jo Glanville, Editor of Index on Censorship, chaired the debate. Josh and Richard Drake were in the gathered throng.

Click to read more ...