The Oxburgh report on the science done at the CRU has now been published and….. as in the first inquiry, they find no scientific misconduct, no impropriety and no tailoring of the results to a preconceived agenda, though they do suggest more statisticians should have been involved. They have also some choice words to describe the critics.
Carry on…
zerowork,
However, as #148 was already kind enough to point out, there were 4 requests in 2007 and 2 in 2008. Why didn’t Jones and the university respond to them?
They did. If you check the document I posted, you’ll see that some were accepted and information released where it was possible. For 2009, most of the requests were out of CRU jurisdiction. They were unable to comply. But even during the blizzard some FOIs were responded to positively.
If you want to get into the details of the rejections, I recommend researching via google. I don’t see the point in supplying further references as you don’t seem to read them.
Kate:
At the risk of sounding a bit patronizing … unfortunately your surprise is probably due in part to your being a high school senior (a very bright, thoughtful, and well-educated one, however).
We old cynics don’t find it at all surprising, unfortunately. The press pandering to power … no surprise here. Unfortunately, the stories of heroic exposures by the press like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, etc are famous for being the welcome exception to the sordid everyday reality of the press licking the hand that feeds them.
RickA and BPL:
You are highlighting one of the things I find most frustrating and irritating about the climate debate. Accuracy, and a high regard for truth are absolutely paramount (but often overlooked) in debate. Even when the original claim is completely misleading and disingenuous (such as claims that temperature has been high in the distant past) this does not excuse a casual treatment of the facts when responding.
RC has some interesting debate. I think frequent contributors on both sides need to put more effort into checking facts and constructing reasoned arguments, rather than taking a scatter-shot approach without regard for reality.
Barry – thanks for the link at 15 April 2010 @ 11:45 AM
My favorite was the following:
“ref – FOI_09-97
request – I hereby make a EIR/FOI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements)restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries: [insert 5 or so countries that are different from ones already requested1]
1. the date of any applicable confidentiality agreements;
2. the parties to such confidentiality agreement, including the full name of any organization;
3. a copy of the section of the confidentiality agreement that “prevents further transmission to non-academics”.
4. a copy of the entire confidentiality agreement,
Status – clarification sought”
Evidently this skeptic did zero work to read the instructions printed on the bottom of the boot. BTW, the typo “involing” appears in thirteen of the cut-n-paste FOI requests.
I guess the current meme is “sure, we sent in 99 requests to harass the CRU, but you can’t count the first one, because if you had responded the way we demand to that one, the others wouldn’t have been sent”
“…or that they were vexatious to the point that he should not have responded (which, anyway, I’m not sure he was legally at liberty to deny).” zeroworker — 15 April 2010 @ 10:53 AM
“Under section 14(1), public authorities do not have to comply with vexatious requests. There is no public interest test.”
“Deciding whether a request is vexatious is a balancing exercise, taking
into account the context and history of the request. The key question is
whether the request is likely to cause unjustified distress, disruption or
irritation. In particular, you should consider the following questions:
Could the request fairly be seen as obsessive?
Is the request harassing the authority or causing distress to staff?
Would complying with the request impose a significant burden?
Is the request designed to cause disruption or annoyance?
Does the request lack any serious purpose or value?”
direct from the UK Information Commissioners Office
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ico.gov.uk%2Fupload%2Fdocuments%2Flibrary%2Ffreedom_of_information%2Fdetailed_spec**ialist_guides%2Fawareness_guidance_22_vexatious_and_repeated_requests_final.pdf (sorry about the sucky URL – removed the double asterisks, which I hope I extracted correctly from all the Hooey that google has decided to use to obfuscate links)
I get five out of five yes; YMMV.
RickA@9,77
It sure would be nice if all climate scientists take the advice from the report and get their work reviewed by statisticians.(my metathesis)
Excerpts from Wegman Report 2006.
”‘It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community.”
…Report: “As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
David Hart seems to be following up on a report by a respected leader professional statisticians (17+ pages of wiki resume at http://www.galaxy.gmu.edu/stats/faculty/wegman.resume2.htm)
The problem is the climate scientists study their quite intricate and complex data and invent statistical method to cope with it. Their invented method has no entry in the dictionary of valid statistical techniques employed by professional statisticians. When a statistician works his way through the analysis, s/he comes up with the “proper” technique and result. Unfortunately for everyone this “proper” result is so close to the climate scientist’s ad hoc invention that, given the “noise” in the data, it really makes little difference which is used. Except to the players.
The climate scientist resents the apparently mindless criticism of his (quite inventive) work. The professional statistician resents unwillingness of the climate scientist to use the accepted analysis and terminology. The rest of us suggest that the two camps get together at the start and work together. It doesn’t happen or it doesn’t seem to happen. So be it.
I don’t see a technical problem here. The statistician is trained to spot in advance potential problems with the data analysis. If the most appropriate techniques are used and described the chance of error is lessened. OTOH, the climate scientist checks and rechecks the work and relies on peer reviews to spot any errors. So far, the results come out the same – but a political problem has been created. Just as a climate scientist resents some scientist from another field commenting on results from an ignorant point of view, the statistical analyst resents the publication of climate science ignorant of statistical technology.
I didn’t intend to single out RickA, I believe this post would serve equally well for :
3Bill@10, Roberts@11,53, Jaime Frontero@15, Eric @16, Toby@18 – who seems to have a firm grip on the politics, Paul@20, Jesús Rosino@22, Mark A.York@24, NS@32, Martin@39, Deep Climate@47, Brian Carter@48, Doug Bostrum@49,51,103, CM@62, John Mashey@63, Geoff Wexler@64,122, 134, Richard Ordway@67, Steven Sullivan@61 – Wegman uses biological science as an example of where the statisticians are consulted. The FDA insists on it., Bob@82 Wow, freespeech@87 – read Wegman, Chris S@113, NS@118, Lord Flack@127, Check out Wegman and Principal Components, Deech56@131, ROI@135, Bob@140, barry@141, close.
Sign petition at:
http://www.petitiononline.com/clim4tr/petition.html
Thanks 192 Philip Machanick. I commented on the IEEE web site you mentioned.
A little googling didn’t reveal anything much relating to question that occurs to me; is there any reason the CRU folk can’t publish the FOI requests they got, the answers they gave and an indication of how much work it took to deal with? I understand that doing so might in itself seem quite a bit of work but if it were possible to illustrate the extent of the problem that a sudden blizzard of attack-claims causes there might be some payoff in general understanding.
It could potentially be a useful approach for any researchers – publish everything you can pre-emptively, publish FOI and similar demands, publish your responses, publish the money/time it took to provide such info. At least it would both weaken the attacker’s stick and provide one with which to beat them back. As in “Look – look! Rude persons sponsored by industry lobbyist wasted x gazillion poundollars of taxpayers money by forcing us to do this pointless paperwork!” Estimates of the costs should perhaps be included in grant requests so that overall figures for the waste of money can be compiled and published, indexed by order of most expensive requester.
Sometimes giving people what they *claim* they want is the best way to get them to go away and stop being a nuisance.
Re: 110
I was born in the UK in 1965 and grew up there in a town in Eastern England. Snow was already a “rare and exctiting event”, there were sleety days most winters, but significant snowfalls that persisted for more than a day only occurred, as far as I can remember c 1970, c 1975, c 1980, 1986 and 1990.
While I’m sure it’s gratifying to statisticians to know that CRU’s work would have been better had they used more statisticians, what about more software engineers, more computer scientists, more PR people and more lobbyists? I’m sure a few minor jobs could also be found for a whole range of other disciplines. They key issue is: did any of this result in producing results that are indefensible? Since others approaching the problem from a different angle produced consistent results, I would say no.
Chris’s #121 cold fusion example is a good one. Had CRU’s work been bogus, someone else would have shown it up. You can’t tell me all the people trying to replicate the cold fusion experiment wanted it to fail… or was the greenie conspiracy not in charge of Nature‘s editorial policy yet in the late 1980s? Cold fusion is notable for being an area of science that generated a remarkable number of papers in high-impact journals knocking it down.
#194 David Miller and #195 barry
I’ve done a lot of digging – reading the FoI act, looking at old comment threads, reading various blog posts, etc.
I have to say a few things:
1) It does indeed look like the university acted legally
2) I say “looks like” because the results of the 2 inquiries are not categorical that the university acted appropriately in terms of FoI. I’ll be interested to see the results of the third inquiry, although I expect them to be cleared at this point.
3) I disagree that this is as cut and dried as some others here seem to think.
4) I still believe the emails are quite quite damaging. Even if Jones did comply with FoI, he at times claimed he would take actions that would certainly violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.
Whether this was illegal or not, it definitely damaged the campaign to increase public awareness of climate change and its seriousness.
5) I appreciate those who responded respectfully and with helpful links.
#178 CFU – apparently it was globally warmer than today (half a degree C), during the last interglacial, the Eemian due to a rather more pronounced eccentric orbit, and hence higher summer insolation in the Northern Hemisphere. Some discussion here:
http://www.bgs.ucalgary.ca/files/bgs/otto-bliesner_marshall_overpeck_miller_2006.pdf
None of which strengthens the deniers catalog of zombie arguments. Perhaps BPL was referring to levels of atmospheric CO2?.
#83 “For everyone who wants to see libel suits…
Well, I do, too, and they are possibly needed to discredit a certain crowd, but they are also expensive to pursue and I suspect they are unlikely to materialize.”
The professor should have no difficulty taking the libel suits in The UK. I would also suggest he sues Michael Graham for the libelous comments he made on an Irish radio programme about Professor Jones and Mann. The Law in Ireland, as in the UK, is strongly protective of a persons reputation. I agree the US is a different matter though. There it is possible to lie and slander to your hearts content without any real concern for legal repercussions.
Mark Fiore got the Pulitzer this week, so it seems appropriate to (re?)post this:
http://www.markfiore.com/political/watch-climate-gate-science-animation
169- zeroworker
“”>>Even though no demonstrable harm was done.
Right. The huge firestorm in the media that happened after the hack didn’t do any damage at all to the campaign to educate the public on the dangers of climate change or to achieve policy changes to mitigate the problem.””
You misunderstood my point.
No demonstratable harm was done to those who requested the information- the ones who submitted request under the FOI.
And based on what I have seen – there would have been no way to respond that would have avoided what ended up happening.
Since some of what was requested info could not be released by those who got the FOI request then the supposedly harmed party was always going to be able to claim that they were abused in some way even though they weren’t.
I know (and at times agree) that some wish real climate only reported on the science. Unfortunately dealing with the politics now seems to be part of being a scientist who deals with any issue that some want to make into a poltical game. And when it gets as ugly as this has gotten, the whole thing becomes tragic. Scientists who are doing a good job – what every investigation has so far shown – get blasted by those using cherry picked, hacked (or whatever you want to call it), out of context info. And then somehow it becomes the scientist’s fault.
Does anyone else see parallels between the Icelandic volcanic dust cloud and climate change?
All flights in many northern European countries have been grounded, causing huge knock-on problems for the airline industry around the world, because of a scientifically-based possibility that the dust cloud may cause planes to crash. It is not certain that planes would crash, but the scientists say that there is a likelihood that it might, so many flights have been cancelled.
I keep hearing from deniers that we shouldn’t be enacting policies which have a huge financial impact on the world’s economy unless the science is certain, right down to the most minuscule of details.
So where is the cry for scientific certainty on the Icelandic volcanic dust cloud?
Obviously, the grounding of all of those planes must be designed to wreck western business and introduce a communistic form of global governance, so I fully expect to see the defenders of individual freedoms on denier blogs bombarding the scientists involved with FoI requests, to ensure that scientific integrity is maintained. Until the science behind the closure of airspace is audited, by people with no relevant scientific qualifications, nobody can trust it!
Re #190 Kate .
Inquiry Pathology
I forgot about the IPCC one. That makes six. Three in the UK , of which two completed (see also #189) , two in the University of Pennsylvania of which one has been completed as far as I know,and the one you mention.
Of course that disregards Nigel Lawson and the IOP energy sub-group’s clamour for more and wider inquiries.
The IPCC needs to be still more careful with proof reading and checking their references. Apart from that, this concession to the conspiracy theory of science, is doing no good to anyone except that it has helped to educate a few non climatologists about a branch of climatology.
It turns out that the real news is restricted to the initiation of such inquiries. BBC 2 (TV) hardly bothers to report their findings. Did anyone see a mention of the first inquiry on Newsnight ? If there was one , I must have missed it in spite of watching. As for this week’s report from the Royal Society, Newsnight devoted about 1/2 minute to it on 14th. April near the end of the programme. The spoken words were accompanied by text displaying one of the leaked emails referring to ‘hide the decline’. This was a totally unjustfied and confusing juxtaposition. For those who want to check this exceptionally bad report it might still be available on the web.
RickA: Not only are you ignoring the MWP, the Roman warming period and the Holocene Climate warming period – but you are ignoring the ice core evidence from Antarctica.
BPL: Point taken about the previous interglacials. My bad.
The MWP was not global however, and even if it had been, was not warmer than today. The “Roman Warm Period” does not even formally exist; deniers made it up.
The Holocene Climate Warming Period is right now, and is at peak temperature today.
I just had to share… I saw this posted on WUWT this morning:
You just can’t make this stuff up.
Clarification of my last comment.
The reference to non climatologists only applies to some of the Royal Society’s panel. I have no objection to their being selected.
Frank Giger says, “That’s not true. The ability to validate a theory or experimental finding is in repeatability.”
Frank, this is a common misunderstanding. Repeatability and reproducibility address different errors/concerns. Repeatability is needed for measurements and addresses random errors in the measurements. Reproducibility is what is needed to address systematic errors. A particular researcher might carry out similar measurements via a different method to see if he/she gets similar results, thus checking for the possibility of systematic error. Another researcher may try to independently replicate a published result. What is crucial here is that, at a minimum, the implementation of the procedure to obtain the results must be independent. Ideally, you have a similar, but not identical method implemented on a similar dataset–thereby showing that the results are robust.
“Auditing” adds no value to the scientific method.
From the report:
“Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined”
If CRU believed their work was being misrepresented by the IPCC, should CRU have resigned from the process in protest as others did?
/Mango
QUOTE: “the inquiry only existed in order to see whether there was anything to the criticisms of the science. – gavin]”
You see, that’s just it. The inquiry existed to look into the truth/falsehood of an assortment of charges…not into the character or ingenuousness of the accusers, who were many in number and of many different minds. The report would have accomplished its goal if it merely said “not guilty (save for the statistics bit). Instead, it went on to say “not guilty, and furthermore, the accusers are often bad guys”, which gives a neutral observer the impression that the body is carrying water for someone.
My point isn’t that they weren’t right in attacking the attackers; my point is that it gives partisans on the other side, and even some neutrals, grounds to doubt the impartiality of the judging body.
zeroworker (146),
Did you receive demands from the IRS that you fill out forty copies of your form 1040 over one weekend? Quit defending the indefensible.
1. 95% of CRU data was already publicly available.
2. The other 5% was under proprietary agreements and could not be released by CRU, though people were still free to get it from the national met services it originated with.
3. McIntyre organized a denial-of-service attack by encouraging his bloggers to “picky any five countries” and send FOI requests to CRU about them. Such information is supposed to go to research. As far as I know, none of the people who submitted the data actually had any plans to use it for research.
4. McIntyre already HAD a great deal of the data he asked for–having gotten it from CRU itself years earlier.
5. The McIntyre blizzard came conveniently before the Russian hack.
OT, but since there have been a lot of comments on FOI requests people might be interested in this news relating to Queen’s University Belfast and the appalling Douglas J Keenan:
“If CRU believed their work was being misrepresented by the IPCC, should CRU have resigned from the process in protest as others did?”
Doesn’t appear to be supported by your quote.
“The inquiry existed to look into the truth/falsehood of an assortment of charges…not into the character or ingenuousness of the accusers, who were many in number and of many different minds”
But ALL moved those goalposts in order to remain able to state they were right and there WAS a problem, so there.
“211
Dappled Water says:
16 April 2010 at 4:22 AM
#178 CFU – apparently it was globally warmer than today (half a degree C), during the last interglacial”
According to some recurrent denying posters here, you can’t say that because the data is nearly nonexistent.
Now, if you’re talking about the Vostock cores, please note they are not a global phenomena.
Unless the world really WAS smaller in those days…
And also note that maybe 0.5C warming is inherent because of thermal inertia.
Please also note the CO2 concentration graph over that period:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
NOTE: If you consider that there isn’t an imbalance, then the CO2 levels of the last interglacial require that we have a high sensitivity of temperature to CO2.
This is not a good thing.
“4) I still believe the emails are quite quite damaging.”
Yes, we guessed.
“Even if Jones did comply with FoI, he at times claimed he would take actions that would certainly violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.”
So when you emailed that joke to a friend, you broke the obscenity laws?
See, I thought the law was that if you threaten someone, that’s a different crime from murder. Apparently, you think merely saying “i’m gonna kill you” is the same as actually killing someone.
> ROI
> … look into the truth/falsehood of an assortment of charges
If someone makes false charges against you, do you merely rebut the charges without asking who lied, and wondering about their motives and future plans?
“207
tim rowledge says:
15 April 2010 at 11:04 PM
A little googling didn’t reveal anything much relating to question that occurs to me; is there any reason the CRU folk can’t publish the FOI requests they got, the answers they gave and an indication of how much work it took to deal with?”
Some would complain about data protection act and tortious interference with their work.
So you’d have to do yet MORE work to sanitise.
Given that zero still thinks the emails show that the CRU are wrong, what are you expecting to happen?
zero: Let it be known that in the future I will fight fire with fire.
BPL: Super. So far you’ve been fighting it with smoke. And mirrors.
tim rowledge (207): is there any reason the CRU folk can’t publish the FOI requests they got, the answers they gave and an indication of how much work it took to deal with?
BPL: Because they have no legal or moral obligation to do so, and it would be just one more gigantic waste of time keeping them from doing their jobs?
Dappled (211),
Yes, I had the CO2 history mixed up with the temperature history. It’s only hotter now that at any time in the last 130,000 years, not 20 million.
Bob (218),
The charge is ridiculous. Nobody involved
SEND BARTON PAUL LEVENSON MONEY
in this has ever used subliminal advertising
SEND BARTON PAUL LEVENSON A CHECK
for any nefarious purpose. This is just the
SEND BARTON PAUL LEVENSON A BIG CHECK
kind of conspiracy-theory craziness we keep
SEND BARTON PAUL LEVENSON MONEY NOW
seeing on this blog from the deniers.
#217 BPL.
Thank you for your thoughtful response regarding the prior interglacials having higher temperatures than today.
It is always a pleasure to engage with people who read other peoples points, think about them, continue to argue if they are not convinced, but also concede when they have made a mistake.
> publish
FOI requests, and replies, apparently are public information, e.g.
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/UEA%20CRU
P.S. — it’s really not hard to find this stuff.
e.g. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/availability/
—- excerpt follows —-
We receive numerous requests for these station data (not just monthly temperature averages, but precipitation totals and pressure averages as well). Requests come from a variety of sources, often for an individual station or all the stations in a region or a country. Sometimes these come because the data cannot be obtained locally or the requester does not have the resources to pay for what some NMSs charge for the data. These data are not ours to provide without the full permission of the relevant NMSs, organizations and scientists. We point enquirers to the GHCN web site. We hope in the future that we may be able to provide these data, jointly with the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, subject to obtaining consent for making them available from the rights holders. In developing gridded temperature datasets it is important to use as much station data as possible to fully characterise global- and regional-scale changes. Hence, restricting the grids to only including station data that can be freely exchanged would be detrimental to the gridded products in some parts of the world.
We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data. The priorities we use when merging data from the same station from different sources are discussed in some of the literature cited below. Parts of series may have come from restricted sources, whilst the rest came from other sources. Furthermore, as stated in http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/landstations/ we have never kept track of changes to country names, as it is only the location and the station’s data that are important. So, extracting data for a single country isn’t always a simple task.
—- end excerpt—
How did you know El Nino would linger this long and the records would start falling? I’m impressed.
Could you comment however on the NASA model:
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/CFS-10-27.gif
Were they all weell below observations, and again, how did you know?
thanks
t
I find this extended meta-discussion about what color are the file cabinets used by climate scientists, whether their ties are knotted correctly, etc. very cheering.
When the big climate change “debate” dribbles down exclusively to a matter of how many hours are required to fulfill an FOI request or whether or not an inquiry report included extraneous matters in its outline, I suppose it’s safe to conclude there’s nothing wrong with the findings of inconvenient avenues of research CRU and others are pursuing.
Re #205
I am not so sure whether Wegman’s use of statistics has been consistently high:
Please see this:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/riddle-me-this/#comment-37293
The rumour that Wegman believes that most of the CO2 should collect near ground level because of its density, is so unbelievable that I shall take it to be inaccurate. You write:
[‘Their’ refers to MBH]
Research is not done by cookery book. Here is a professional statistician who does not agree with the drift of your remark
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/pca-part-5-non-centered-pca-and-multiple-regressions/
All this shows the inadequacy of inquiries except as a method of discrediting individuals. If Wegman had some doubts about non centered PCA he should have submitted a completed piece of work on it to see whether it could pass peer review. Instead of doing the numerical work , he appears to have padded out his report with material lifted from sociology (see Deepclimate) without providing the supporting evidence. I am beginning to think that there may be a social network of statisticians ready to beat people over the head with their dictionaries of acceptable practice.
You assert that the disagreement between his method and that of MBH would only appear to be ‘small’ because of the large noise. You should provide evidence for this. An alternave interpretation is that the two methods were equivalent for most purposes (for this problem), except that MBH converges quicker.
#223 BPL
Can you read? I’ve acknowledged, multiple times, that the university did indeed receive a blizzard of FoI requests. Of course they should not have had to respond to them. Yet you continue to bring the point up.
Let me refresh your memory:
“the vexatious FoI requests you mention occurred after a number of earlier, and definitely non-vexatious, requests were turned down”
“I agree that the flurry of FoI requests received in 2009 were vexatious”
“There clearly was a campaign to flood the UAE with FoI requests in 2009 – I don’t dispute that”
“His argument is actually a good one assuming a flood, or blizzard, or deluge (pick your description) of requests meant only to annoy Jones and the UEA, which, as I’ve admitted, did happen in 2009”
Are you really incapable of understanding such plain language?
By the way, this is exactly one of the (despicable) tactics used by folks like McIntyre and other deniers. Just ignore the comments of the other side, and keep hammering home the same point, whether it has been addressed or not.
[edit]
To ‘zeroworker’:
“But I have to say, as a longtime reader of the site, but a new poster, I was hoping this site would be a place where mudslinging would be held to a minimum and people would at least try to politely engage with a newcomer.”
With respect, I don’t see how you can have been a longtime reader and still hoped your marginally contrarian views would be greeted with other than disdain. Whether or not the disdain is justified, it’s a hallmark of this site. There is hope for you, though, that you will be treated better down the road. Your own mud-slinging, “the character of the opposite side… they are media savvy, and we know they play dirty,” should play well here.
Jim the moderator tried to inject some civility into the proceedings last week, and it was a pause that refreshes, but I fear only a pause.
@ #218 Bob
William Gray seems to be a first time poster on WUWT (going by a google search). I call Poe :D
#228 Fed up
>>Apparently, you think merely saying
>>“i’m gonna kill you” is the same as
>>actually killing someone.
Not at all.
Let’s see if your apparently puny brain can understand this (I doubt it):
1) the emails display intent to subvert the spirit, and on occasion the letter, of the law.
2) Legal issues aside, they were and are a PR problem, largely because of 1) above. Do you think the hack promoted general awareness of climate change issues, or the reverse?
3) If the answer to 2) is that they did NOT promote general public awareness, then they were damaging, since effective policy responses to climate change can not be effected without public support, and the more public support that exists, the easier such policy responses will be to implement.
I now believe the university’s actions were legal. Yesterday when I first posted I was agnostic on the question, so I’ve modified my position based on the information I’ve since obtained, partly thanks to other commenters (and I sincerely thank those who did so).
But certainly no thanks to YOU, who had nothing to offer but insults and snide remarks.
“The rumour that Wegman believes that most of the CO2 should collect near ground level because of its density, is so unbelievable that I shall take it to be inaccurate.”
Worst, he’s not even competent to do a check on the consequences of that.
400*11,000m/1,000,000 = 4.4m
Therefore the first 4.4m of the atmosphere is CO2.
Bugger.
Better get to asphyxiating…
Dave G (215), surely you jest…
zeroworker says:
16 April 2010 at 12:56 PM
“Let’s see if your apparently puny brain can understand this (I doubt it):”
and…
“But certainly no thanks to YOU, who had nothing to offer but insults and snide remarks.”
Why not just make your point without feeling obliged to return any perceived insults that may have been directed at you? It looks a tad hypocritical to whine about snide and insulting remarks and then come out with “puny brain” nonsense.
Bob (218), that’s about as far out there as one can get…. (:-)
> 1) the emails display intent to subvert the spirit, and on occasion the letter, of the law.
Eh, when the law is being abused, the spirit can go do what little boys do in the dark. IMHO.
“>>Apparently, you think merely saying
>>“i’m gonna kill you” is the same as
>>actually killing someone.
Not at all.”
So how is saying “I’d rather delete my stuff than give it to that arsehole” (not a direct quote) breaking the spirit of the FOI?
Unless the spirit of the FOI is to never to be annoyed by an arrogant time wasting idiot.
Myself I thought it was so that the people could see the government (as in Parliament and Councils) doing its job.
“Yesterday when I first posted I was agnostic on the question”
Didn’t seem like it
“However, I believe Monbiot has some valid criticism of Jones and the university”
“he should have simply complied with the FoI request up front”
“Until I see some more evidence to the contrary, I’m with Monbiot on this one.”
“Additionally, the vexatious FoI requests you mention occurred after a number of earlier, and definitely non-vexatious, requests were turned down.”
“It is _NOT_ acceptable to deny such a request just because it’s a pain in the a**”
Didn’t to anyone else.
“2) Legal issues aside, they were and are a PR problem, largely because of 1) above.”
Except that “1) above” was false.
It’s a PR problem in the same way as if you were to accuse me of having KP would damage my reputation. Even though you pulled it straight from the nethers.
So how am I supposed to avoid that? Kill you before you get a chance?
Tempting…
“3) If the answer to 2) is that they did NOT promote general public awareness”
“they” being the hackers. Again, how is this CRU’s fault?
If “they” are the emails, then why should private emails promote public awareness? They’re not public.
You’re REALLY stretching the old “thought producer” to find something that will stick to the wall, aren’t you?
“But certainly no thanks to YOU, who had nothing to offer but insults and snide remarks.”
Yeah, I’m hurtin’ inside.
See me crying.