Comments on: More News from RC/FOIA

By: Brian H

Brian H — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:12:33 +0000

So, will the “plod” be on the case again? I hear Tallbloke is feeling new heat.

By: kjsgfhsadkfjhnoU9

kjsgfhsadkfjhnoU9 — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 23:37:18 +0000

I think the author of the letter is a native English speaker. It might be a female. The final sentences are hurried and the word “send” was hastily left out after “will” as happens sometimes.

That leaves several possibilities:
1) Native speaker from Ireland, Canada, Belize, Virgin Islands, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, etc., possibly highly educated and from Africa or Asia.
2) The author of the letter might not be the original releaser, but cracked the password and set up a BitCoin acct to “garner” some lucre.
3) The author of the letter is lying and is from US or UK
4) The author of the letter is not the original releaser but a government entity with sufficient resources to crack a 32-member aes password constituted of 30 lower-case letters, one upper case and one digit, compose a reasonable cover-story and set up a BitCoin acct for purposes unknown (honey trap, to see who bites?)
5) The letter was translated by a native English speaker with numerous back-and-forths with the author in order to get it just right, meaning they really screwed up in a few places despite both being intelligent individuals. A variation on this is that it was written by a non-native speaker and then heavily edited by an English major using a dictionary of synonyms to boost the mystery or something.

Gut feeling: a youngish male English speaker living somewhere in Europe and spending most of his time on the computer, possibly an Aussie.

By: honestcal

honestcal — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 22:50:00 +0000

Well Jeff, I suppose you are right in a way. But after you have chopped the heads off a Hydra, and they keep growing back, the phenomena of reappearing heads gets a bit :Ho-hum.” (Actually, if I let it, it exasperates the heck out of me. Instead I put on a bored face, and give it a cold shoulder. Hydras hate it, when you yawn at them and give them a cold shoulder.)

By: pottereaton

pottereaton — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:33:38 +0000

Jeff Condon, Roger (tallbloke) and I believe Mosher all got a letter purportedly from attorneys representing UEA today on the subject of the Climategate emails. At tallbloke’s blog, Christopher Monckton had an amusing comment on how tallbloke should handle the situation:

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/university-of-east-anglia-attempts-to-put-frighteners-on-tallbloke/comment-page-1/#comment-47339

By: Chad Wozniak

Chad Wozniak — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:59:34 +0000

The omission of articles in Mr. FOIA’s article may reflect the fact that in the Scandinavian languages, Romanian and Bulgarian, the definite article is suffixed to the noun – that would seem to make it easier for it to be lost in translation, as other European languages do not do this.

By: David Holland

David Holland — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 10:48:19 +0000

Another amusing titbit #1210344567

cc: “tim Osborn” xxxxxxxx@uea.ac.uk>
date: Fri May 9 10:49:27 2008
from: Phil Jones xxxxxxx@uea.ac.uk>
subject: David Holland document
to: t.osborn, k.briffa

Sorry!

Keith, Tim,

No point in reading this, but it could be useful in proving the vexatious point.

As he has Nigel Lawson’s email, it might help explain why the economy didn’t do that well when he was Chancellor – if he was getting advice from people like this!

There are numerous trivial mistakes in all this, apart from the obvious ones. The funniest is the claim by MM that the significance level for RE should be 0.59!

The Appendix in the Wengen paper will be great to see in print!

Cheers
Phil

Hopefully further on there may be more interesting revelations.

By: David Holland

David Holland — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 10:34:05 +0000

Here’s the first titbit. #1210173484

It’s not dramatic but until now we only had one Palutikof email. Now we know Jones contacted her as soon as I made a formal request to the UEA.

From: Phil Jones
Sent: 07 May 2008 09:52
To: Palutikof, Jean
Subject: FW: Freedom of Information Request [FOI_08-23 ; EIR_08-01]

Jean,
Can you help us out a bit? See the first pdf here from Holland. In the footnote there are two IPCC documents referred to. I can’t find these on the IPCC site in Geneva. I’ve found these two attached – are they the same? The second in Holland’s footnote looks like the larger one attached. Issue is were the claimed documents there and has IPCC changed them? A quick look through seems as though the two I’ve attached are the ones?

As an aside you’ll see that this requests relates to an awful lot of emails. Have you had more requests – beyond that for the RE letters about their duties in WG2?

Cheers
Phil

Subject: RE: Freedom of Information Request [FOI_08-23 ; EIR_08-01]
Date: Wed, 7 May 2008 10:07:43 +0100
From: “Palutikof, Jean” XXXXXXXXXX@metoffice.gov.uk>
To: “Phil Jones” XXXXXXXXX@uea.ac.uk>

Hi Phil

The dreaded David Holland!

Yes, you have the two correct documents. The short one is the version which was modified in Mauritius.

David Holland is presently on his third FOI to the Met Office re the AR4. The first one was to the WGII TSU and was pretty straightforward. He’s presently chasing John Mitchell for his emails – broadly the same text as went to Keith – just the names have changed.

I have no doubt he will return to the TSU ultimately – hopefully by then we’ll have been disbanded!

The FOI people here tell me that he can ultimately be declared vexatious, but since our best gues is that he’s a lawyer that might land us in even more hot water.

Do you have any clues as to who he is?

Jean

Lawyer indeed!

By: Climategate 3.0 … Of saints, sanity and premature pronouncements | The View From Here

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 08:02:56 +0000

[...] UEA/CRU seem to have magically found some emails that David Holland had requested five years [...]

By: jennifermarohasy

jennifermarohasy — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 02:15:36 +0000

Mr FOIA,

You are a true hero.

You have indeed done science a great service, by exposing the corruption within the IPCC process.

I completely agree with your statement:

“Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life.”

You go on to explain why we should thus better allocate our collective “assets”.

I wish this clear message from you were better understood.

Sincerely, Jennifer Marohasy
www. jennifermarohasy.com

By: Scottish Sceptic

Scottish Sceptic — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:14:27 +0000

Well done David.