Curiously, and unnoticed by anyone else so far, the first comment posted on this subject was not at the Air Vent, but actually at ClimateAudit (comment 49 on a thread related to stripbark trees, dated Nov 17 5.24am (Central Time I think)). The username of the commenter was linked to the FOIA.zip file at realclimate.org. Four downloads occurred from that link while the file was still there (it no longer is).

The date and the time of the CA comment is 16 hours, more or less, before the date and time that Gavin Schmidt says that the file was put on his site.

It’s worse than we thought. Not only are we dealing with a sophisticated hacker multinational hacker, he or she is also a scientist with a time machine, able to post a link to a file and have it downloaded several times before it even existed.

One would think it would be risky to assume that you could upload a file to a root directory half a day after announcing it — since people trying to download it would be generating error messages for the missing file. So, clearly, the uploader put the comment and link up on CA first, then went back in time to put the actual file on RC.

Or, just possibly, Gavin Schmidt is mistaken or misleading about the file’s upload time. Perhaps a time machine is more likely.

More seriously, I think that Dr. Schmidt has inadvertently confirmed that the first upload was to his site. The evidence suggests to me that CRUW (CRU Whistleblower) is skeptical, but not an “active skeptic” — and may never have been on the ClimateAudit.org website — but wanted to get the info out there somehow. And obviously the BBC gambit did not work, though CRUW gave it a month.

===|==============/ Level Head

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~jorge/ETCCDMI/ClimDex/climdex-v1-3.xls

Maybe they’re doing some needed admin work. I was doing a quick check to see what google had indexed off the site (for obvious reasons).

>>> Phil Jones wrote:
>>>> Mike,
>>>> See below for instructions.
>>>>
>>>> Also, just because IPCC (2007, Ch 3) didn’t point out the 6/7-month lag
>>>> between the SOI and global temperatures doesn’t mean it hasn’t been
>>>> known for years. IPCC is an assessment and not a review of everything
>>>> done. If they had even read Wigley (2001) they would have seen this
>>>> lag pointed out. I wasn’t the first to do this in 1989 either. I don’t
>>>> think Walker was either. I think the first was Hildebrandsson in the
>>>> 1890s. Why does it always go back to a Swede!
>>>>
>>>> file is at http://ftp.cru.uea.ac.uk
>>>>
>>>> login anonymously with emails as pw
>>>>
>>>> then go to people/philjones
>>>>
>>>> and you should find santeretal2001.pdf
>>>>
>>>> Cheers

They’re using the FTP site as a network folder! Geez, and these are supposed to be the smartest people in science?

C:\FOIA\mail\1127614205.txt,155,”Password: 2005Nov04″
C:\FOIA\mail\1172063883.txt,127,”password: EQ0KW0WG (Please note that these are zeros – not letters.)”
C:\FOIA\mail\1179765915.txt,24,”password: water08″
C:\FOIA\mail\1243527777.txt,117,”Password: 307923″
C:\FOIA\mail\1256353124.txt,13,”Password: tosser”

Excerpt from 125635124:
———————————————————————–
1256353124.txt
GMT: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:58:44 UTC

From: Mike Salmon
To: Mike Salmon
Subject: Re: Yamal 2009
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:58:44 +0100
Cc: Keith Briffa , Tom Melvin ,
Tim Osborn , Phil Jones

I’m not thinking straight. It makes far more sense to have
password-protection rather than IP-address protection. So, to access
those pages

Username: steve
Password: tosser

Have a good weekend!

Mike
——————————————————————————-

This Username/Password combo, IMO, is an inside joke/slur directed towards Steve M.

Definition of “tosser” can be found here:

http://onlineslangdictionary.com/definition+of/tosser

So they do play fast and loose with passwords.

That’s downright sophomoric. It’s one thing to have a personal opinion, quite another to carry it over to professional correspondence. These guys are world class Climate Scientists?

Way to go, Mike