As a retired businessman, not scientist, it is quite amazing to me that Dr. Jones of CRU displays the petulance and defensiveness he does over his findings. Regrettably, if everything I read elsewhere on the AGW thesis is an indicator, his behaviour is common amongst the scientists working to promote AGW.

Such contact as I have with ethical scientists reinforces the view that real scientists work harder than anyone else to interrogate their own work to seek out weaknesses. The ones who dislike your enquiries fail this test.

I do hope you keep it up.
Yours aye
Bob V T

It would seem sooner or later, it would get tiring having the details show you were incorrect, and you’d be more careful on such matters in the future. It would certainly save Steve a lot of time. Perhaps that’s the point, eh?

I’m sure the directories being stamped the day after the request is simply a coincidence.

This is obviously not Aarhus compliant but just another way of saying “we are not going to let you have our data if all you want to do is find fault”.

What these “people” conveniently avoid is responsibility for their incompetence. If they are wrong, and it is shown where they are wrong, surely mature professionals would have the behavioural standards to accept and progress?? (my bad)
regards

I still don’t believe the August 2008 date. The file structure is dated Sep 9, 2008 and the link shown in the page as of Sep 12 could not have existed prior to that.

My FOI was sent in on Sep 8, 2008. Data directories are stamped the next day. PErhaps it was a coincidence, perhaps not. In any event, the evidence looks very like they unlocked the data following my FOI request on Sep 8, but before my follow-up on Oct 31. This was not mentioned in their response to my FOI request. While they unlocked the data, key webpages continued to say that data was password-protected, tho not the one where the zip file was directly called.

In any event, I think that this timing is now pinned down pretty accurately (and that the data was probably unlocked on Sep 9).

The Wayback Machine at archive.org has snapshots of the page – with the password protection – dated to 2004.

So cockup rather than conspiracy.

Is there someone who has the technical skill and computing power available who could take a list of Web sites provided by Steve and create a robot to do the crawling on a timely basis that wouldn’t put undue stress on the “helpful” researchers schedules?

Oops! “Toward them” should be “toward you”.