Dec 18 2011
Jones’ CRU/IPCC Data Lost, Corrupted & Unrepeatable
Addendum: At the end of this post I note how Phil Jones finally admits he has lost or overwritten the original raw data from prior CRU products. One of Jones’ admissions is that his group continuously overwrites their data. He tries to say some data has not been ‘adjusted’ or deleted, etc. But the truth is he has reprocessed the data so many times very little of it is still pristine. As I said at the end, this invalidates all claims to date built upon this unverifiable data. Without the ability to reproduce results, then the results cannot be defended. My guess is only 10-20% of the data is untouched. And it is the ‘adjustments’ on the remaining that needs to be audited and cross checked. Going forward there may be some claims to be derived, but nothing in the current record that cannot be reproduced would be considered verified.
Addendum2: What we may be seeing in all this is the slow biasing of ground station data as discovered at NCDC recently. Would it be true irony if the ‘divergence’ Briffa detected in the tree rings was actually all the fudging Jones was doing on the temp record? – end addendum
In a previous post on the ClimateGate 2 emails I noted how Phil Jones, the head of CRU, was a serial deleter and FOIA dodger. I was being too kind.
I decided it would be worthy to paint the evolving picture of how this man lied to people requesting data and – worse – how he lied to his coworkers at UAE and CRU. If anyone is regretting the new release of emails it is Phil Jones (though Michael Mann will come in a close second).
The emails show over time an arrogant ass fool who felt he was too pure to be bothered with criticism, technical challenges and scientific scrutiny. Time and time again he simply made things up and communicated these fantasies as fact. The email record exposes a petty and whiny man whose career should now be truly over.
Let’s begin the story in Feb of 2004 with email 1076336623 between Phil Jones and Tas Van Ommen, who is holding proxy data from Antarctica. In the email Jones and Ommen conspire to deny Steve McIntyre the raw data he requested, even though Tas Van Ommen has the data in hand. The lies spewed by these two disreputable scientists is astonishing:
Ommen to Phil: What you will find below is (in reverse chronological order) an email interchange between Steve McIntyre and myself. He has been asking for LD [Law Dome] data for a while (since your GRL paper came out) and to my chagrin, I have put him off once already, for reasons I spell out below.
…
Ommen to McIntyre: Dear Stephen,
The 18O data used in Mann and Jones 2003 was provided as an advance copy in 2003, and you are welcome to have access to it and it will certainly be placed in public archives.
….
It is this next paper that controls the timeframe for release to you and archives. While I should await peer review for a release to the archives, I am happy to pass on a copy of the data set to you on an advance basis as soon as the paper is submitted I expect in a couple of months.
Phil to Ommen: Dear Tas,
Thanks for the email. Steve McIntyre hasn’t contacted me directly about Law Dome (yet), nor about any of the series used in the 1998 Holocene paper or the 2003 GRL one with Mike. I suspect (hope) that he won’t. I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in CRU. At that time, I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through GCOS.
Keep note of this lie about the Met Services, because Jones will later claim it was National Met Services (NMSs) that were the source and that it was they who were stopping him from providing the raw ground station data.
A year later in Feb 2005 we have email #1107454306 between Mann and Jones. Here is what Jones has to say as be plays the part of a braggart:
The two MMs [McIntyre and McItrick] 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.
Jones is really worried about these two ‘skeptics’ since they know a lot more about statistic than poor ol’ Phil. And thus begins a sad saga of deception and delay. The man has lost his mind and now is obsessed with hiding the data – or more accurately the major problems with the data.
By January 2007 (email #1432) the FOIA requests were starting to rattle CRU and now Jones is having to start ‘splaining what the fuss is all about.
I would suggest you contact the Met Office, to get their view on the use of FOIA on this. … The data requested are not on our site or theirs (Met Office). What is there [at CRU], as you’ve found out, is gridded data where we combine the station data, with marine data (which the Hadley Centre, Met Office only have)
Here Phil begins to admit he does not have the raw data anymore to reproduce the ‘gridded data’. It is the processed ‘gridded data’ that needs to be validated in order to determine if the grids are correctly built, which are in turn used to build regional, hemispheric and global temperature anomalies. If this first step is garbage (or biased), then all conclusions based on it are also garbage. Phil knows the raw data is needed to verify the gridded product.
Phil Continues:
I suspect this request is from a climate change skeptic who wishes to try and discredit me, by finding some bad data or bad stations which we likely shouldn’t have used [1]. The law of large numbers, however, means that the average is amazing robust to a few outliers. We have also spent years of effort trying to reduce these outliers to a minimum. It would be extremely difficult for anyone to exactly reproduce what we have with the Met Office jointly produced [2].
Two more hints of honesty from Jones. First he now claims the purpose is to find bad station data. He will repeat this in later emails, exposing the fact the data is not just lost, but in really bad shape. The second fact he exposes is it is nearly impossible to reproduce his past results. Which, per the standards of the scientific method, means the conclusions must be withdrawn. This also affirms the skeptics claims that one cannot simply go to the US data sets and rebuild Jones’ claims.
Finally Jones changes his story as it applies the NMSs:
The data have been collected over many years, and in come cases we have been given data from national met services (NMSs) on the proviso that we do not pass on the raw data to third parties, but we can use them in derived products – such as HadCRUT3.
Finally, I’m not sure this data are mine to pass on. I do pass small subsets of the data onto fellow scientists, but never the whole dataset. None of the data are collected by us. We assemble it from what NMSs in all the countries provide over a system called the CLIMATE network.
So Jones now claims he does get the data from the NMSs – completely opposite the claim he gave to Tas Van Ommen. He also notes that he has violated the rule on passing data to third parties before (and he actually has done it many times before). He’ll return to this subject in a gross and pathetic way in 2009.
By March 2007 (email #4341) comments at McIntyre’s Climate Audit site have caused University of East Anglia mamagers to take notice and start taking over the FOIA response battle:
I repeat, I am not primarily interested in the dispute between yourself and ClimateAudit and will keep my opinions to myself. However when I read that people are suggested methods of legal redress against the University for not supplying research data, I felt that I needed to act.
This is from Alan Kendell who had to alert one David Palmer (FOIA Manager) to the true mess Phil Jones had created. The echoes of this concern are captured in the email traffic captured at the end of this email – I suggest everyone read this in its entirety. For example, Phil tries to claim the gridded data should be good enough (even though that is the result people want to verify):
I have told these people on several occasions that some of the data are restricted. They refuse to believe this. We make all the gridded data available on the CRU web site. 99.9% of climate scientists are happy with this, and our data are widely used.
Here Phil is lying to his CRU and UEA colleagues. He is not being open and honest, but he will be in less than a month. Phil whines and moans a lot as the new scrutiny kicks in. My favorite line is how on one hand Jones complains about having to deal with ‘blogs’, but on the other tries to point the powers that be at UEA to an alarmist blog for cover:
Alan,
I appreciate your concern about UEA and ENV’s image, but I don’t appreciate you calling our press office about what is happening on the Climate Audit website. The website is run by a self appointed group, who ignore most climate facts. They are not interested in getting at the truth. If you want to learn more about the subject I would suggest the Real Climate website.
One month later, in April 2007 (#email #0314) Phil starts coming clean on what is the real problem – he does not have the data to reproduce his results. This is a response he has worked with David Palmer:
I can’t do anything about B. This is because I don’t have a copy of the station data we had in 1990. The station database evolves and we weren’t able to keep versions of it – as we added, amended and deleted stations. We didn’t have the data storage luxuries we have now.
Tell him the best he can do is to use the current version of CRUTEM3(v) or CRUTEM2(v) – as the latter is still available on our web site, though not updated beyond 2005.
These latest versions are likely different from what we had in 1990. Australia and China have both released more data since then – it is likely that much of this was not digitized in 1990. He will say the grid resolution is now different, but this is again due to greater disk storage available.
It will take 2 years before this failure is made public. Along the way Jones will spin out variations of these lame and irrelevant excuses. By 2009 – after a year of trying to avoid complying with the law and acting like a real scientist – things begin to move fast. Jones has another flash of openness in a May 2009 email (#4460):
We could decide to make the station data available that will go into CRUTEM4 (and hence HadCRUT4). My issue about not doing it is when will it stop. They will then want programs. As you know there are two key files (the 61-90 normals and the SD file). The station headers within the station data aren’t that well documented.
If MOHC does release the station data, I’ll let MOHC deal with all the flak. You don’t know what some of the header info is, for example. There are codes that cause some series to only get used from certain dates. I can barely remember some of it.
Again, we learn something totally damning to the IPCC claims. The station data they still have is also crap. Those problems Jones blamed on 1980s storage capacity are still there – and not due to lack of storage, Jones has no idea what makes up the gridded products nor whether it is any good. Again, under the professional standards of the scientific and engineering processes and methods, the fact the data is garbage means all claims derived from it are now invalid.
Another May 2009 email (#2117) shows Jones collating a series of half truths and excuses. Phil is responding to the Met Office as it works to actually meet their FOIA requirements
2. I have signed agreements with some Met Services (European ones) in the 1990s that I would not pass on their data to third parties. The data could be used in the gridding though and gridded products made available. I never kept a list of which stations these were though, as I never thought such problems would arise.
3. Work on the land station data has been funded by the US Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this in 2007.
4. You web site says that anyone requesting the data should apply to me, so tell him that’s what they should do. I think you should remove this sentence, by the way. It is this that has opened up the issue again.
5. The data aren’t yours to release! Maybe there is no formal IPR agreement, but there is an implicit one.
6. We’ve altered the version that you have anyway. We’re also in the process of doing more of this.
7. You’d need to waste your time combining the two parts of the data and removing the stations that don’t get used.
So let’s review. In ‘2’ Jones claims he has some old agreements (somewhere), but he cannot connect the agreements to the station identifiers. So he basically is saying he never could protect the date rights. In ‘3’ he postulates a complete lie. All US federally funded work is available to anyone as public property. The DoE would never, and could never, make such an assertion (take it from a person who has made a living in federal contracting). At best the contractor (in this case CRU) can make a claim of IPR, but it has to do so at the time and when the data was generated and labeled as such.
In ‘5’ Jones admits he does not really have any signed agreements. He has verbal or imagined agreements. In ‘6’ he admits that CRU to this day does not retain copies (configuration managed) of the data has it is processed. A serious breach of data auditing and another reason his units work is unrepeatable. And finally in ‘7’ he confirms a prime complaints of the skeptics – without knowing which stations to use in developing the gridded data, you cannot replicate CRU results. A major and damning admission.
So the skeptics were right. Jones’ methods are not repeatable, his data is not controlled and maintained and even he cannot replicate his results. In a July 2009 email (#1577) Jones confirms many of these revelations:
Also from looking [at Climate Audit] they will not stop with the data, but will continue to ask for the original unadjusted data (which we don’t have) and then move onto the software used to produce the gridded datasets (the ones we do release). CRU is considered by the climate community as a data centre, but we don’t have any resources to undertake this work. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
Phil makes another accidental admission (clearly due to the frustration by him losing the FOIA battle). He states the work is done under research grants and must be hidden. Why? Did they misuse funds? Did thees grants come from US and UK funds – and therefore expose his team to full scrutiny? Note how is latest fear is the code being exposed (which a lot was in Climategate 1 and showed shoddy work). Is there much more here?
In an August 2009 email (#3497) Jones reaches an all time low in rationalizing his actions:
I did send some of the data to a person working with Peter Webster at Georgia Tech. The email wasn’t to PW, but he was in the CC list. I don’t know how McIntyre found out, but I thought this was a personal email. This was one of the first times I’d sent some data to a fellow scientist who wasn’t at the Hadley Centre. As I said I have taken pity on African and Asian PhD students who wanted some temperature and precipitation data for their country.
I also don’t see why I should help people, I don’t want to work with and who spend most of their time critisising me.
The man is clearly losing it, The folks at CRU and UEA are trying to work with him to do the right thing and he whines about it.
The excuse making continues in email #0752. Finally the true picture comes to light in October 2009 as Phil is forced to fess up (see email #1192):
Phil’s comment:
No one, it seems, cares to read what we put up on the CRU web page.
…
If we have lost any data it is the following:
1. Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.
2. The original data for sites that we adjusted the temperature data [Phil: for known inhomogeneities, or what?] in the 1980s. We still have our adjusted data, of course, and these along with all other sites that didn’t need adjusting.
3. Since the 1980s as colleagues and NMSs [National Meteorological Services] have produced adjusted series for regions and or countries, then we replaced the data we had with the better series.
This is just stunning. He went from pretending to hide data from a scientific critic to admitting he does not have the data. And now we know more about why.
According to ‘1’ he threw out (cherry picked?) data that did not fit their expectations and assumptions. That is clear and obvious. ‘2’ is an admission all he has is the output of his calculations – not the inputs. So not only is the data he filtered out loss (and why he filtered it) what he has has been ‘adjusted’. It is this “selection” and “adjustment” process nf raw data that drives the gridded products. This is what everyone wants to confirm.
‘3’ again indicates he does not even hold copies of the original data, but lets the NMSs overwrite data without any controls.
What a mess. What a liar. All those people who believed Phil Jones was a qualified man of science with a clear audit trail of his work now know he was a shoddy charlatan.
If this had been data on medical trials for drugs, structural testing for foundations, buildings or bridges, or safety data on cars, trains or planes the man would be fired and possibly charged with some form of criminal negligence. But this is climate science, where professional rules of conduct are apparently optional.
I really like this statement from above:
“I never kept a list of which stations these were though, as I never thought such problems would arise.”
you can read that as ‘we just assumed that everyone would buy our story hook, line and sinker, without question, why should we have to keep ‘data’ to prove it?.’ kinda arrogant.
As was pointed out, there are many other examples of their ignorance.
but I fear ‘climategate’ is only the tip of the iceberg. I suspect there are many other fields that are just as corrupt.
Very good rundown – I think one point needs to be repeated again and again, because people not familiar with the process have a hard time believing how rotten it is.
To recap, there is no such a measurable thing as “average temperature” for the world, or even for any region. The only actual, physical data that anyone can measure are a host of individual data points that vary because of elevation, or proximity to water, or influence by man made structures (UHE). You cannot simply average these numbers together without taking into account their geographic distribution and the factors that influence each individual location. Even keeping the number and location of the stations constant wouldn’t give you a usable number, since circumstances such as increasing urbanization cause the nature of individual stations to change over time. (and in fact, the number and location of stations used in these calculations has changed radically over time)
And yet…. every climate theory ever put together is absolutely dependent on these elusive “average” temperatures. Without them, any theory about global “changes” collapses before it even starts. This is what Phil Jones and his partners worked so hard to create. They collected RAW data from around the world, and then created a magical program that took in all the raw data, supposedly “adjusted” it for every local variation, and spit out “average temperatures.”
All climate calculations done by everyone in the world depend on these “Average” numbers, not on actual data. The actual, physical data does not even come close to supporting any of these theories – only the re-manufactured data does. BUT – for the remanufactured “data” to have any validity others need to be able to go into the data, look at the adjustments that were made, and recreate them. Without that, what we have is just a string of random numbers that are, to put it bluntly, made up nonsense.
Now Phil Jones has revealed that they have no idea what “adjustments” they made. Mathematically, what happened was that they took a string of numbers “the original data”, and then applied a complicated algorithm to it to create “adjusted data”. But that didn’t do what they wanted, so they took the results and applied another algorithm – and then another, and then another. THEN they threw away ALL the algorithms – no records! this is what was lost! AND they threw away all of the original numbers, the “raw data” they had started with.
Mathematically, this means that the “temperature record” no longer has any predictable relationship to the raw data, and no one can calculate how to get back to where they started from where they are, because the missing algorithms were too complicated to reverse once they were lost.
And this brings us to the big, not so secret “Secret” that no one in government or the AGW alarmist crowd wants to admit – that the entire data stream we have now consists of complete mathematical garbage – it is just an output of a computer game based on no-one-knows-what. We might as well be looking at the digital output of a donkey kong game from the 80’s that somebody left running and forgot about. The numbers that *every* climate calculation depends on how hopelessly corrupted garbage with no mathematical relationship to the actual, original data.
It is all total crap – and Phil Jones knows it.
This means that *every* study, *every* research paper, *every* IPCC report – EVERY CAREER! – bases on these numbers over the last 30 years is TOTAL GARBAGE.
If we really wanted to understand what’s happening to climate, EVERY paper written, every study done, every graduate degree granted for the last 30 years has to be torn up and thrown in the dumpster, where it belongs. That’s what these emails from Phil Jones mean.
And once again – Phil Jones knows it, and so most of the others involved in these emails. Which is the final straw of evidence we needed to show that this is not just a “mistake” some scientists made, this is an absolute, total, legally defined Fraud on the citizens of the world – perhaps the greatest Scientific Fraud ever pulled.
They all belong in prison for the rest of their lives. They are not just bad scientists – they are deliberate and intentional thieves and liars, every one of them. Which of course is the reason they now have to fight to the death to protect their “work” – because to admit the truth now is to plead guilty to literal crimes against humanity.
Thieves, liars, and grifters – every one of them. And that goes for their supporters as well.
Don’t mince words WWS – tell us what you really think!
😉
It will take a while to sink in, but the inconvenient truth is there is no scientific foundation upon which to make any IPCC claim or prediction.
None. Pull out the station record and you have nothing.
One has to wonder if the tree ring ‘divergence’ is due to all the ‘adjusting’ Phil and company did in the record to try and show recent warming!
Think about it. The divergence could have been the statistics catching all the biases in Jones’ mess!
My favorite line in all these emails may be: “We have also spent years of effort trying to reduce these outliers to a minimum.”
There are very specific statistical tests to determine if a data point can be considered an outlier. To exclude a data point from a data set it must meet these stringent tests as well as being subject to a rationale, (a physical explanation) as to why it is not part of the population you wish to exclude it from. It is not enough just to say that the data point doesn’t fit in as well as other data points so we’re going to exclude it as an outlier.
For example, it may be tempting to exclude low tensile strength data from a population so the design minima can be higher. But unless you can show a legitimate reason to exclude the data – perhaps a test sample anomaly or test equipment error – you cannot exclude data just to make the results more convenient for you.
Jones has worked for years to exclude data that doesn’t fit his hypothesis and has kept no records detailing what data was excluded and why it was excluded. He has cherry picked data he wants to use that fits his desired outcome, transformed other data to make it fit his desired outcome, and thrown out other data as “outliers”. Any undergraduate student studying statistics can tell you that this invalidates the entire analysis. The resulting conclusions are unsupportable at best, complete nonsense at worst.
Put it this way. Suppose an aircraft manufacturer wants their plane to have a specific maximum gross weight so they can sell its extraordinary range. The airframe structure is too heavy so they go back to the design data, remove all the low data points, increase the design minima, and then build the airframe 20% lighter. Would you (or Phil Jones for the matter) want to fly on that aircraft???
They apparently have calculations (adjustments) to try and account for all the various things you point out WWS. The problem is…that’s still open to interpretation…despite the fact that they can get people to agree with their approach to how they are correcting data for these things.
They believe…that if 2 or more people can apply the same method of correction to the same starting data…that this proves their underlying theory and this was the very evidence that he used to defend himself in UK inquiry.
It’s like playing whack-a-mole.
DC, they *claim* to have calculations to account for those things. But when scientists from outside the tightly knit warmist community that calls itself “the team” ASKED for these calculations, they were denied. This is the issue that started all of the Freedom of Information Act requests. (FOIA). A bunch of other stuff came out – but the key piece was that Jones and his allies had lost track of the original algorithms used for adjustment while erasing all of their original data.
There is no way left to unscramble the eggs – meaning that they have no way to tell anyone what they did to the data anymore. Although in one surviving bit of information, apparently at one point they put in a negative scalar to reduce all the temperatures before 1940, and put in a multiplier to boost all temperatures after 1960.
When asked how much they cut pre-1940 temperatures and raised post-1960 temperatures, all they can say is “we don’t really know, can’t be recalculated. But here’s our temperature record, it’s accurate!”
To put it as simply as possible, there is NO real temperature data anymore. (unless someone starts from scratch from the old printed almanacs) All the electronic data has been hopelessly and intentionally perverted until it means absolutely nothing at all. What we have is nothing but a string of garbage digits manipulated to give an outcome that will transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from the public to the fraudsters who are responsible for this travesty.
There doesn’t need to be.
You first have to understand the UN program of “Sustainable Development” then in that context lookup the “Precautionary Principle”
This goes back to the treaty created in Rio in 1998 or 1999 that George HW Bush signed and that was ratified by the Senate under Clinton, I believe.
What it basically says is that under the “Precautionary Principle” there is no need to show cause and effect and “scientific uncertainty” is not justification for not acting. In other words, all the IPCC has to show is that it CO2 is rising, CO2 *could* cause climate to warm, and that a warming climate *could* cause an environmental impact. That is all the UNFCCC needs to act under the “Precautionary Principle”.
There is no need to show that climate IS changing due to CO2. There is no need to show that there IS any harm being done by climate change. Those items are quite beside the point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
In other words, the way this is written, for us NOT to take these climate change actions, we must PROVE that CO2 isn’t harmful. That is impossible. You can not prove a negative. You can not prove what is NOT happening or what does NOT exist. You can only prove what DOES exist and what IS happening. It is impossibly to prove something does not exist because all you can prove is that you haven’t yet found any evidence of it. You can’t say that just because you haven’t found evidence that such evidence doesn’t exist.
How would you go about proving that CO2 isn’t harmful? You would first look at the temperature databases. Oh but those are being adjusted nearly monthly making temperatures before 1950 colder and temperatures after 1950 warmer. There has been considerable adjustment of the NOAA database in this regard just since July of this year.
If you are arguing this from the science you are wasting your time. The science doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it IS warming or not. It only matters that it COULD warm and that gives the UNFCCC all it needs “scientific uncertainty” notwithstanding.
Ooops mean 1989 I think.
In addition to “Sustainable Development” you might look up other things such as “Agenda 21” this has been a recent topic of discussion at E.M. Smith’s blog:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/
Agenda 21 is the UN agenda that implemented “Sustainable Development” which is an Orwellian term that means that your community would turn over its development policy to the UN and do things according to UN regulations instead of having your local elected representatives involved.
It basically removes any representatives of the people from the process and turns policy making over to unelected bureaucrats who weren’t voted in to office and can’t be voted out of office. If you don’t like it, tough, there is nothing you can do because the UN said so.
[…] http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/17760 […]
CP, while I agree the UN and other bureaucrats have crafted nice and surreal prose to cover themselves, the truth is if they are exposed as making up data or being far less than the minimal standard, then a political opposition can undercut their credibility and stop the attempt to loot people and put them under one world government of lefty do-gooders.
People want to help a good cause and will sacrifice for a good cause. But they get really angry if that could will is used to trick them into giving up their hard earned money or opportunity for freedom of choice.
It is our responsibility to uncover how the UN and IPCC are lying to Americans to fool them into a cage.
Do I care if Russia or the EU are fooled? Not really. Canada and the UK and others are starting to realize that the US is not going to cripple its economy on such foolishness. Combined with the fact the science behind AGW is crumbling and the Earth is not warming, people will simply dump the IPCC into the dustbin of history – as long as the US holds out.
And that really is why we have such a rare place on this planet. As long as we don’t fall for the lies, time will expose the IPCC foolishness. We just have to hang on and let this play out.
Maybe, but we would have to pull out of several treaties in order to do that, including the Rio Agreement that George HW Bush signed us up to. For all practical purposes we have committed ourselves to these processes formally through treaty. We must first remove ourselves from these treaties and I don’t see how that is going to happen.
For example, to eliminate “Sustainable Development” would be played by the Democrats as the US wanting unsustainable development. That is not true. It is just that the phrase “sustainable development” has been coopted in an Orwellian fashion to basically mean depopulating rural areas and packing everyone into cities along “corridors”.
CP,
Give Americans some credit. Yes, an OWS-fool would be easily duped by clever titling, but most voters know snake oil when they see it.
Gidday AJStrata – in your post “Jones’ CRU/IPCC Data Lost, Corrupted & Unrepeatable” – which I found an enjoyable read – you say [All US federally funded work is available to anyone as public property. The DoE would never, and could never, make such an assertion (take it from a person who has made a living in federal contracting).]
Are you up to date with the fact that in 2005 the DoE emailed me as follows
On October 12, 2005, Thomas Boden of the U.S. Department of Energy (copy to D.P. Kaiser) replied as follows:
Subject: Re: Station data required for 1856-2004 Jones et al
Dear Warwick,
Unfortunately, our data center does not have any of the six requested items. You will need to contact Phil directly. I spoke today with the DOE program manager who indicated Phil was not obligated under the conditions of past or present DOE proposal awards to provide these items to CDIAC. I regret we cannot furnish the materials you seek.
Regards,
Tom Boden
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Some of the story is here;
http://climateaudit.org/2005/10/15/we-have-25-years-invested-in-this-work/
I have a recent post;
“US Dept of Energy – should come under more scrutiny”
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=1198
includes a link to a FoxNews story picking up on the above email.
Well, I am honored to have you drop by Warwick! I read a lot about you on the AGW front.
And yes I did read that email from DoE and the Fox News story. All the products that went into the DoE studies are property of the US Government unless stated otherwise in contract and by labeling – which is why you don’t lose IPR rights when providing the government IPR – you have to note it in the contract and label it. IT stays protected and can only be distributed under your authorization.
I could see how Phil might have an argument on the raw data since he claimed his product was gridded station data sets. But we would have to see the contract and I seriously doubt they covered themselves.
Now, DoE is not as stringent as NASA and DoD when it comes to contract details. These entities manage 100’s and 1000’s of contracts a year. The CRU contract doesn’t look proper from a myriad of angles, so I doubt the IPR clauses were followed.
My guess is the PM could argue the raw data is not a deliverable of the contract, but that also is not sufficient in many cases. The methodology to produce the products sure as heck is available for government review and scrutiny.
Sad truth is, if the PM wants to cover for CRU they will. If they wanted to investigate CRU for not following the FAR, they could as well. It is up to the PM to decide – and he/she may be biased or unwilling to get into the mud.
But the fact is Jones acted as if the DoE Program authorized him to avoid FOIA – and that is not what the PM said. The PM said the DoE could not force joins to follow UK FOIA. Subtle, but true.
Gidday Warwick,
On further reflection let me add a few things:
If a congressional committee investigates, the DoE will fold like a cheap lawn chair. If it comes down to their careers or Jones’, they will CYA.
But also – if Jones supplied the source data to DoE – anyone can get it unless Jones has an IPR clause. And you can find out if there is an IPR clause easily (just ask).
So don’t feel like this is a done deal. Jones put the DoE folks in a box and they now desperately want out. It is now their butts on the line.
Crosspatch – treaties and agreements are embarrassingly easy to get out of, and the US has done this dozens of times in its history. (not that we’re real eager to admit this in any of the history books)
All a nation does is to get out of a treaty is to quit recognizing its terms. That lets the other parties of the treaty out of any obligations they may have had, and the treaty is now dead for all. Now that may piss off the other parties to the treaty, and they may try to retaliate in some way. Well, then the US gets to retaliate back – recently the US and Mexico just finished a round of this back and forth, after the US refused for a while to recognize the trucking terms of the NAFTA treaty. (we didn’t like it, so we said screw the treaty, we’re not doing it, and did that for 15 years.)
as far as anyone who wants to enforce a dead treaty, it always comes down to – you and what army? The Europeans have been the ones who have been at the forefront of this idea of running the world through agreements and treaties – and yet now they are so weak and desperate for support that we can do anything we want and they’re not going to say boo about it.
The instant we say there’s no treaty, then there’s no treaty. Which really points out how worthless the entire effort was.
[…] recent warming. Not only was the CRU temperature record completely unverifiable and unmaintained (see here), the premise behind tying today’s temperature back 1500 years via tree rings was also a […]
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