Toronto 1912

Jan 5, 2012 – 10:53 AM

Ross McKitrick, in his non-climate life, writes from time to time on particulate matter pollution in Ontario. The Toronto Globe and Mail ran a a story a few days ago about Toronto in 1912, showing the picture at left in its print edition. The amount of pollution looks like some present-day images of Chinese cities. It is also a challenge to those who think that pollution in Toronto (or similar cities) is at “unprecedented” levels.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Toronto’s primary form of home heating was coal. There was a substantial changeover to oil heating in the mid-20th century. The trans-Canada natural gas line reached Toronto in the 1950s and Toronto’s home heating is now mostly natural gas. Ontario’s history on this issue is probably similar to many North American (and perhaps European) jurisdictions.

Read More »


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Dr Phil, Confidential Agent: Re-visited

Jan 3, 2012 – 2:22 PM

In today’s post, I continue my re-appraisal of various untrue statements made by the University of East Anglia in order to avoid disclosure of CRUTEM station data. I do not consider motives at this time. Also see preceding posts here, here.

In East Anglia’s response to July 2009 FOI requests for alleged confidentiality agreements (here) , CRU stated that, since the 1980s, they had entered into confidentiality agrements that prohibited them from providing station data to third parties, but were unable to “locate” any such agreements noting that they had “moved offices several times during the 1980s”:

Since the early 1980s, some NMSs, other organizations and individual scientists have given or sold us (see Hulme, 1994, for a summary of European data collection efforts) additional data for inclusion in the gridded datasets, often on the understanding that the data are only used for academic purposes with the full permission of the NMSs, organizations and scientists and the original station data are not passed onto third parties. Below we list the agreements that we still hold. We know that there were others, but cannot locate them, possibly as we’ve moved offices several times during the 1980s. Some date back at least 20 years. Additional agreements are unwritten and relate to partnerships we’ve made with scientists around the world and visitors to the CRU over this period. In some of the examples given, it can be clearly seen that our requests for data from NMSs have always stated that we would not make the data available to third parties. We included such statements as standard from the 1980s, as that is what many NMSs requested.

In East Anglia’s submission opposing appeals by Jonathan Jones and Don Keiller (e.g. here), they made the even stronger claim that national meteorological services(NMSs) “invariably” released information only under licences that prohibited transfer to third parties:

It was invariably the case that most NMSs only released information under licences, both written and verbal, that prohibited the further transfer of the information. There was no standard form for such licences but they were all similar in that they prohibit the onward transmission of the data to third parties.

CRU’s longstanding relationship with the US Department of Energy and its transmission of station data to the US Department of Energy (which placed CRU’s station data online (e.g. here) is inconsistent with their claims that they entered into binding confidentiality agreements in the 1980s. In my 2009 appeal, I confronted East Anglia with this relationship (a matter that they discussed in email 2929).

Their refusal of my appeal was dated Nov 12, 2009 (one day before the last email in the Climategate dossier) and was sent to me on Nov 18, 2009. While the dates of these refusals have attracted some commentary, relatively little attention has been paid to the content of the refusal (reported at CA on Nov 21, 2009 here) in which East Anglia stated that the “restrictions” applying to the station data only arose after CRU provided data to the US Department of Energy (along the lines of a scenario that I contemplated in a CA post of Aug 4, 2009 entitled Dr Phil, Confidential Agent):

In regards the information provided to the US Department of Energy, my investigation has revealed that this was done in the early 1990s prior to the imposition of the restrictions now pertaining to the data pursuant to a contractual obligation at the time. Therefore, the analogy you are drawing does not apply to the data that is the subject of this request.

Despite this explicit admission, CRU’s claims that they have been subject to longstanding confidentiality agreements have been accepted by Nature and the climate science community, which has, in turn, denounced CRU critics for not believing in the existence of actionable CRU confidentiality agreements from the 1980s.

In preparing today’s post, I considered not merely the (limited but relevant) new information from Climategate 2.0, but also re-examined contemporary (1980s, 1990s) statements about provenance of station data. Prior to 2004, there is little to no evidence of the commitment to secrecy said by East Anglia to have been “invariably the case”. Quite the contrary. Prior to 2004, there is considerable evidence of a longstanding practice of making station data publicly available (both by GHCN and CRU). Read More »

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Evading Mosher’s FOI

Dec 28, 2011 – 1:01 PM

Climategate 2.0 emails contain an interesting backstory on East Anglia’s evasion of Steve Mosher’s request for something as simple as university policies that governed entry into confidentiality agreements. Palmer consulted university specialists, receiving an answer that was adverse to the line that they were taking in their CRUtem refusals. Rather than providing this information to Mosher, Palmer adopted a tactic borrowed straight from Sir Humphrey. He pretended that he didn’t understand the question and asked Mosher for clarification – undoubtedly on the off-chance that Mosher would not return the ball. Palmer’s tactic succeeded. They avoided answering the question. The Climategate 2.0 backstory, especially Jones’ candid answers, make fascinating reading, as it shows that there were indeed compulsory university policies which were related to a term of standard employment contracts – information provided directly to Palmer.
. Read More »

By Steve McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (120)

Climategate 2 and the FOIA/Mole Incident

Dec 27, 2011 – 10:12 PM

The FOIA/Mole incident of July 2009 attracted much public interest and somehow seems connected to the subsequent Climategate events, though precisely how (and even whether) remains unclear. The incident was discussed in both Mosher and Fuller’s CRUTape Letters and Fred Pearce’s Climate Files, though not in Andrew Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion (which was mostly complete prior to Climategate.)

Climategate 1.0 emails provided relatively little context on the CRU/East Anglia side of the incident. Climategate 2.0 changes this situation dramatically, as it contains a rich (though still, at times, frustratingly incomplete) documentation of the university’s side of events. (The Climate Audit side is, of course, exhaustively documented in contemporary posts and comments, starting here and continuing in threads for the next month or so.)

The FOIA/Mole incident has been central in self-serving rationalizations of Climategate events by institutional climate science. They’ve represented the affair as an attempt to “harass” climate scientists, claiming that the events vindicated many prior years of data obstruction. However, institutional climate science and their house organs (e.g. Nature) have failed to report the origins of the incident. Its proximate cause was an institutional mendacity incident. In July 2009, CRU had refused a FOI request for station data with the flagrantly untrue claim that language in their alleged confidentiality agreements prevented them from sending station data to “non-academics” (while not preventing them from sending the same data to sympathetic academics:

Regulation 12(5)(f) applies because the information requested was received by the University on terms that prevent further transmission to non-academics

This assertion was completely fabricated: there were no agreements that contained the claimed language. Climate Audit readers quickly recognized that the university’s assertion was fabricated and submitted FOI requests to the university for the supposed confidentiality agreements containing the alleged language. The university was unable to produce a single agreement with such language and quickly abandoned this line of refusal in favor of other lines of refusal – these new grounds of refusal still, however, relying on faith in agreements unseen.

The new Climategate 2.0 emails shed fresh light on the process leading to East Anglia’s fabricated claim about language that specifically prohibited the transmission of station data to “non-academics”. The emails show that the untrue claim was not made casually or by accident, but was carefully crafted through a process that included not just Phil Jones and FOI officer David Palmer, but also Michael Mcgarvie, UEA’s Director of Faculty Administration. It also seems unlikely that Mcgarvie would not have reported to his superiors in the Registrar’s office and beyond, but these reports (if they exist) are not in the Climategate dossier.

Although the university’s mendacity in this incident was one of the flashpoints that seems to have precipitated Climategate, it was not investigated by the Muir Russell “inquiry”. To do so would have required examination of Climategate 2.0 (and other) emails. Muir Russell made no effort to examine such emails until late in the review process. These late and feeble efforts were then resisted by Acton and the university administration and nothing came of them. Muir Russell nonetheless proclaimed in his press conference that, while CRU was “unhelpful” at times, the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists in question was “not in doubt”.

In preparing today’s review, I’ve made my own “edition” of the emails in which I’ve arranged threaded emails in chronological order. See here – link to follow.
Read More »

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Berkeley “Very Rural” Data

Dec 20, 2011 – 11:35 PM

Richard Muller sent me the BEST list of “very rural” sites – see www.climateaudit.info/data/station/berkeley.

I took a quick look at the “very rural” stations in two tropical countries – Peru and Thailand – in order to groundtruth their classification methodology. These two examples were chosen because several years ago, I looked at Hansen’s “rural” Peru stations, most of which were actually urban; and because one of my sons is in Thailand.

Berkeley classified only two stations in Peru as “very rural” – Huanuco and Quince Mil. However, the population of Huanuco, according to GeoNames, is 147959; it was classified by Hansen as urban. Why the Berkeley algorithm classed it as “very rural” is unclear. Quince Mil is a small town recently featured in Time magazine here. The Berkeley record only has a few sporadic values after the mid-1980s. The BEST urban-rural comparison in Peru looks to me like it has no meaning.

The Berkeley classification in Thailand also looks very suspect. As in Peru, many of the “very rural” sites are small cities. Some locations look suspicious. “Bangkok Pilot” is shown as “very rural”, but when googled is associated with Suvarnabhumi, the name of the very urban Bangkok airport (data is sparse, so it may be something else, but anything associated in any way with Bangkok can hardly be “very rural”)

There are five “very rural” Thailand sites with a minimum of 120 values: PHETCHABURI (population 46,501), KO LANTA (population 20,000), TAKUA PA (population 35,337), KO SAMUI (population 50,000) and MAE HONG SON, a relatively long record in the northwest hill country near the Myanmar border. (We visited Pai which is near there a couple of years ago.) A picture Mae Hong Son airport is shown below:

The Bangkok metropolis data set is the longest series in the area. For reasons that remain obscure, the Berkeley version for Bangkok runs hotter than the CRU version:

The CRU stations in the CRU gridcell are all highly urban: BANGKOK METROPOLIS (!), ARANYAPRATHET (population 73813), CHANTHABURI (population 488397), SIEMREAP (population 85,000), KAMPOT (poluation 39186), PHNOM-PENH (!). Although we keep hearing of the unimportance of UHI, Bangkok has increased 0.24 deg C/decade relative to Mae Hong Son.

By Steve McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (263)

Eudora and the Briffa Attachments

Dec 20, 2011 – 8:49 AM

In March 2010, Eugene Wahl admitted to the NOAA Inspector-General that he had destroyed his email correspondence with Keith Briffa about changes to IPCC and falsely stated that “all” the emails were in the public domain. This was untrue. The attachments were not in the public domain. Not only were the attachments not in the public domain, but Wahl had actively opposed disclosure of these emails. Following Wahl’s disinformation about the topic, I submitted an FOI request in April 2010 for the attachments to Wahl’s emails. I provided a review of this and subsequent events earlier this year here – worth re-reading if you wish further context on today’s post.

Briefly, East Anglia refused my request for the attachment to the Wahl-Briffa emails on the grounds: “Information not held”.

Later in the year, after Muir Russell admitted to the Parliamentary Committee that he had not investigated Jones’ email deletion enterprise, Acton told the committee that he had “investigated” the incident – the first public mention of the “Acton investigation” – and, in answer to a direct question from Graham Stringer whether all the emails were available and could be read, told the Committee “Yes”.

Acton’s answer was inconsistent with the excuse used by East Anglia to refuse my request for the attachments to the Wahl-Briffa emails. I accordingly appealed the decision last year. I followed up on several occasions. In July 2011, I was informed that the decision was in the process of being drafted. In early November 2011, I was told that the decision had been drafted and was awaiting sign-off. But still nothing.

Climategate 2.0 brings interesting new information on the attachments – information which may also shed some light on the provenance of the Climategate dossier itself.

On October 12, 2009, about a month before the release of the Climategate dossier, Tom Melvin emailed Mike [Salmon] describing a procedure in which Melvin had copied Briffa’s complete Eudora file together with 3.5 GB of attachments (apparently going back a number of years) to his portable. These arrangements were presumably made to facilitate Briffa’s access to his email history while Briffa was recovering from a serious illness.

3939. 2009-10-12 12:07:03
______________________________________________________
cc: Keith
date: Mon Oct 12 12:07:03 2009
from: Tom Melvin
subject: Keith Email
to: Mike
Mike,
For Keith’s Email :
1. Copied the full C:\Eudora directory to my portable.
2. Deleted the 12000 temporay .gif files from C:\Eudora\Embedded.
3. Copied 3.5 gig of attachments (1 year or older) from C:\Eudora\Attach to C:\OldAttach – this will need to be copied back to his PC
4. He is left with a 1.5 gig C:\Eudora directory on my portable which can be copied back to his PC and readily be moved from PC to portable etc.
5. When using my portable (via yellow cable (in office) or various WiFi networks) Keith logs in to VPN.
Tom
PS. I need to take my portable to a conference w/c 26th Oct.

Bishop Hill, in an article today, refers to another CG2 email that sheds new light on CRU’s handling of emails. In email 0021, Jones informed Manola Brunet:

Hola Manola,
I’ve saved emails at CRU and then deleted them from the server. Now I’m at home I just have some hard copies.

Email 21 was on Sep 12, 2009, only a month prior to Melvin’s email. CA readers will recall that, in August 2009, as a result of the “mole” incident, Jones had ordered the removal of many documents from CRU’s FTP server (many of which were presumably placed on another server not intended for public access.)

By Steve McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (64)

Co-Opting the US Department of Energy

Dec 18, 2011 – 5:31 PM

Maxim Lott of Fox News has an interesting article drawing attention to the co-opting of US Department of Energy funders by CRU and their associates – co-opting in the sense that the US Department of Energy totally failed to ensure that their grant procedures complied with US federal policy for requiring grantees to archive data.

In the article, Lott quoted extensively from Jones’ emails between 2007 and 2009 in which he assured correspondents that the US Department of Energy had assured him that he didn’t have to archive data:

Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection — and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data.

“Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,” Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.

Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data “has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

A third email from Jones written in 2007 echoes the idea: “They are happy with me not passing on the station data,” he wrote.

I was contacted by Lott and drew his attention to correspondence in 2005 between Warwick Hughes and the US Department of Energy, which was reported at CA in October 2005 here. Earlier in February 2005, Jones had famously refused Warwick Hughes as follows:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. There is IPR to consider

In my October 2005 post, I reported Hughes’ email to Tom Boden of the US Department seeking Jones’ data, together with Boden’s response advising Hughes that the terms of Jones’ grant did not require him to provide the funding agency with the data. Curiously, in the early 1990s, under earlier Department of Energy contracts, Jones had provided the US Department of Energy with a complete station data base which was published online by the DOE. (The University of East Anglia has never provided any theory of how alleged confidentiality agreements from the 1980s remained “actionable” given that Jones had either not been prevented by these agreements from providing station data to the US Department of Energy for their online publication or had done so without complaint by the NMSs at the time.)

The October 2005 post is well worth re-reading as it reviews US federal policy which would appear to have required the DOE to ensure that grantee CRU archived data. It also quotes policy from UNFCCC which also clearly required NMSs to have ensured that a system for archiving station data was established. The position of Nature and other defenders of CRU as justified due to elusive confidentiality agreements entails that IPCC participants who rely on these supposed agreements have failed to live up to these UNFCCC obligations. In my opinion, Jones, in his capacity as IPCC AR4 Coordinating Lead Author, ought to have reported such NMS consent refusals to IPCC participants as breaches of UNFCCC commitments. Jones’ failure to do so is hard to separate from his expressed desire as CRUtem proprietor to prevent critics (for reasons that remain unclear) from examining this data.

In my October 2005 post, I wondered at the tactical wisdom (from the Team’s standpoint) at obstructing access to this (and other) data, noting then (as on numerous subsequent occasions) that I did not necessarily anticipate large changes in the temperature history, but equally, given the wide public interest, why the record should not be made available for scrutiny.

By Steve McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (48)

New Light on Jones’ Document Deletion Enterprise

Dec 18, 2011 – 12:13 PM

David Holland, in a guest post at Bishop Hill, shows that Climategate 2.0 has provided more context on Phil Jones’ efforts to organize the deletion of documents. Read More »

By Steve McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (35)

The Tallbloke Search Warrant

Dec 16, 2011 – 1:10 AM

Here is a copy of the search warrant. The name of the detective who swore the information giving rise to the warrant has been whited out at Tall Bloke’s request. (Tall Bloke said that he had “promised anonymity” to the detective. I don’t know why he would do this, but he was the one surrounded by six detectives.) The information (affidavit) supporting the warrant doesn’t seem to have been provided to Tall Bloke so far.

The warrant entitles the police to enter and search the premises for “evidence of an indictable offence” referring to section 15 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. In its Climategate series, even the Guardian was unable to conclude that there had been a crime. So I wonder how the Detective Inspector came to the conclusion that the computers at Tall Bloke’s residence would provide “material that is likely to be relevant evidence and be of substantial value to the investigation of the offence”.

The warrant does not include “special purpose material”, which,under section 14, is said to include “(b)journalistic material, other than excluded material.” “Journalistic material” is defined in section 13 as follows:

13 Meaning of “journalistic material”.
(1) Subject to subsection (2) below, in this Act “journalistic material” means material acquired or created for the purposes of journalism.
(2)Material is only journalistic material for the purposes of this Act if it is in the possession of a person who acquired or created it for the purposes of journalism.
(3)A person who receives material from someone who intends that the recipient shall use it for the purposes of journalism is to be taken to have acquired it for those purposes.

In California, bloggers are legally included as journalists. I wonder what the UK situation is.

By Steve McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (125)

Police Raid on Tall Bloke

Dec 14, 2011 – 7:17 PM

Tall Bloke reports that he was raided by UK police and his computers seized. Read his blog post for further details, including actions in the US involving WordPress. Also see Jeff Id here. It is not a coincidence that this story is reported first on these three blogs.

In an unrelated story, according to Richard Tol, IPCC has told its WG2 scientists that they are above the law on freedom of information.

By Steve McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (98)
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