Motes, beams and the University of East Anglia
The Telegraph 26 November 2010, by James Delingpole
An email reaches me from the office of Sir Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. Apparently in my blogs I have expressed “inaccurate and vituperative views” about certain members of his hugely distinguished and globally admired seat of learning, and unless I apologise and retract he will report me to the Press Complaints Commission.
As you can imagine I am keen as mustard to soothe the wounded feelings of Sir Edward and his world-renowned staff, but not if it means retracting statements which are patently true. For example, Sir Edward takes exception to my description of Prof Phil Jones, the head of his Climatic Research Unit, as “disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method-abusing.” Clearly poor Sir Edward has not been kept in the loop by his minions, so I’d better break the sad news about something really quite embarrassing that happened to his university last year. It was a story called Climategate and involved numerous leaked emails, many of which showed the aforementioned Prof Jones in a not-altogether flattering light.
“FOI-breaching“. Here’s an email Prof Jones sent to his pal Michael Mann in Feb 2005:
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439 Comments
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The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear
there
is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than
send
to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within
20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.
We also
have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried
email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He
has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant
here,
but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere
to it !
Email deleting: Here’s Jones to his old pal Michael Mann again, this time in May 2008.
Phil Jones wrote:
>
>> Mike,
> Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
> Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
>
> Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
> have his new email address.
>
> We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
>
> I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature
> paper!!
>
> Cheers
> Phil
>
>
Scientific-method-abusing.
From an email from Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement – dated November 16, 1999.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Though Sir Edward Acton clearly doesn’t get out much, he might possibly have heard the phrase “Hide the decline” before, perhaps in this amusing satirical ditty on YouTube.
Anyway, to put it very, very simply, what this refers to is a trick, presumably invented by Mann, but enthusiastically advocated by Jones whereby at the point where the palaeoclimatological tree ring data start giving out the wrong message (ie post 1960) they are spliced with thermometer temperature data instead. This is not good scientific practice: like pretending that apples are the same as oranges.
For a much fuller explanation, see Steve McIntyre here at ClimateAudit.
Which leaves us with the word “disgraced.” The reason Sir Edward appears to consider this word inaccurate is because apparently Prof Jones and his colleagues have been “exonerated and cleared of all malpractice by a series of independent reviews” and apparently I should have made this clear.
The problem is that if I had mentioned these “independent” reviews and what I thought of their “independence” and reliability, I’m not sure that this would necessarily have been to the University of East Anglia’s or Phil Jones’s advantage. As I have posted on this blog several times before – obviating, I should have thought, the need to mention them yet again – these hearings have about as much connection with objective reality as the trial of OJ Simpson.
In the blog post titled Climategate whitewashers squirm like maggots on Bishop Hill’s pin, for example, I reported on the detailed and thorough investigation by Andrew Montford (commissioned by the Global Warming Policy Foundation and launched in the House of Lords by Lord Lawson of Blaby) into the four “independent” inquiries so far into the UEA emails. Every one of them, he found, was sketchy, evasive and with investigative panels so stuffed with friends-of-the-Climategate-scientists and/or people with a strong Warmist bias and/or people with vested interests in the “low carbon” industry as to render their verdicts entirely meaningless.
Thanks to further research by Bishop Hill and the indefatigable David Holland – he who uses FOI requests like the US military uses drone strikes – we learn that the UEA paid no less than £300,000 for another of these “independent” inquiries, the Russell Review. And to judge by the latest revelations here and here the UEA is not about to acquire a reputation for fairness and scrupulous transparency any time soon.
Obviously, if Sir Edward Acton wants me to go into a bit more detail about the grotesque inadequacies of the Climatic Research Unit, why the University of East Anglia has become a standing joke, how the Climategate emails showed the scientists at the very heart of the IPCC to be untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions,or why it is that Professor Phil Jones is more likely to find himself remembered for the Climategate scandal than he is to find himself mentioned in the same breath as Einstein, Newton or Watson and Crick, I should be more than happy to do so.
