UEA and the Muir Russell Cooper Up

Nov 22, 2010 – 11:58 PM

For some time, we’ve commented on the unbelievably obtusely untrue “finding” of the Muir Russell “inquiry” that Jones’ request that Briffa and Wahl delete any records of their 2006 correspondence – correspondence described by Fred Pearce as a “subversion” of IPCC procedures – had not been preceded by an FOI request, even though David Holland had issued an FOI request only two days earlier and FOI was mentioned in the heading of the email. As Fred Pearce observed,

Sir Muir seems to have been about the only person studying the affair not to have known about it. This is all, we may hope, cock-up rather than conspiracy.

Even though the Muir Russell finding was blatantly and obtusely at odds with facts known to the University, they repeated the canard that there had been no requests to delete emails subject to prior FOI inquiries, even though members of their own administration knew the “finding” to be untrue.

I pointed out that one of the inaccuracies of the Boulton-Muir Russell Report was its omission of FOI request 08-31 (David Holland) from the list of FOI requests – even though this was the FOI request underlying Jones’ request to delete emails.

I had notified David Palmer of UEA of this omission and of the corresponding error in the Muir Russell report. On October 26, 2010, later in the day of Muir Russell’s appearance before the Parliamentary Committee, I noticed that Muir Russell had coopered up his website, presuming at the time that he had coopered up the website finally reporting the error in preparation for his evidence to the SciTech Committee. They added the following untrue editorial comment:

Readers should note the addition of the 08-31 FOI request which was previously omitted due to an administrative error. The revision does not affect the conclusions or recommendations of the final report.

Documents obtained by David Holland this week (see Bishop Hill here) show that the University of East Anglia “urgently” requested the correction after Muir Russell’s testimony and asked that the supposedly “independent” Muir Russell add this language to the website – Muir Russell following UEA instructions on this point to the letter.

The documents show that the University notified Muir Russell of the error within an hour of my original notification to them of the error. (They didn’t mention that I’d been the one who had notified them of the error.)

On Sep 14, 2010, after a CA post on the matter on Sep 11, Lisa Williams of UEA wrote Muir Russell, observing that the Muir Russell website had still not corrected the error and that the “University had been criticised for the CCER website still failing to show the important FOI request 08-31.”

In fact, no such criticism had been leveled at the University. In my post, I’d criticized them for their unsavory satisfaction in the obtusely incorrect Muir Russell finding on email deletion, a finding that their own FOI officers knew to be untrue, concluding my post as follows:

But, under the circumstances, it is exceedingly inappropriate for the University to take any satisfaction whatever in the finding that “there was no attempt to delete information with respect to a request already made” since the finding was incorrect, the FOI officers of the University know that it was incorrect and the University contributed at least in part to the untrue finding by filing an incorrect list of FOI requests with Muir Russell.

The indolent Muir Russell continued to do nothing.

Muir Russell appeared before the Parliamentary Committee on Oct 26 at 9.20 am (UK time) – see link here.

[UPDATE Nov 29,2010]; Subsequent to this post (and perhaps in response to it), UEA reported an Oct 25, 2010 email from Lisa Williams to Muir Russell on the eve of his appearance as follows:

Sir Muir
I didn’t receive anything else from you on this but I see that the updated list is now up on your website, thank you.
http://www.cce-review.org/Evidence.php
Whilst it doesn’t indicate that the revised list was received by the Review team some months ago, I trust that can be explained if need be.
Best,
Lisa

The next day, shortly after the Muir Russell testimony (October 26 at 11:43 am), Lisa Williams sent an “URGENT” email to Muir Russell asking him to cooper up the website, saying that it would be “helpful” to include the following language “alongside the document”:

Please note the addition of the 08-31 FOI request which was previously omitted due to an administrative error. The revision does not affect the conclusions or recommendations of the final report.

Muir Russell implemented the change later that day – it was noted up at CA in a post at 12.02 pm (blogtime) here . In my post, I had presumed that Muir Russell had coopered up the website prior to his appearance at the SciTech Committe. I introduced the post “in preparation for his appearance at the SciTech Committee, Muir Russell has, at the last possible minute…”

The new documents show that Muir Russell made the changes to the website after his testimony to the SciTech Committee, adopting the untrue language suggested by the University itself, apparently without doing any independent due diligence. As Fred Pearce said:

Sir Muir seems to have been about the only person studying the affair not to have known about it. This is all, we may hope, cock-up rather than conspiracy.

“Small inaccuracies” have a long history in British inquiries. Im documents released in 2003 (for example here), Kim Philby’s report on the Gouzenko revelations of Soviet espionage in Canada were noticed at the time to contain “small inaccuracies”. Roger Hollis of MI5, whose indolence later resulted in himself being suspected of being the Fifth Man, commented to Philby:

Perhaps you hedged on this, so as to avoid giving the Directors of Intelligence too much detailed information.

“Detailed information” — an item conspicuously lacking from the (Boulton)-Muir Russell and Oxburgh reports.

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Escape from Jonestown

Nov 22, 2010 – 2:10 PM

This week, CNN commemorated the 32nd anniversary of the end of Jonestown (November 18, 1978) with a documentary entitled “Escape from Jonestown”. It includes astonishing television footage taken by NBC right up to the death of its cameraman at Port Kaituma airstrip in northwest Guyana.

In the mid-1990s, I was involved in gold exploration in northwest Guyana. I’ve flown out of both Port Kaituma and Mathews Ridge, the other jungle airport shown in the documentary. I’ve walked along the narrow-gauge railroad tracks shown in the documentary and seen the bridge over the Barima River used by Jonestown escapers. I once drove by the turn-off to Jonestown on the road from Arakaka to Port Kaituma. At the time, I hadn’t realized that it was so close (or would have stopped to look). We didn’t have time to stop that day if we were to meet our flight out and I didn’t pass by again. A day or so before we drove by Jonestown, I had my own interesting trek through the jungle, which I’ll describe some time. Continue reading →

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Strip Bark Growth Pulses

Nov 11, 2010 – 12:12 PM

CA readers know that virtually all of the “independent” IPCC reconstructions purporting to compare modern and MWP temperatures use Graybill strip bark chronologies and/or Yamal. In various posts, problems with strip bark chronologies have been discussed, including discussion of Pete Holzmann’s observation based on our sampling at Almagre that strip bark trees seemed to show a growth pulse after the strip bark event. Indeed, this topic was under discussion in the very thread that the Climategate dossier was first mentioned (though no one noticed this until Gavin Schmidt brought it to our attention.)

In one of the last Climategate emails in October 2003 prior to MM2003, Malcolm Hughes (368. 1065785323.txt Oct 10, 2003) observed that he was “sitting on the bones of a manuscript” reporting the phenomenon of dramatic growth pulses after strip bark formation:

I am sitting on the bones of a manuscript in which I had someone spend
several months checking many hundreds of bristlecone and similar cross-sections and cores in our store. They found only a few dozen – less than 10%, where either pith was present, or the innermost ring could reasonably be described as ‘near pith’. If you have seen these stripbark montane 5-needle pines, and ever tried to core them, you will understand why. A further problem arises from the observation that radial increment may increase rather dramatically in the period after most of the bark dies back, but of course we don’t know when that was.

Now compare this to the CA post:

Note, as reader Erasmus de F observed, the tremendous growth pulse in the surviving part of the trunk immediately following the glacier scar.

If you drilled a core in the center of the surviving “strip” bark in the scarred spruce, you would get a huge growth pulse in the late 19th century; if you drilled a core at the edge of the surviving strip bark, you would get correlated but narrow widths. This is exactly the situation that we hypothesized at Almagre strip bark (our Tree 31 discussed here.) Here’s a ring width plot from the prior post. The glacier-scarred tree would yield a graphic like this:

Hughes observed that the date of the strip bark event was not knowable, but in some cases, dating seemed plausible. In the Miracle post, the event had been dated quite precisely to glacier expansion in the 1840s. It seemed highly plausible that strip barking in a number of Almagre bristlecones had also occurred in the very cold and snowy 1840s. Because the growth pulse was highly nonlinear – six sigma deviations in some cases – it wouldn’t take more than a few such trees in a typical sample to affect the chronology.

Seven years later, Hughes is still sitting on the “bones” of his manuscript describing the post-event growth pulse from strip bark trees.

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Y2K Re-Visited

Nov 11, 2010 – 10:53 AM

Long-time CA visitors will recall the events in mid Sept 2007 when NASA GISS made abrupt changes to US historical temperature data without annotation – a month after the Y2K changes. Some fresh light has been shed on these events by the NASA FOI. At the time, I observed:

no wonder Hansen can’t joust with jesters, when he’s so busy adjusting his adjustments.

Continue reading →

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“Philosophy of Science and Climategate”

Nov 10, 2010 – 9:00 AM

The Twenty-Second Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Montreal, Quebec (not far from Toronto) on November 4-6, 2010. Presenters were from all over North America and Europe. One session was entitled “The CRU E-mails: Perspectives from Philosophy of Science”, chaired by Kathleen Okruhlik (University of Western Ontario),
where Naomi Oreskes was one of the presenters:

Naomi Oreskes (University of California, San Diego), “The Climate Model E-mails: Normal Science or Ethical Dilemma?”
Wendy S Parker (Ohio University), “The Context of Climate Science: Norms, Pressure and Progress”
Kristin Shrader-Frechette (University of Notre Dame), “Scientifically Legitimate Ways to Cook and Trim Data: The Hacked and Leaked Climate Emails”
James McAllister (University of Leiden), “Errors, Blunders, and the Construction of Climate Change Facts”

Notes from a session attendee are online here. Nov 12: The author of these notes opined on climategate last year here.

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McKitrick Rebuts Deutsche Bank

Nov 9, 2010 – 1:47 PM

McKitrick replies to Deutsche Bank here.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (50)

Swedish Documentary on Climategate

Nov 9, 2010 – 12:39 PM

Here is an interesting Swedish documentary on Climategate, with some of the first footage of Jones, who, as has been observed from time to time, looks quite frail from the experience. At least half is in English and you can follow it without Swedish.

The image of the words “hide the decline” is a motif that recurs throughout the video. These words animated much of the early attention. The failure of the “inquiries” to confront the most notorious email is both disappointing and inexcusable.

Mann gives an “explanation” at about minute 22.20. Mann (rough transcript):

The original publication was about that problem [the decline] – it was hardly something they were hiding. What Phil Jones was saying, in a clumsy way, was that he didn’t want to include bad data, data after 1960 which known to be unreliable, so he talked about hiding the divergence problem, hiding the decline, by not showing the bad data.

Here, as so often in this affair, one sees someone who purports to be a “scientist” making unsupportable statements. There is no evidence that the tree ring density data after 1960 is “bad data” in the sense that it was measured incorrectly, that there was some sort of instrumentation or measurement problem. On its face, the density data shows that this particular proxy didn’t respond in a linear manner to warmer temperatures in the late 20th century. See here for a blog discussion of the IPCC and the trick and here for a longer (updated) exposition.

Mann states, as though it were a fact, that the Climategate dossier originated by someone “literally breaking into an academic institution”. To my knowledge, there is no evidence at the present of a “literal break-in”, with many commenters presuming that the dossier was compiled by someone at the UEA. Mann accuses critics of “dishonestly cherrypicking and looking for words out of context”. However, no Climategate defenders, including Mann, have provided additional contextual material justifying the words in question. I, for one, have gone to considerable lengths to place matters in as precise a context as I can and, in my opinion, the words in context are generally worse (a view shared by Mosher and Fuller in CTUTape Letters and to some extent by Fred Pearce in The Climate Files.)

Jones was asked about data withholding. Unfortunately, the question wasn’t sharply posed – Jones wasn’t asked why he sent data to “friends” (Scott Rutherford, Mann, Peter Webster), while claiming that confidentiality agreements prevented him from sending data to others. Jones (about minute 28) discusses matters very late in the day (when the supposed confidentiality agreements were sought after years of stonewalling):

I’m not sure how we could have acted differently. We tried to respond where we could. We put up the agreements we had. A lot of the time we didn’t have the information that they were after. it became obvious that it was just time wasting in responding because they would just go on to something else, with another question and it was just taking up to much of our time.

Gavin Schmidt explains that they aren’t “saints” nor “Mother Teresa”, a point on which he and Climategate critics can undoubtedly find common ground, as though this were a reason for not providing data to critics:

We’re not climate scientists because we’re saints, we’re not Mother Teresa. People who launch off – we’re know you’re a fraud, but give me all your data, all your time and all of this. You know what – people are not going to be well disposed. Given all the things that they could be doing with their time, they’re not going to spend time with these people.

Here, as so often, Schmidt, although purporting to be a “scientist” is disseminating disinformation. My suggestion throughout has been for scientists and journals to archive data and metadata at the time of publication. This removes the temptation to give preferential treatment to friends. Archiving code will, in many cases, avoid the need for someone asking a question about the methodology. Scientists have spent far more time thinking up reasons not to archive data than to archive it in the first place.

In addition, scientists have wasted both their own time and time of critics by giving untrue answers in refusing data.

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“Alderheimers”

Nov 8, 2010 – 10:44 AM

I’ve got a few inquiries from reporters about the one-year anniversary of Climategate and was looking back at early comments. Here’s one that I didn’t notice at the time and made me smile. This is from am email contained in a document and isn’t in the searchable files. Canadian ice core specialist teases Briffa about his
“bloody trees that can not remember one century to the next,,,
(alderheimers)”

And some other bits and pieces,,, The NGRIP record has the trend in it
that is no doubt closer to the truth for the fixed elevation temperature
history. But even there one could need a correction for elevation
change. The elevation corrected south GRIP Holocene has a very strong
negative delta trend in it and I expect there should be some correction
done to the north GRIP record too,, eventually I think they should all
come out looking like our records from Northern Canada. Now at least
ice core records have some low frequencies to correct… not like your
bloody trees that can not remember one century to the next,,,
(alderheimers )

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The “Hockey League”

Nov 8, 2010 – 8:51 AM

Michael Mann in a recent interview

“there’s not just a hockey stick — there’s a hockey league.”

The Team. The League.

h/t Bishop Hill

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Phil Jones and the China Network: Part 3

Nov 6, 2010 – 3:13 PM

Part 1
Part 2

In today’s post, I’ll follow the affair through Keenan’s complaint to SUNY, which is documented in the Climategate emails and at Keenan’s website. Continue reading →

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