If website documents are accurate (and they are supposed to be comprehensive), Muir Russell did not meet with Jones, Briffa or Osborn on any occasion subsequent to the press conference on Feb 11, 2010 unveiling the Muir Russell panel – other than perhaps crossing paths at the March 1 Parliamentary hearings.
In January, Nigel Lawson suggested to Muir Russell that, given the importance of his inquiry, he would be wise to take on extra legal expertise, observing (among other points):
It would assist you as chair if someone else experienced in cross examination led the questioning, leaving you free to concentrate on listening to the answers.
Lawson apparently presumed that Muir Russell and all the other panellists would actually attend examinations of Phil Jones, Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn. Documents from the “Inquiry” website show that this was not the case.
Muir Russell was appointed to lead the inquiry in early December 2009. On Dec 18, Muir Russell had 8 meetings at UEA (mostly administrative staff), which included meetings with Jones (chaperoned by the ever-present Trevor Davies) and Briffa (also chaperoned by Trevor Davies). Notes were taken by Lisa Williams of the Registrar’s Office (previously the email address of the Oxburgh inquiry) (Report, Appendix 4), but notes on this meeting have been omitted from the website documents. (I presume that these 8 meetings in one day were merely introductory and that no evidence was taken at these meetings.)
On Jan 27, 2010, prior to the announcement of the panel, Muir Russell visited UEA (accompanied by Jim Norton) for four meetings: one with the Norfolk police, one with the ICO’s office, one with UEA IT staff and one with Jones and Briffa. The minutes of the meeting with Jones and Briffa say that the “purpose of the meeting was exploratory”. Muir Russell did not mention the main issues in the emails (IPCC and proxy reconstructions), referring instead to CRUTEM (mentioned in only 25 emails and only once prior to 2005) and peer review.
There is no evidence that Muir Russell ever saw Jones or Briffa again. Or that he ever met Osborn (or Melvin.)
The Muir Russell panel was announced to considerable fanfare on February 10.
The first (of only two interviews) with CRU took place on March 4. Notes here show that panelists Peter Clarke and Jim Norton interviewed Jones, Osborn and Ian Harris about CRUTEM, stating that the purpose of the meeting was to gain a “bottom up” context for the CRUTEM data sets. Jones commented on Chinese stations. There were no questions about IPCC or reconstructions. Muir Russell did not bother attending.
On March 26, Muir Russell visited UEA, accompanied by David Eyton of BP. The Report (Appendix 4) lists meetings with 9 administrators, but not any meetings with Jones, Briffa or Osborn.
In addition to the listed meetings, a website document shows that Muir Russell and Eyton had a meeting with Vice-Chancellor Acton about the progress of the Inquiry that was not reported in the Report itself, in which access to emails was discussed – more on this theme on another occasion.
On March 30, Muir Russell (accompanied by Norton) met three administrative staff involved in the FOI process (Palmer, Colam-French, McGarvie). This is Muir Russell’s last documented visit to UEA.
On April 9, Geoffrey Boulton (accompanied by Peter Clarke) held the only interview with CRU in which questions about IPCC and proxies were raised. (Curiously, this meeting took place only a couple of days after Oxburgh’s interviews.) Minutes are here, with CRU’s response to the minutes here.
Amazingly for an inquiry, CRU employees were not interviewed separately. Instead Jones, Briffa, Osborn and Melvin were interviewed as a group. Boulton did not allot a full day for interviews with CRU employees as, later in the day, the interview was joined by UEA FOI officers Palmer and Colam-French. The notes conclude:
As time had run out, it was agreed that Professor Boulton would later seek written evidence from Professor Jones and Professor Briffa.
This is the only documented visit of Geoffrey Boulton to UEA and only documented meeting of Boulton with CRU staff. As noted above, Muir Russell (and 2 other panelists) did not bother attending. Boulton did indeed send some follow-up written questions to CRU, Geoffrey Boulton had a number of follow-up inquiries for Jones and Briffa, noting in one letter that at the evidence session itself “it was difficult to pursue issues relating to the IPCC in the detail that is needed by the ICCER”. I’ll discuss these inquiries on another occasion.
Indeed, the April 9 meeting seems to have been the last interview with CRU staff (and the only meeting in which reconstructions and IPCC were discussed.) Indeed, only one further telephone interview with UEA is reported in the Inquiry documents – a June 15 telephone interview with Trevor Davies by Muir Russell and BP’s David Eyton.
Thus, according to website documents, after the introductory meeting on January 27, Muir Russell appears not to have ever met with Jones, Briffa or other CRU scientists again – other than perhaps crossing paths at the March 1 Parliamentary hearings.
Climate Audit 
41 Comments
All this must have been a real strain for Jones and company:
Psychological tension at its worst. Never knowing when Sir Muir wasn’t going to turn up. One can see why they almost cracked under the pressure.
That is a complete utter disgrace. – snip
It is hard to see what role Muir Russell had in this enquiry and he seems to have done the minimum. Although he has a degree in physics from some 30-40 years ago I am sure that is all forgotten – a long period of being a civil servant will do that – and that was just used to make him seem more acceptable. It now seems clearer than ever that he was simply the front man for Geoffrey Boulton. We now see why Boulton never resigned. As we suspected from the start, he was the one running this inquiry.
Seriously, I want to believe these guys that they are telling the truth and that this is all happening. How hard is it to drag out your data, lay it out for me, show off your amazing skills to some lords and what not and then get your names published around the world for how awesome you are at your jobs and how all this uproar about archiving data and writing emails to your coworkers really is that silly?…. If it is so hard that they have to avoid doing a proper job of an inquiry (or several different inquiries) and avoid asking the difficult questions which are already well documented for years and years regarding these topics and avoid getting into the nitty gritty details of why these questions are “difficult” and why these “scientists” struggle to answer them given this is their job and they are getting tax payers money (basically) to do all this research which at the end of the day will likely result in more of tax payers money getting spent on government policies based on this research to do something which we haven’t quite decided on yet, then why do we bother?
Surely… if they knew that was the case, this would be a walk in the park. Instead we get this lame, completely amatuerish spectacle of an “inquiry” and everyone pats each other on the back and every single person that really wants to understand what is going on inside these guys heads every day when they wake up starts to wonder if they are either completely insane or naive or seriously trying to cover something up. I can’t actually work out a way that they can seriously believe their work if they try so hard to avoid having to defend it.
If Muir Russell isn’t going to attend his own inquiry interviews (which only lasted days mind you) then this inquiry is all about handing out Blue Ribbons and not doing any proper inquiring.
Snip as you like.
200,000 pounds doesn’t buy all that much in the way of diligence, does it?
Well, to be fair … this may well have been an exercise in “post-normal diligence” – as opposed to the “due diligence” one might expect if one had the benefit of a pre-post-modernist education.
Those were certainly the good old days, eh?! Hard to believe that, once upon a time, two (or more) wrongs did not make a right.
Yet there are so many wrongs [either of omission or commission] in the big picture of this “report”, one cannot overlook the possibility that they may have been designed to support the (foregone?) conclusion that the post-normal CRU crew were, well, right.
I like the fact that at: http://www.cce-review.org/evidence/salient_points_of_9_April_meeting_at_UEA_Final.pdf they never actually state how many cores in a core count is considered “low” and why it is an issue (oh surely low is like quite a few right….not like 10… surely it would be in the hundreds…) Oh yeah… move along. And then the excuse is that it’s not their fault because the data wasn’t available…
This is great stuff. 🙂
The CRU’s responses link should be:
Click to access Responses_salient_points_April9.pdf
Ah okay with the updated link it does actually state the no. of cores and goes into a little more detail so i will retract my statement regarding any reasoning behind seeming to dance around the details when dealing with that issue. Cheers ZT.
Can we do a FoI for Muir Russell’s timesheets and expenses and see how much public money he actually claimed for not doing his job?
Steve: If you’re interested, do it yourself. All they can do is say no.
He wasn’t very zealous or diligent, was he?
You’ll be seeing this eventually, but…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/09/stringer_on_russell/
Muir Russell approached this inquiry very like he controled the building of Holyrood.
‘The parliament’s audit committee said that Muir Russell, permanent secretary of the Scottish executive, had been “semi-detached” in his handling of the project by failing to control its spiralling costs, despite being the civil servant in overall charge.’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/officials-blamed-for-holyrood-overspend-626974.html
Somewhat off topic – but interesting. It appears that the inquiry ‘Team’ considered looking for additional information in the CRU team’s email, and even rounded up that email for inspection.
However, their consultant decided that this would be too difficult to examine in the time available with the required security:
Click to access Report%20on%20email%20extraction.pdf
(I wonder if this avoidance of looking for information would pass muster if this inquiry was actually charged with finding the truth?)
Apparently this activity was only started on 14-May. By 17-May the consultant (Professor Peter Sommer, a lawyer by training) had decided that the task was too difficult because of the need for a ‘very high level of security classification’ and seems to have recommended that the activity be abandoned.
Looks like someone was rather worried about a second leak or theft – and was also extremely keen to avoid finding more information….!
Click to access Responses_salient_points_April9.pdf
AFAIK it is an error to attribute the idea of “implied falling temperatures” to McIntyre. (Although I have seen that mistaken intereretation of “the decline” appear in some skeptical writings.)
But inventions aside …
McIntyre never advocated this “biased analysis” or suggested it as alternative to anything done by CRU. He simply asked for criteria by which those data were excluded to produce the oppositely biased analysis. Steve’s analysis was not “biased”. He merely showed that there was indeed an opportunity for such a bias to arise, and that it did indeed arise.
The argument that Khadyta is “more remote” makes no sense in the context of hemispheric climate reconstructions. So that is a red herring as far as a selection criterion.
This is Briffa’s *opinion*. Whether it is true or not requires a formal analysis of the sort that Steve was conducting when climategate broke.
The issue of the downplayed divergence (which is clearly illustrated in the unused Khadyta series) is that it serves to prop up the blade of the stick AND to reduce its apparent uncertainty. Note Briffa does not deny this effect. He merely asserts that its importance has been “greatly exaggerated” – whatever that means.
Steve: Parsing some of the CLimategate documents gives evidence that some Yamal cores come from Khadyta (from a Vaganov or shiyatov collection, not Schweingruber. So its stupid for Briffa to say that Khadyta River isn’t a relevant site.
Here in the UK we would call the Muir Russell inquiry report a
WIDGERY
However, after 30 years it will all come out right.
It would seem that Muir Russell has been able to avoid giving the perception that he was too close to those he investigated.
gobsmacked, I am
surprised, I am not
All,
You obviously know what the pronouncement would be,so
why cry over spilt milk.
You are living in the past and fighting 1812 battles.
You won a victory,albiet small but you won.
Science should not hide,in fact it should encourage
controvesy.They did not respond to intelligent questions,as pointed out in the report,so you had a small victory.
OK,
I am new this game.And I hope I am neutral.
But the game is serious.
I have done some analysis of the HADCRUT and UAH data and ,from my scientific background I would to tee up the real question ?
Is the earth average temperature increasing due to CO2 or is it a random phemonema,please excuse the spelling,but my work that I would like to publish in a neutral environment indicates that
Well ,
I hope that both CA and RC would like to encourage me to publish.
For serious people I have published a few papers ,that can be traced.
Tony
As some have noted previously, none of the investigative questions have
been put to the participants where the answers were given under oath.
“Informal”, “exploratory”, ‘gain a “bottom up” context’, are phrases that indicate
none of the information such meetings generated was proffered as legally sworn
testimony.
If later, in a true Parlimentary committee or true court hearing, or a Congressional
investigation, should this material be brought out and questioned, nobody can be
tagged for perjury because of the non-legal status of the interview questions and
responses. Notes taken during these softee investigations are on par with hearsay
evidence, and hearsay promulgated and controlled by those interviewed to boot.
These “reports” amount to nothing but PR material now and chaffee to stack on the
defendent’s table and clog up the enrollment of evidence procedures when a real investigation comes along.
Dear Steve
O/T I know, but just a note to wish you a pleasant and safe journey to UK today. We look forward very much to seeing you here. Wednesday’s meeting should be very very interesting.
Bring light gear – we are having a bit of a heatwave by our standards…31C in London predicted today..24-26 midweek.
Bon Voyage!
I’m amazed Muir Russel was the man overseeing the construction of Holyrood, a half a billion pound project that was ten times the estimated cost. It also seems he knows a thing or two about evading responsibilities at inquiries:
“SIR Muir Russell, Scotland’s top civil servant until last year, was accused of giving misleading and confusing evidence to the Holyrood inquiry yesterday.
The charges were made by John Campbell, QC, the counsel to the inquiry, who told Sir Muir his evidence was both “contradictory” and “anomalous”.
Mr Campbell’s remarks represent the most serious challenge to the testimony of a witness since the inquiry started, an astonishing development given Sir Muir’s former role.
Mr Campbell made his comments after asking Sir Muir repeatedly about his failure to pass on warnings …”
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-13040968.html
Unless there were further overruns, Muir Russell’s Holyrood came in at “only” 4 times budget, at 1/5 billion GBP: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/officials-blamed-for-holyrood-overspend-626974.html.
But still, bad enough!
Well, Wiki says it came in at about 414M GBP, versus initial estimates of 10-40M, so almost 1/2 B and 10-fold may not be too far off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Parliament_Building.
the Muir Russell “inquiry” cost GBP200,000 – worth comparing to his press conference. And only had one interview with Jones, Briffa et al, that wasn’t orientaiton.
I guess British taxpayers can be glad that Bolton and not Muir Russell was really running the show. 😉
It cost approx $300,000. Given that Jones et al were interviewed (other than exploratory) for only one day with only 2 panelists in attendance, that’s a Muir Russell overrun.
Must have been a killer lunch to make the Astors proud….
The Boulton-Muir Russell report includes a list of 109 submissions, including 2 by Steve and 3 by Ross, that are online at http://www.cce-review.org/Evidence.php. Although Steve was not interviewed, his submissions are cited occasionally in the report.
However, there is a note at the end of the list that an additional submission by David Holland (eg http://www.thegwpf.org/climategate/1206-david-holland-a-ruling-more-significant-than-russell-review.html) was not published, followed by a notice that the Review “reserved the right to withhold publication of submissions if they were abusive, potentially defamatory, anonymous, or if there were other legal difficulties which prevented publication.”
What was the story behind Holland’s suppressed submission?
The Muir Enquiry is an Ad-Hoc body with no legal status. As such it attracts no privilege. It cannot therefore publish anything that is defamatory without the risk of being sued. The Panel members as the publishers would be personally liable.
David Holland’s submission contains frank and adversarial allegations about corruption of the IPCC process, the sort of submission which a tribunal would normally receive and which could be reported without fear of litigation, but not in the case of an Ad-Hoc body.
It’s never been established that it was ever open to the Review panel to make an adverse finding which could be defamatory at all.
Can someone please explain to me what is the concern regarding temperature data. The Muir Russel report covers this in section 6 and Appendix 7. The point they are making has been very effectively summarized by the BBC correspondent Richard Black who writes as follows:-
“The Muir Russell team investigated this by just about the simplest method you could think of. They downloaded the temperature data themselves from public databases, and wrote a computer program that would combine the datapoints into a temperature record for the instrumental period.
The entire process took less than two days. All the data they needed was freely available, writing the code was a cinch, and it produced a curve similar to the ones produced by CRU and its counterparts in the US and Japan.
Anyone competent in the field could do the same, the inquiry team elaborated. You can take out data points you don’t like, you can apply whatever correction factors you want (such as the one that Nasa’s GISTEMP series uses to compensate for the dearth of measuring stations across the Arctic), and you can therefore end up with a temperature curve that might look a little different: but don’t say it can’t be done, because it can.”
If it is that simple why has someone not done it? Why are we putting in all these Freedom of Information requests if the data is freely available. Will someone please explain?
Steve: I asked for the data that they sent to another researcher. Why should I not be entitled to see this version? My primary scientific issue is with the proxy reconstructions.
Neil Hampshire.
It remains to be shown that the input data used by CRU were raw, or adjusted by the submitting countries: and it remains to be shown if the various versions of the Jones constructions are logical developments of previous efforts, or improperly adjusted.
It is not correct to assert, as the Russell Inquiry did, that an accurate reconstruction could have been made at any time past because the figures were always available. (Or words that leave that feeling to a reader). The efforts of several to access the raw data and code remain unanswered.
Neil Hampshire Posted Jul 11, 2010 at 1:11 AM
To make a very very long story short, virtually everything the Muir Russell report had to say about the land temperature data were false, misleading, and/or deceptive statements. You cannot “download station data directly from primary sources”, because the downloadable data are not in fact primary sources. The primary sources are in fact not in a downloadable form. The available downloadable data are in fact secondary, tertiary, or worse sources.
Even if you had access to download the primary sources of the land temperature data, such as document images, the primary sources are themselves too inaccurate to be relied upon for the accuracies claimed for the analyses performed by CRU. You simply cannot take temperature measuring instruments whose accuracy in laboratory calibrations are no better than about a half-of-a-degree Celsius and use those instruments in the field with uncorreccted instrument drift of more than one degree Celsius to analyse and find a global climate change measured in tenths-of-a-degree Celsius. Claiming to do so has nothing whatsoever to do with science, and it has everything to do with certain unscientific pursuits.
The report deceives by saying “we find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data”, and then it contradicts its own finding when they admit CRU was unhelpful when CRU withheld the list of station identifiers needed to reconstruct the CRU analysis from any relevant and available downloadable data. Anyone attempting to corroborate and reproduce the work of CRU cannot do so without having access to the precise subset of data and methods of analysis used by CRU, and the Climategate unambiguously discloses the CRU correspondents knowingly and deliberately denied access to the information required to perform such scientific corroborations. Conducting a separate and uniquely competing analysis has nothing whatsoever to do with repeating the exact same CRU experiment and analysis, and they know it.
Books can be and have been written about his subject. Suffice it to note for this brief response, you can independently review the Muir Russell report’s comments about the temperature data and discover one monumental falsehood after another in those comments.
Thanks for all your comments. Much appreciated.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
rules for paranoids.
GR (Thomas Pynchon)
Do we have indication that the climategate email archive is exhausted and that another batch won’t be dropped into the marketplace? The spread of Mr. Breitbart’s tactical information release to expose the foolishness of the cover-up leaves me desirous of a comparable fate for these “inquiries”. Little more than wishful thinking, but a “miracle has happened” before.
Click to access UEA-CRU_IV2_ICO_270110FIN2.pdf
Interesting that ICO believes a ‘whistleblower’ was likely source of Climategate leak. Apparently waiting for completion of Police investigation and Russell report before taking further action on three out of four of their areas of investigation.
Click to access UEA-CRU_IV4_Briffa%20and%20Jones_v6_1.pdf
Hmmm…. how come I missed this assessment in the final report?
Rigour and Quality Assurance
4. It was noted that individual CRU researchers develop their own algorithms and
their own software to encode those algorithms. No systematic approach could
be evidenced to either peer review of algorithms or software either within or
outside the CRU. Retrieval of data sets, meta-data and documentation from
departing researchers appeared to be at best haphazard. When pressed on the
quality issues Prof. Jones noted that “one developed a feel for the data and
instinctively knew what was right”. There seemed to be little awareness that
development and testing of software has different characteristics to that for
physical systems. In physical systems, reasonable inferences can be made as to
correct operation by testing at specific points and interpolating between them.
That is not the case for software systems. A strong impression was given that
pressure on resources led to a very low priority being given to data indexing and
archiving plus software development and testing.”
It is all simple really: Sir Muir Russell’s and Lord Oxburgh reviews were typical examples of the age old process of “Peer” review, in multiple ways. The UEA’s vice-chancellor Edward Acton asked his ex-collegue the ex-Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow (Muir Russell) to feel the pulse of his institution. For Oxburgh the UEA in consultation with the Royal Society, had “suggested that the panel looks in particular at key publications”. The usage of peerage rank holders as investigation leaders was meant to divert the attention from subject or legal expertise to artificial pomp – a classic technique. One has to help an old friend in need, right?
As for truth finding these investigations have all gone pear-shaped. Call them “pear reviews”.
Read the third paragraph for a chuckle.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2010/0715/1224274726932.html
regards
Anyone seen todays Times, the front page story is about ExxonMobil financing ‘climate sceptics’, inside there are a couple of stories banging the “UEA is exonerated” drum. No mention of the non-existent science review, failure of Russell to even ask basic questions or the massive funding in favour of the pro-AGW agenda.
I was considering subscribing to the Times Online as I thought it was a decent news source. Clearly its reporters are either lazy or have a orders to tow the AGW line.
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[…] Sir Muirs rapport är, som jag nämnt tidigare, en i raden av skådeprocesser vars syfte är att rädda ansikten på Climate Research Unit (CRU) vid East Anglia University (UEA) och de brittiska politiker som helhjärtat satsat på att bekämpa koldioxiden. Rapporten säger sig kunna rentvå CRU och de deltagande forskarna, främst Phil Jones och Keith Briffa. Man har dock inte gjort sig besväret att förhöra någon kritiker (och kanske inte ens de enskilda CRU-medarbetarna!). […]
[…] Mann’s hockey stick, has been combing through the Muir Russell report. He wrote on his website ClimateAudit that it was absurd for Russell to conclude they “have seen no evidence of any attempt to delete […]
[…] As extremely well documented in Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog, the investigation, headed up by Sir Muir Russell, only interviewed representatives of the CRU itself—hardly a balanced investigation—and Russell himself did not even attend the interviews of Jones, Briffa and other key players (“Muir Russell Skipped Jones Interviews“). […]
[…] reported on the Climate Audit blog run by McIntyre, Muir Russell review made no attempt to contact the Canadian who originally […]
[…] the unveiling of the Muir Russell panel (on Feb 11, 2010), a point previously reported at CA here, as follows: Muir Russell was due to report in spring 2010, but as of the start of April, nobody at […]