There will be at least two new posts later this month. Meanwhile, the last Open Thread is getting a little long, so here’s a new one.
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Exploring climate science, and climate science misinformation, in Canada and beyond
There will be at least two new posts later this month. Meanwhile, the last Open Thread is getting a little long, so here’s a new one.
Deep Climate 
Just when you thought McIntyre couldn’t sink any lower, here’s the opening from his latest at ClimateAudit.
And the conclusion:
It’s hard not to transpose the conclusions of the Penn State Climategate “investigation” into Penn State’s attitude towards misconduct charges in their profitable football program
I didn’t believe my eyes that McIntyre actually typed that. So I had to go to Climate Fraudit to see it for myself. *SMH*
Let’s see. McIntyre point-blankly equates pedophilia with a scientific non-event.
McIntyre opines that the gruesome sexual assault of at least 8 minors by a demonic individual is somehow associated with the most exonerated climatologist, nay, scientist in recent history.
McIntyre somehow relates the suffering and loss of innocence of these victims with his own arrogance and self-inadequacies.
As someone who knows of friends who have suffered similar sexual abuse, and is aware of the pain and prolonged suffering these victims endure for years after the abuse…I have extreme contempt of what McIntyre just posted.
Pathetic. What a f***ing pathetic individual he is.
It’s the perfect (despicable) example of the logical fallacy of guilt by association.
Anyone who resorts to this strategy has obviously thrown to the winds any pretense of reasoned rationality.
One more thing. To understand how wrong McIntyre is on this one – and why I am so p***ed off by this – I would suggest reading the grand jury report here. Warning – it is graphic.
Only someone as pathetic as McIntyre can compare that to the non-event of the CRU hack.
And McIntyre reader’s know how to join to the dots – a WUWT commenter calls Michael Mann a “climate pedophile”.
And those boys get abused yet again, thanks to the trivialization of their rapes by one Steve McIntyre. Disgusting.
There are no lower limits for people like McIn**** [edit] and his right wing friends. The point about constantly lowering the bar is that you acustom the gormless to ever more outrageous mendacities. A greedy minority is quite prepared to wreck the furture of the human race and many other species too, to have luxury undreamed of by Croesus, Roman Emperors, or the Moghuls. [DC: Edit – Sorry, certain historical parallels are not permitted here. ]
Surely if there is any justice in the world Mann now has grounds to sue McIntyre for libel or defamation?
McIntyre’s “case” is so vacuous that he has to resort to slander. When it comes to the science he has nothing and he knows it. I pity pathetic losers like McIntyre.
History is going to judge McIntyre very very harshly. It’s a small consolation right now but it’s the truth.
Watts joins in too.
“Steve McIntyre writes about what many of us have been thinking about Penn State’s failures at investigating its own, such as the appearance of a whitewash investigation done about Dr. Michael Mann and Climategate”
I’m not sure I really want to, but in case Watts goes all shy about his reprehensible participation in McIntyre’s just-as-reprehensible mud-slinging, I backed up the page:
http://backupurl.com/i41mve
After reading a few of the comments, all I can do is shudder with revulsion.
For posterity, in case McIntyre either grows a conscience or a healthy respect for lawsuits:
http://backupurl.com/s4rzry
Someone ought to alert the the families of the victims, the media and Penn State about what McIntyre is doing.
Steve McIntyre and his ilk (e.g., Ross McKitrick) are morally bankrupt. No words can describe my anger at this uncalled for action by McIntyre who is knowingly trying to capitalize on (and benefit from) the suffering and pain of sexual assault victims. Absolutely disgusting in the extreme.
Rob is correct, history is going to judge McIntyre and his ilk very harshly. In fact, I hope a court of law judges McIntyre harshly in the very near future.
On a more serious note, what is happening to the major climate zones? It would appear logical that with the Earth warming and the Arctic ice near a record low, the Hadley cell should be expanding and the Arctic Polar cell declining. Thus descending dry equatorial air would be coming down further north than previously. This would not bode well for Texas or much of the southern US. To see their future, one only has to look at North Africa or Arabia. I hope I’m wrong, but the heat of this summer suggests a different type of drought to what happened in the fifties. I’ve seen it suggested that it’s high pressure and the jet stream, but I suspect this is putting the cart before the horse. The high pressure is the descending dry air and it is adiabatically warmed, and so has an even greater affinity for any remaining moisture, thus the drought. The jet stream position would then be the consequence rather than the cause of this expanding equatorial Hadley cell. Is this what is happening now, is it a freak, or is it te first sign of what will happen later?
It seems particularly ironic that the southern politicians are the very people who most vehemently oppose any action to remediate climate change. The Tea Party does seem to be taken from “Alice in Wonderland.”
I suggest that part of Watts’s and McIntyre’s motive, maybe a large part, is to anger those concerned about climate change and thus prolong the debate. (Huh, now that I think of it, reminds me of the saying about not wrestling with a pig–you just get muddy, and the pig enjoys it.) True, it’s awful stuff, but the NSIDC graphic showing Arctic ice extent dipping below 2007 is much more awful and important. Let’s try to keep focused on communicating the science and what it is telling us about the risks of our planetary geoengineering experiment, and not get distracted (“Squirrel!”) by every provocation the (metaphorical) pigs dream up. If they distract us, they win.
Here in the UK Bishop Hill has piled in too. http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/11/11/corrupt-inquiries.html#comments
I have asked “Desperate stuff. This post is evidence that advocates positioned as skeptics will stop at nothing to slur climate scientists. Is there no connection too tenuous for you ?” But Montford doesnt answer, his usual crowd answer for him. So the answer is that there are no standards so low that they wont stoop to and no connection is too tenuous
And also from Climate Audit: the SwiftHacker pops up again, to scribble a laconic comment:
http://ijish.livejournal.com/38158.html
— frank
the mann investigation should be reopened
I thought that the denialists would try to use the scandal at Penn state to slime Dr. Mann, and they did. They don’t have scientific arguments, so they depend on guilt by association. they are pathetic. When my boys were in grade school (late 1980s), they attended one of the football summer camps. They enjoyed meeting all the famous players, and nothing bad happened. They were pretty shocked when I reminded them where their camp was. Still, I think those in power should have brought in the police instead of hushing it up.
I hope the British authorities discover the identities of those hackers who stole the CRU emails. The denialists think the cyber-criminals are heroes.
Some useful facts:
1) The inquiry/investigations at Penn State were handled in the normal way, under Hank Foley, VP Research, the job often responsible for academic misconduct investigations. (University Presidents nomrally don’t do this). PSU more than followed the rules, compatible with OSTP guidelines.
PSU got a flood of incoherent email, not a specific, well-documented complaint, but went ahead and synthesized real complaints as best they could, did an inquiry and then an investigation.
Most of the commenters at CA seem to have zero experience or knowledge of academic misconduct processes.
2) When the investigation committee’s names were announced (not required), within a day, the committee members were getting threats if they didn’t find Mann guilty.
3) McK says they didn’t ask Wegman. The Wegman Report was not scientifically credible when it started, and DC had already unearthed the first plagiarisms months before the investigation. By now, it is clear that Wegman is a serial plagiarizer and then lies about it, and of course, GMU is now 20 months into inability or unwillingness to handle relatively simple academic misconduct complaints. McI doesn’t seem to comment on that, other than to make up slander about Bradley copying Fritz.
4) McK quotes Lindzen. But Lindzen is also a demonstrated teller of untruths. See this, p.11, where Lindzen writes:
"Not surprisingly, efforts were made to get rid of the medieval warm period (According to Demming [sic], 2005, Jonathan Overpeck, in an email, remarked that one had to get rid of the medieval warm period. Overpeck is one of organizers in Appendix 1.)."
Demming, D. (2005) Global warming, the politicization of science, and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 19, 247-256."
Of course, JSE is my favorite Dog Astrology Journal, which figures in Discussion of The Hockey Stick Illusion.
See more on JSE and He Who Quotes from Dog Astrology Journal (HWQDAJ).
Deming’s paper does not mention Overpeck, and even in testimony for Inhofe, Deming didn’t mention Overpeck (he might have had to prove it). Lindzen wrote a clear untruth claiming Deming wrote something he had not. (And then HWQDAJ falsified it further in HSI.) BTW, McK+McI are quite fond of that Deming quote, used it in the talk for George Marshall Institute that was the blueprint for the Wegman Report.
Recently Barry Bickmore used it in this talk. It’s included in the 2-minute section from 17:00-19:00.
Re the JSE
[DC: More to come?]
John, if you or DC need any help, let me know 🙂
And let’s not forget that the NSF confirmed the Penn State findings exonerating Mann of msiconduct.
http://blogs.physicstoday.org/newspicks/2011/08/nsf-clears-michael-mann-of-cli.html
It might be worthwhile to point out that the reaction of many Penn State alumni has been to raise money for an organization that works against sexual violence. Michael Mann has tweeted about this.
http://rainn.org/news-room/alums-unite-to-show-what-penn-state-is-really-all-about
An excellent countervailing force to those PSU students who rioted in favour of [edit]. (What on earth were they thinking?)
— frank
Holly Stick
And that the quarterback of the team twittered about thinking of the victims (the kids, not the coach), not that Mann … well, I won’t go there.
At least Watts, McI, et al are on record:
Doing science is no different than [edited] ten-year old kids.
Really, I hope these disgusting threads are kept by someone. They’re really being indiscreet …
Done, to date:
There is a publication on the Internet that I stumbled across while following Kent Clizbe’s tweets. Clizbe claims to be a former CIA employee. He claims that global warming is a hoax, although the whole security establishment is concerned about climate change.
The publication is called “Office of Medical and Scientific Justice.” They put “office” in there so it sounds official.
They have an article by John O’Sullivan trashing Dr. Mann and they also have a lot of false information about AIDS.
http://www.omsj.org/
They don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS, etc. They claim Dr. Gallo, who discovered that HIV causes AIDS, is a fraud.
It is a really dreadful publication. Keep your eye on the climate change link.
http://www.omsj.org/category/issues/global-warming
I made a mistake when I was describing the Russian conference on geoengineering. It was actually hosted by Roshydromet, not the Russian Academy of Sciences. Don’t know why I was such a careless reader. Maybe I first saw something on the Academy site.
Roshydromet is the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring. They are sort of like NOAA.
http://www.pacc2011.ru/en/organizers.htm
They are considering putting aerosols in the atmosphere to keep some sun out so they can cool the planet. It is like causing a small nuclear winter.
Nuclear winter expert Dr. Alan Robock was scheduled to give a paper titled Smoke and Mirrors.
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/11/dr-alan-robock-explains-nuclear-winter.html
I commented at the disgusting McIntyre thread — cached at http://www.webcitation.org/63AWl331d :
Did Steve have the guts and transparency to post your comment? If so, did he respond?
[DC: Last time I checked it was there, but no response. Occasional cross-posting is fine, but I don’t necessarily want to get a running commentary of the back-and-forth on ClimateAudit. When the dust settles, I may do an overview of some of the more “interesting” comments. ]
What details does Steve know about the post made by “RC”, we know McIntyre investigates IP addresses, so did he do same for “RC”? Time for Mr. Steve McIntyre to cough up whatever he knows.
[DC: Personally, I don’t think making anyone’s IP address (or other information based on that IP) known publicly is justifiable. But McIntyre does have a duty to communicate any relevant details to those investigating the crimes (i.e. the Norfolk constabulary). ]
Hi DC,
“But McIntyre does have a duty to communicate any relevant details to those investigating the crimes (i.e. the Norfolk constabulary)”
That is what I was trying to suggest, sorry for not being clear. Any indication that McIntyre has done that? Probably pointless though as RC is likely just bouncing their IP around; but one never knows, all criminals slip up sooner or later.
McIntyre did give the IP address (82.208.87.170) for RC’s “A miracle just happened” comment. But as far as I know, he didn’t mention the IP address used by RC to submit the more recent “There was no deal made” comment.
82.208.87.170 seems to be a router which was accessible to the whole wide world until recently. It might have been simply part of a network of pwn3d machines.
— frank
It’s money. That’s why there’s no shame and no let-up. They’re hired guns.
Karl Rove’s playbook:
1) Attack your opponent’s strength from your weakness.
2) Accuse your opponent of doing what you’re doing.
(and here’s the currently most applicable one)
3) Be worse than anyone can imagine.
The playbook isn’t complicated and it explains so much.
“2) Accuse your opponent of doing what you’re doing.”
Regular tactic.
C`mon guys…it`s only about whether Spanier and his minions covered up both scandals..Mann should insist on an independent investigation to clear his name now that Spanier and others who exonerated him are now either fired or under indictment.
Well, there is the NSF IG investigation which cleared him.
“both scandals”?
Shame, shame, shame.
So, Jack, you are claiming that Sarah Assmann, Welford Castleman, Mary Jane Irwin, Nina Jablonski, Fred Vondracek and Candice Yekel are fired or under indictment? You see, those people constituted the committee that investigated and cleared Mann. Not Spanier.
Looks like libelous lies to me, Jack. Well done, heeding the dog whistle of The Auditor, and adding some further false charges. Do you feel proud?
I think the main point here is that Penn State did not investigate its own. McIntyre is not equating Mann’s actions to Sandusky’s actions. He is comparing the lack of investigation of each by the university.
BTW, this will not be good for Mann’s suit against Tim Ball. If Mann tries to claim he was cleared by university investigations, Ball’s attorneys will simply point out that Penn State has a history of covering up for its own.
Typical Ron Cram, defending McIntyre to the death.
Ball’s attorney would be stupid if he pointed to PSU’s history. He’d have to equate a non-investigation (on the pedophilia charges) with an actual investigation (two, actually) AND he’d have to explain away the NSF investigation. Two strikes.
Lack of investigation my behind: PSU investigated WITHOUT EVEN RECEIVING A FORMAL COMPLAINT!
Then how, pray tell, could the investigation be a whitewash, which has been the long-standing claim?
And I don’t care how you care to slice and dice it, WUWT and CA are smearing Mann by virtue of the fact that he works at the same university as a child molester.
And your support of this is contemptible.
Oh …
The child molestation scandal wasn’t known when Ball libeled Mann, so has no bearing on the case.
dhogaza, McIntyre has now added new lows, by discussing Lasaga, a convicted pedophile who once was a scientist at Penn State…
That’s right, more “guilty by association” argumentation. And his lap dogs are lapping it up like crazy.
Make a specific charge about an individual’s conduct.
Hang on, McI is now trying to make Mann guilty by association by dredging up some concocted association with a shamed scientist from way back when?! Wow, desperate times for McI.
Is it completely lost on McI that he is associated with, has collaborated with, aided (i.e., shared code with) and defended a serial plagiarist who goes by the name of Wegman? If he wants to try and play this “guilt by association” game, then we can assume that Mci is directly implicated in the very real Wegman plagiarism scandal, as opposed to his fantastical assertions against Mann. The irony is that the only person directly affiliated with someone who has engaged in academic misconduct here is McIntyre!
McI needs to stop and think before trying to fabricate unfounded smear against scientists. On second thoughts, nah, he should forge ahead and continue to make a complete fool of himself and perhaps end up in court too.
Jack McLaughlin:
Ron Cram:
Oh, really? Mann was exonerated by an inquiry panel and an investigation panel (for the vaguer, more general misconduct allegation). None of these panel members have been fired or are under indictment.
McIntyre’s piece was nothing more than a deeply offensive attempt to smear an inquiry into unfounded, politically-motivated accusations of research misconduct, by equating that inquiry/investigation with a completely unrelated coverup of sexual abuse.
And by the way, the National Science Foundation did an independent review of the PSU procceedings, and also exonerated Mann of the specific misconduct allegations, finding no credible evidence to support them. Somehow, McIntyre omitted that fact when he recently reiterated his long ago complaint of so-called “procedural errors” in the Mann inquiry:
Actually no, they did an independent review of Mike Mann, all over again from scratch. And specifically addressing McIntyre’s “concern” about not being invited.
Click to access NSF-Mann-Closeout.pdf
I take your point that the NSF conducted its own investigation de novo. But they also explicitly conducted a “review” of the Penn State proceedings.
The NSF OIG did find that Penn State should have gone further in their inquiry of the misconduct allegation, specifically by inviting critics to supply information that could support the allegation. However, this implied criticism does not extend to McIntyre’s specific procedural criticism (i.e. whether there was enough evidence for the allegation to go to the investigation stage).
In fact, after numerous interviews, the NSF came to the conclusion that there was no such evidence,
Not a lack of a “preponderance of evidence” necessary for a misconduct finding nor even weak evidence. There was no evidence whatsoever.
This raises another question that I have often wondered about. It seems inconceivable that Steve McIntyre would not have been one of the critics contacted. Sure enough, it turns out that McIntyre did discuss his interview with the NSF (in a discussion criticizing the NSF’s finding with regard to deletion of emails) in September of this year.
McIntyre appears not to have gotten around to that post yet. But one can only presume that the NSF was less than impressed with McIntyre’s “issues”. It is reasonable to infer that the NSF did review McIntyre’s incoherent baseless accusations regarding “hide the decline” and “withholding adverse findings”. And found that there was no evidence of scientific misconduct at all.
BTW, here is a direct link to the NSF report (at ThinkProgress).
Indeed, I should have said that they did both.
Actually at the time I was a bit unhappy with the OIG’s finding that Penn State hadn’t done enough; I didn’t think it was deserved, as no reasonable investigator familiar with the science would even want to interview these so-called ‘critics’. But perhaps the point was political, that in investigations of this kind of highly politicized issues it doesn’t harm to be seen to lean over backward a little. Anyway the OIG — apparently a bunch of lawyer types — learned the hard way what the PSU investigators could have told them. Good for them 😉
(And that’s the same NSF report link?)
(And that’s the same NSF report link?)
Yes, it’s the same report. At the time, the ThinkProgress piece said their link was easier because NSF required entering the case number.
However, here’s the NSF link based on the search for case A09120086.
> [Y]ou’d have thought that the university would have
> obtained the best possible professional advice
Meaning himself, no doubt
True, because he has no idea who they actually did consult … therefore his claim that they didn’t obtain the best possible advice is obviously self-referential.
David Schnare, the lawyer for the American Tradition Institute (ATI), has published rationalization for why he wants Dr. Mann’s emails.
“Our law center seeks to defend good science and proper governmental behavior, and conversely to expose the converse. Without access to those kinds of emails, and, notably, research records themselves, it is not possible for anyone to adequately credit good behavior and expose bad behavior. This is one of two reasons we prosecute this case. It is the core purpose of a freedom of information act.”
So I wanted all Schnare’s emails. All of them. It is the core purpose of ‘a’ freedom of information act… Guess it works one (totalitarian) way only.
Schnare spews a truckload of sanctimonious-sounding b******t about ‘scientific openness’ and ‘citizen sovereignity’.
Consider this. When Murry Salby presented some new finding which made some ‘skeptical’ claim about global warming, how many self-proclaimed ‘skeptics’ asked for his code and data? Zero.
So let’s, not for even a single minute, give any credence to the idea that the ATI lawsuit’s about “scientific openness”. The only purpose of this oil-funded ATI effort is to help the Koch-Murdoch Empire of B******t send a message: that no one who speaks the truth against the Empire of B******t will go ‘unpunished’.
It’s a harassment campaign, plain and simple.
— frank
Pingback: Denialist Porn-Chum — A New Low | The Policy Lass
So. Almost a week since these horrible posts went up.
I’ve been checking here (I don’t go to either ‘there’) for progress. I merely wanted to see what date they’d be pulled or comments shut down or something. Some indication that the perpetrators realised they’d overstepped the mark.
It’s not going to happen, is it. I feel numb about this one. Not sad or enraged or offended or disappointed. Just numb.
adelady:
No, the opposite, McI’s piling on. Along with the Lasaga travesty, he’s now blogging about “inside information” as to how the Penn State Inquiry Committee didn’t do their job or some such (I refuse to read the posts, much less the comments, but obviously there’s a hatchet job afoot).
It’s now 17 Nov, just two days before the second anniversary of SwiftHack. I wonder why McIntyre will come up with on that day…
— frank
I’m late to this game, but isn’t it ridiculous to make this a personal quest to destroy Michael Mann?
My impression was that his work has been replicated several times by other scientists. They’ve used different methods; they’ve used different data.
In the end, they all got “hockey sticks”.
So the result is there and it is not going away.
Trying to destroy Michael Mann won’t change that.
It’s abundantly clear that this anti-Mann campaign has nothing to do with the science.
More importantly, it has nothing to do with actually ‘changing the science’, as you suggest. As I said, this is a harassment campaign, plain and simple. The anti-Mann campaign’s just the Fossil Fools’ way of ‘punishing’ those who dare to speak the truth about climate science.
Do not be fooled.
— frank
The whole point of destroying the scientists researching climate is to make the public doubt the findings of those scientists. It’s a PR move, since that’s all the “skeptics” have now. They lost the science battle a long time ago, as the evidence (reality) passed them by. They don’ care how many times hockey sticks show up in independent studies, or how many studies show the instrumental record to be fundamentally sound; if they can make enough people believe that the science is corrupt, they’ve done their jobs. Whether the science is sound or not is irrelevant to them, as is the collateral damage that is done to the reputation all science by their attacks. This is what leads someone to pathetically try to smear Mann with the taint of pedophilia; the ends justify any means.
[DC: Edit – characterization over the line.]
“Trying to destroy Michael Mann won’t change that”.
These people aren’r dealing with science Jim, they’re attacking symbols.
And Mann’s instantly recognisable (even to laymen) hockey stick totem is heap big magic. That’s why they must destroy it. Or him.
McinTyres will go, Ahab-like, to his grave in the attempt.
[DC: edited].
But all to no avail, as you rightly point out.
Jim,
I agree that the pursuit of Michael Mann has long since passed the bounds of reasonableness and propriety. What I suspect is the green-eyed monster of professional jealousy has as much to do with it as anything else.
McIntyre seems to sail on with his mean obsession and his little Pequod of devoted followers ….
That lunatic John O’Sullivan is “linking” Mann with the accused child-molester Sandusky. It is pretty disgusting.
O’Sullivan claims:
“Cynically, Mann has been allowed by his university employers to keep the key metadata for his graph hidden under lock and key for over 13 years. He is set to plead the Fifth Amendment if a judge orders him to reveal it, in an ongoing courtroom investigation in Virginia.
Likewise, Sandusky also had his crimes covered up since 1998. Now Mann is working to block his former employer, the University of Virginia (UVa) from complying with a court order to release Mann’s hidden data to the Commonwealth’s Attorney General. I’ve no doubt that once prosecutors are permitted to examine that evidence which Spanier helped to hide Mann will be indicted on fraud charges.”
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/41610.html
O’Sullivan is just another purveyor of nonsense who managed to get on the denialist gravy train — see his involvement in the soi disant “Principia Scientific International” (http://principia-scientific.org/). Without the gravy train, he’s nothing more than a failed lawyer.
— frank
That’s a civil, not criminal, action. O’Sullivan seems to be an ignoramus.
Not to mention that it’s UvA that’s being sued in order to force them to release material, not Mann directly.
Frank, he is not a “failed lawyer”, in fact, he never was a lawyer but just dishonestly claimed that he was. See:
http://hot-topic.co.nz/the-gullible-leading-the-credulous-with-a-sting-in-the-tale/ and read the comments to this thread by askolnick which give details on O’Sullivan’s dishonesty regarding his legal qualification.
O’Sullivan and Skolnick get into it over at Lucia’s, starting around here.
One interesting quote from O’Sullivan:
“I have repeatedly stated, in response to Skolnick’s straw man claims,that I have never claimed to be a licensed attorney and as such cannot be accused of misrepresenting myself. It appears that others, perhaps even [Ball’s real lawyer] Michael Scherr , despite all the communications between us, has incorrectly assumed I was licensed. “
I’ll say. As Skolnick explained at Judith Curry’s:
“Indeed, Ball and his attorney Michael Scherr filed a response to the allegations in Dr. Mann’s defamation suit alleging that the communications between Ball and O’Sullivan are not actionable because of their attorney-client privilege.”
Oh, I see. It’s everyone else’s fault for failing to parse O’Sullivan’s statements carefully enough, even causing Scherr to make the huge mistake of assuming that O’Sullivan was a practicing attorney engaged by Ball. But there is plenty of room for such, um, misunderstandings, judging from his LinkedIn profile:
O’Sullivan is a member of the New York County Lawyers Association (NYCLA) and is litigating in two high-profile international lawsuits involving climatologists, Dr Michael Mann and Dr Tim Ball.
And here’s the kicker. Apparently, Skolnick asserted that O’Sullivan was not in fact a member of the NYCLA, as soon as O’Sullivan cganged his profile. In refuting this supposedly “false accusation”, O’ Sullivan produced this letter from the NYCLA.
Problem is it’s dated October 28, 2011 and welcomes him as a new member of the NYCLA.
Skolnick, again from October 15:
He falsely claimed to be a member of the American Bar Association. Following formal complaints I filed with the American Bar Association and the Law Society of British Columbia, he finally deleted his claim of membership in the American Bar Association from his LinkedIn profile — but replaced it with the equally false claim of membership in the New York County Lawyers Association. I called the membership director of the NYCLA last week and — surprise, surprise — she says there is no John O’Sullivan in its database.
So at the time O’Sullivan was certainly not a member of NYCLA, but maybe had applied or was about to. Maybe. But there’s more.
As Skolnick points out, even associate members must be admitted to the bar in some jurisdiction. But O’Sullivan himself says: “To be very precise, I have never claimed to be a licensed attorney and as such cannot be accused of misrepresenting myself.”
It turns out that O’Sullivan is a *provisional* member, a fact I found out by calling the NYCLA. This is a category meant to accomodate recent graduates who anticipate being admitted to the bar in the coming year.
So if O’Sullivan isn’t admitted to the bar, he’ll be turfed out within a year. Or maybe sooner, if the NYCLA takes a dim enough view of his various misrepresentations. For one thing, a non-practising lawyer can hardly claim to be “litigating in two high-profile international lawsuits”. Especially when he has no relationship to the actual law firm in the case.
You can’t make this stuff up.
A neat anecdote encapsulating the mile wide streak of dishonesty of running through denialism, and the – literal in this case – shysters involved.
I hope it ends up in immortalised in someone’s book some time.
John O’Sullivan sent me several emails and threatened legal action. He made claims about what I said that wildly mischaracterized what I said. In an email, he sounds like Donald Duck having a temper tantrum. You have to wipe off your screen from the spit after one of his emails.
He said he wasn’t going to initiate any legal action against me because nobody reads my blog.
O’Sullivan is like those bullies who say, “I’d beat you up, but you’re not worth it.
You have to actually check every single thing O’Sullivan claims that someone else says. He stuffs words in other people’s mouths just like Ward Churchill does.It is a well-known propaganda technique.
Normal critics who differ with you argue with what you really said, not what they falsely claim you said.
John O’Sullivan has been a guest on the Kremlin’s English-language satellite channel Russia Today. Notice how the interviewer pretends to ask tough questions.
O’Sullivan also claims there is corruption and fraud and that the climate scientists and government agencies cannot produce the evidence of climate change. The denialists just keep repeating this falsehood about the lack of evidence even though it is not true.
O’Sullivan is a propagandist who masquerades as a lawyer in order to intimidate people. I doubted he was a lawyer because I know that skilled lawyers don’t act like O’Sullivan. I also told him that I have access very large, powerful law firm, which is true.
O’Sullivan blocked my emails so he wouldn’t have to hear any facts.
Denialists try to give the impression that they have the law enforcement as well as intelligence agencies behind them, but really they are scared of emails from ordinary members of the public like me.
O’Sullivan has claimed on this AIDS-conspiracy website that Dr. Mann keeps his “alleged dodgy data….hidden for over a decade. ”
http://www.omsj.org/corruption/michael-%E2%80%98climategate%E2%80%99-mann-suffers-three-legal-blows-in-court-escapade
The article seems like a parody. It would be funny, except that people may believe it.
This conspiracy site is supposedly run by a former LAPD detective. He is sort of like the retired CIA operative Kent Clizbe who brags about being in the CIA but doesn’t tell his readers that the CIA has a Center for Climate Change and National Security.
O’Sullivan claimed that Dr. Mann suffered “legal blows” in court. He gives a lot of “legal” opinions that were not really at issue in this hearing. O’Sullivan claims that Mann did not give any evidence that he owns his proprietary materials.
Actually, Dr. Mann says that his data was on the Internet in his 1995 letter to Joe Barton. Mann’s says that his computer code is his personal property, however. Researchers only need the data to replicate his research. They can make their own computer code to run Dr. Mann’s data.
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/11/dr-michael-manns-data-is-available-on.html
Even if Internet links to data change when government agencies and university websites reorganize, I expect Dr. Mann’s data is available.
In this letter he gave the websites as they existed in 1995.
Click to access Mann_response_to_Barton.pdf
I think if Dr. Mann’s research were flawed, fabricated, or hidden, other scientists would not have replicated the hockey stick graph using his data and their own research.
(Ah, I just remembered that shortly after SwiftHack I did suspect that O’Sullivan wasn’t actually a lawyer, but I later forgot about it. Must guard self against retentive power of nonsense…)
Wow, so what kind of wrong did he insist was being done to him? “I don’t like what you say” isn’t a basis for initiating legal action.
Anyway, it does seem that someone’s paying O’Sullivan good money to write nonsense; we ‘just’ need to figure out who.
— frank
One time I gave a speech about political repression in the former USSR. A diplomat came from the Soviet embassy. After my presentation, this diplomat started screaming at me. He started screaming a lot of “facts” as if his facts undermined my paper, which was later published. People laughed at him, but one person said that he was KGB.
The Soviet diplomat was a fool and he was funny. He was also probably a KGB officer, and that’s not so funny.
People like John O’Sullivan and Kent Clizbe may seem funny to some people, but there is nothing funny about what Attorney General Cuccinelli is doing to UVA and Dr. Mann with the help of his political operatives who are paid by the fossil fuel industry and even by the state of Virginia.
These kind of political operatives are like a little secret police, a little KGB. They are the sword and shield of the Denialist Party. They tell lies. They confuse and intimidate ordinary people like me who are trying to understand what is true. They can even drag universities and scientists into court. There is nothing funny about that.
Still, I think that Cuccinelli and his ilk have ended up exposing themselves instead of Dr. Mann. Certainly I now see through Attorney General Cuccinelli. I won’t be voting for him again. He lied to me, and so I will not be voting for ANY Republicans any time soon. His underling W. Russell never once answered all my emails, so I know the Attorney General’s office is nothing but a pack of a liars who were trying to trick me on behalf of their financial sponsors.
Cuccinelli is now pontificating about all the foreign women forced into prostitution, but Cuccinelli and his office are for sale.
Frank–
I’m not going into the specifics of an email exchange, but if O’Sullivan were to sue me he would be up against some high-priced, first-rate, lawyers. They won’t be those crackers who hang out with that prostitute Cuccinelli or the American Tradition Institute. O’Sullivan needs to watch his mouth more than I do. So far, this “legal expert” doesn’t even have an address.
In Soviet Russia, KGB operatives often told dissidents to shut up or they would get in trouble for slandering the government. John O’Sullivan reminds me of those operatives. He even goes on the Kremlin’s Russia Today and alleges that climate scientists are corrupt. Monckton and Pat Michaels have also appeared on “Russia Today.” It is the Kremlin perspective in English.
When RT invites Michael Mann on and lets him do the talking, I will listen, but I’m not holding my breath.
A conspiracist blog http://www.omsj.org that belongs to a man who claims to be a retired LAPD detective has posted an article by O’Sullivan that falsely claims that Dr. Mann keeps his data secret. http://www.omsj.org/corruption/michael-%E2%80%98climategate%E2%80%99-mann-suffers-three-legal-blows-in-court-escapade
According to the site, “Clark Baker is OMSJ’s Director and Principal Investigator.”
The interesting thing is that I found the OMSJ website and John O’Sullivan’s post because Kent Clizbe the alleged “ex-CIA operative” tweeted about it. Looks like these three stooges may all be in bed together.
“Legal expert” John O’Sullivan opens his essay by claiming:
“Discredited global warming scientist, Michael Mann, sees his last-ditch efforts to hide data fall apart as legal experts reveal a mountain of legal precedents against him.”
Here is the response to the false allegation that Dr. Mann hid his data. The MBH [Mann-Bradley-Hughes] data have been publicly available for more than a decade now! When Dr. Mann moved from U.Va, the same information and data were maintained through his Penn State research site.
Here are some links where the data can be found:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#Paleo_data
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/MANNETAL98/
More generally, links to ALL the MBH research data, etc. from ALL of the MBH studies are here:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/research/research.html
In 2005, Dr. Mann told Congressman Barton where his data was stored at that time, but denialists just keep telling this lie even though Dr. Mann has told people where the data are stored.
Regarding O’Sullivan, has he managed to get beyond the “fringe” blogs? What’s the most prominent think tank or other online venue that has published his rants?
He posts as climaterealists quite a bit…
Not sure if it is “beyond the fringe” but Suite 101.com published a lot of O’Sullivan’s junk.
Since his recent rubbish on the IBUKI satellite they have removed all of his articles (aprox 60). I guess they are not interested in junk science written by a “science journalist” who is neither a scientist nor a journalist.
He is complaining like crazy on his “firing” on the many blogs which still support his nonsense.
Dear Deep Climate,
You ask, “What’s the most prominent think tank or other online venue that has published his rants?”
Russia Today (RT) http://rt.com/ is on TV and on the Internet. It comes up near the top if you search “John O’Sullivan” climate.
O’Sullivan is constantly cited in the blogosphere.
O’Sullivan himself posted three clips from Russia Today. He is in one of them.
http://co2insanity.com/2010/10/29/climate-fools-day-videos/
RT is basically Putin imitating Fox News.
According to Wikipedia:
RT is the second most-watched foreign news channel in the United States, after BBC News.[1] By March 2010, its videos had garnered more than 83 million views on YouTube[2] and has also set a TV News Channel record after exceeding a view count on YouTube of half a billion.[3] It has 2,000 employees worldwide.[4]……
According to a variety of sources such as Der Spiegel and Reporters Without Borders, the channel presents pro-Kremlin propaganda.[19][20] Russia Today staff have nonetheless claimed that their coverage was fair and balanced.[21] A 2005 VOA report interviewed Anton Nosik, chief editor of a major English-language computer internet site in Russia, in which he described the creation of Russia Today as an idea smacking of Soviet-style propaganda campaigns, and also noted that the channel was not created as a response to any existing demand.[22] While another article in the Digital Journal called RT a “pro-Putin news outlet”[23] and its advertising campaign as “open propaganda war.”[23]
A 2009 article by journalist Luke Harding for The Guardian reporting on RT’s advertising campaign described the network as “unashamedly pro-Vladimir Putin”[24] and part of the Kremlin’s attempt to create a “post-Soviet global propaganda empire.”[24] The article also interviewed RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan where she said the network “takes a pro-Russian position”[24] and was unrepentant about RT’s pro-Russian coverage of the 2008 Russian-Georgian war.[24]
An article published in The New Republic by James Kirchick characterized the news reportage of Russia Today as, “virulent anti-Americanism, worshipful portrayal of Russian leaders, and comical production values,” that “can’t help but revive the pettiness that was a distinctive feature of Soviet-era propaganda.”[25]…..
The Economist magazine which classified RT’s reporting as “weirdly constructed propaganda” has suggested that the channel has provided a platform to conspiracy theorists.[29] Julia Ioffe claims that Russia Today is a Kremlin propaganda outlet featuring “fringe-dwelling experts” and “was just a way to stick it to the U.S. from behind the façade of legitimate newsgathering.”[30]
Ben Smith criticized an interview between Alex Jones and Russia Today discussing Osama bin Laden death conspiracy theories and called Russia Today a “raw propaganda channel.”[31]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)
The Columbia Journalism Review has a long article about Russia Today.
http://www.cjr.org/feature/what_is_russia_today.php?page=1
Here Russia Today has collected some of their climate change clips.
http://rt.com/news/climate-change-fools-sceptics/
O’Sullivan is again soliciting denunciations of Dr. Mann from whistleblowers who are Dr. Mann’s colleagues. If climate scientists are so greedy, why does nobody come forward?
O’Sullivan states:
“…whistle-blowers are now wanted because Mann’s misdeeds must be punished because his cover up is no less of a perversion than what took place in the football locker room.”
He is linking Dr. Mann to the Sandusky pedophile investigation.
He continues to make the false claim that Dr. Mann’s data is not available.
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/41610.html
I am going to email O’Sullivan the links to Dr. Mann’s data and tell him that he is spreading a falsehood. His email is at the bottom of the article.
John O’Sullivan also claims “Shockingly, Spanier permitted no witnesses to be called to oppose Mann…”; however, according to the National Science Foundation investigation, “We note that the University never received any formal allegations.”
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/41610.html
[[DC: It’s true the PSU inquiry did not call any opposing witnesses. If there had been a formal complaint, no doubt they would have. But the real problem here is the accusation that Spanier did not “permit” this. There is no evidence that Spanier interfered with the inquiry or investigation. ]
If John O’Sullivan were a lawyer or a competent legal analyst, he would have read the Penn State investigation and the NSF investigation, and he would not be making allegations that are contradicted in the public record.
Click to access NSF-Mann-Closeout.pdf
All these people claim Dr. Mann lied, but they won’t make a formal complaint.
I guess the people who accuse Dr. Mann just want to crucify him in the media just so they can confuse ordinary people, they don’t want to have to defend their indefensible lies in any kind of investigative/legal process where Ph.D.s would be looking at the evidence presented by both sides.
Now that I think about it, I reacll that WUWT has given O’Sullivan his most prominent platform.
But O’Sullivan most recent stuff is apparently too extreme, even for Watts.
I think O’Sullivan is going to ever great lengths to try and provoke a reaction, maybe even a lawsuit. That would make him the skeptic player he so desperately wants to be. Perhaps he’s already been given enough attention.
I did a few blog entries on John O’Sullivan some time back, in case anyone’s interested.
The first time he got on my radar was when Marc Morano’s Climate Depot‘s linked to an article on climategate.com by O’Sullivan, saying that he and climategate.com were working with fraud lawyer Joel Hesch and ex-CIA agent Kent Clizbe (both in Virginia, if I remember correctly) to find scientists to turn whistleblower against Prof. Mann. That was in January 2010.
Also, though the owners don’t explicitly state it anywhere, I found that climategate.com was run by the same people behind ihatethemedia.com, namely Californian right-wingers Jim deYong and Mark Fleming.
— frank
For those of us who like to keep track of Steve’s stellar mining career, he’s now on the chairman of the board of the gold miner Augen :
http://www.trelawneymining.com/management_and_directors.php
I guess people have heard that the hackers have released more CRU emails. These emails are from the original hacking. Maybe this will help catch them.
A few links on so-called Climategate 2.0 (or SwiftHack 2.0, if you prefer).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/22/fresh-hacked-climate-science-emails
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/11/two-year-old-turkey/
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/22/374559/fool-me-once-shame-on-you-fool-me-twice-shame-on-the-media-more-stolen-emails-global-warming/
I’ll probably be doing a post or two on this (not too many, I hope). For now, I will note that the pulled quotes released in the accompanying README are wildly out of context; they don’t even have dates attached. I checked a couple.
The first one I looked at is an “own goal” for the contrarians, as it involves Phil Jones bemoaning the discrepancy between glacier retreat in high altitudes, and comparative lack of warming in the UAH troposphere record.
But this is from 2001 and we now know how that turned out.
The hackers were more careful this time and they’ve left fewer clues behind. They didn’t make the mistake, for instance, of putting a time zone stamp on the individual archived emails like they did last time. The 2009 release showed a North American location for the construction of the initial archive of stolen emails, and also showed that it was constructed over a period of time straddling the change from daylight saving to standard time.
But they have revealed some things. For instance, the hackers have 220,000 emails in all – presumably the entire set of CRU emails available in 2009. 5000 are made available in the latest archive, but the rest are encrypted and password protected. The accompanying README says that the “passphrase” will not be released to the general public, begging the question as to whom it has been, or might be, released. (I’m betting if they do release it, it will be to the same folks who got the links to the archive – Watts, McIntyre, Jeff ID and “tallbloke”). Also the README uses a period instead of commas as a large number separator, suggesting that the README writer’s first language is not English.
To be continued tomorrow – in a proper post.
I see you are using the ‘hackers’ in plural. This is obvious now that they used ‘we’ in the README, but was this known before? It explains the use of the decimal in this dump, and time zone discrepancies from the first dump. This looks to be an coordinated effort from several people, as opposed to a lone wolf, blowing the ‘whistleblower’ theory out of the water. Is it all non-English countries that use the decimal, or just a select few in Europe?
I think one of the initial releases also used “we”. Anyway, it was pretty obvious the various versions of “insider” theory never held any water. Besides, Fred Pearce gave it some credence, a sure indicator that it was wrong (as I recall, a fellow Guardian correspondent even felt compelled to correct that particular canard).
It’s even more obvious now, but it always seemed to me that the material was stolen, and then keyword searches applied offline. It would make more sense that different people would do those tasks. The apparently different locations of README writer and the initial archivist tends to confirm that.
As expected,
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/11/22/fix-it-or-fold-it/
McKitrick is quite deluded. I really have to wonder if CA or WUWT were involved in the hack in some way, and/or coordinating the second release.
[DC: I don’t see evidence of direct involvement of CA or WUWT. ]
To Snapple and others:
Thanks for documenting John O’Sullivan and his calumny, and for warning us about Russia Today, or RT News, and its habit of propagandizing for Putin and for fossil fuels, which comprises much of Russia’s wealth.
For several years I read Steve McIntyre and his “climateaudit” to see if there was any “there” there.
There wasn’t.
McIntyre is quite savvy about casting aspersions, and I only saw them cast at climate scientists who report global warming. Note that he rarely, if ever, libels Mann or others directly. He merely casts his aspersions and lets others, such as his commenters, fill in the libel and the hatred.
McIntyre maintains his claim to be a humble “auditor” quite carefully; hence his value to deniers.
:rarely, if ever”:
Bradley Copies Fritts and after someone pointed out that Bradley(1999) carefully Ack’d permission of every figure, then Bradley Copies Fritts #2.
Thanks Mr. Shapiro. I think that the climate activists should look at the Russian media and fossil fuel industry just as they look at Murdoch and Koch.
Calgary geologist and oil company president, Bill Bell, has been at it again. Two years after he last paid for a full page “advertisement” in the Calgary Herald he has done it again though this time it is a page and a half “advertisement”.
It is called “Global Warming Caused by Human-made CO2? Let Us Debate the Scientific Facts”. He goes on for a full page and a half but sadly, scientific facts are conspicuous by their absence, he merely regurgitates all the denier myths and distortions. He even includes a few new ones, or at least ones that I have not seen before. For example he discusses the recent CERN paper by Kirkby (he even misspells the name as Kirby as all the deniers do) and claims that the paper “is providing scientific evidence that low solar activity causes more cosmic rays which indirectly increases cloud cover and reduces solar penetration, followed by cooling”. This is a gross distortion of what Kirkby’s paper in fact stated.
Just about every paragraph in this atrocious “paper” contains one or two gross errors. I cannot link directly to this since it is an “advertisement” but here is a link which shows it but very poor resolution:
http://shopping.calgaryherald.com/ROP/ads.aspx?adid=12051515&advid=1601118&type=
Bill Bell’s first foray in 2009:
Click to access billbell.pdf
The article you posted above mentions the Czech President Vaclav Klaus. He wrote a book titled “Blue Planet in Green Shackle”s about how climate change is a hoax and the translations were paid for by Russia’s LUKoil.
“Russia’s LUKoil has serious pull in the Czech Republic, and has cultivated ties with many leading politicians…Unlike Western firms, which lobby largely in their own interests, Russian state-controlled and private enterprises play an integral role in Kremlin foreign policy, and they’re ‘undoubtedly influencing the behavior of various Czech political parties and politicians,’ [former President Vaclav] Havel said in an interview. ‘I’ve seen several cases where the influence started quietly and slowly began projecting onto our foreign policy. I can only advise serious discretion and great caution.”—RFE/RL (9-25-10)
Russia experts Gregory Feifer and Brian Whitmore have published an excellent article titled “Czech Power Games: How Russia Is Rebuilding Influence In The Former Soviet Bloc” (9-25-10). The article explains how Russian energy companies and the Russian government are subverting democracy and sponsoring global warming denialism.
More details and links
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/09/russian-oil-companies-subverting.html
The Denialist Party claims that climate change is a cover for “world domination.” This is the same sort of thinking that one sees in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” except that now it is scheming climate scientists instead of scheming Jews.
Time Magazine notes:
The Russian position has always been that climate change is an invention of the West to try to bring Russia to its knees,” says Vladimir Chuprov, director of the Greenpeace energy department in Moscow. Case in point: when Medvedev visited Tomsk last winter [early 2010], he called the global-warming debate “some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects.” That was two months after the Copenhagen talks. (Time 8-2-10)
The defamation of the climate scientists is the same sort of lie that the KGB (admits they) spread about AIDS.
Izvestiya (3-19-92) reported:
“[Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov] mentioned the well known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the articles exposing US scientists’ “crafty” plots were fabricated in KGB offices.”
The Russians often debunk their own conspiracy theories because they can’t run a country based on delusions. We told them they would get no help on AIDS if they kept telling lies about our scientists.
The Denialist Party’s campaign against the climate scientists reminds me of the Stalin-era Doctors’ Plot, which was partly debunked by Khrushchev. In his famous 1956 “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Conference, Nikita Khrushchev stated:
Let us…recall the “affair of the doctor-plotters [who were falsely accused of taking money from the U.S. government to poison Soviet leaders].”
(Animation in the hall.)
Actually there was no “affair” outside of the declaration of the woman doctor [Lidiya] Timashuk [more here], who was probably influenced or ordered by someone (after all, she was an unofficial collaborator of the organs of state security) to write Stalin a letter in which she declared that doctors were applying supposedly improper methods of medical treatment.
Attorney General Cuccinelli’s suit against the EPA cited RIA Novosti’s English-language version of Kommersant’s attack on British climate scientists. Many of the organizations that petitioned the EPA about its finding that CO2 is a pollutant also cited the RIA Novosti’s English-language version of Kommersant’s attack on British climate scientists.
RIA Novosti is an organ of the Russian government. Kommersant is owned by the Gazprom operative Alisher Usmanov, who has an education and career that suggest his affiliation with the KGB. Kommersant cited the Russian economist Andrei Illarionov who worked for Putin and Gazprom before he was hired to be a climate expert for the Cato Institute.
The Denialist Party is spouting Kremlin/Gazprom canards about the supposedly greedy, dishonest climate scientists who allegedly mislead people about global warming.
How ironic that the Denialist Party hates American agencies such as the EPA but doesn’t have any problems with Russian agencies such as Russia Today, RIA Novosti, Kommersant, and the Government-owned Gazprom.
Time (8-2-10) reports:
“Two months before Copenhagen, [Russia’s] state-owned Channel One television aired a documentary called The History of a Deception: Global Warming, which argued that the notion of man-made climate change was the result of an international media conspiracy. A month later, hackers sparked the so-called Climategate scandal by stealing e-mails from European climate researchers. The hacked e-mails, which were then used to support the arguments of global-warming skeptics, appeared to have been distributed through a server in the Siberian oil town of Tomsk, raising suspicion among some environmental activists of Russia’s involvement in the leak….”
I personally don’t consider people like Attorney General Cuccinelli conservative. I think he is quite radical to be quoting Kremlin propaganda that targets climate scientists and EPA rulings.
I think the climate scientists are the real conservatives. They are trying to conserve our environment, the independence of science from politics, and the future of civilization.
The scientific organizations, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Vatican all say that man is causing climate change.
Links and details
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/04/kent-clizbe-climate-scientist.html
Here is John O’Sullivan’s article on the newly released emails. Notice that he has done something strange. He sometimes uses a comma for “5,000 new emails” and sometimes he writes about the 5.000 and 220.000 emails.
This suggests to me that O’Sullivan is not the only author of his moronic screed.
[DC: Or, more likely, he just copied the “.” versions and typed out the others.]
This is what he write when he isn’t appearing on the Kremlin’s English-language satellite channel Russia Today (RT) in order to parrot his drivel about the “hoax” of climate change.
O’Sullivan also writes the contraction “it’s” when he should write the possessive “its.”
[DC: A common problem among the illiterati. ]
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/42066.html
Ah, yes, the infamous Czech Inhofe …
Occupy Durban…:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/24/climate-change-occupy-durban-talks
It seems that very little has been spent trying to track down the email hacker. Note comments at link about someone named Neil Wallis.
Cross-posted at RC
Clearly the Norfolk police need to shore up their cyber-crime investigation capabilities…
And, my first impressions upon getting the entire FOIA2011.zip file:
http://ijish.livejournal.com/40121.html
Deep Climate, I’m also interested to know what you think of the file. 🙂
— frank
GWPF has published a study by Ross McKitrick of what’s wrong with the IPCC. Curry has links.
So does CA. I’ve already identified errors and out-of-context quote mining, with a post coming in a day or two.
I notice he quotes or cites Laframboise a few times.
Deep (and other climate bloggers & commenters), I shudder to imagine how hosed the press would be, without your work clearing paths through the agno-muck.
“we will be judged by those who come after us, both by what we did do…and what we didn’t do…in the time given to us.” – DB
Holly, thanks, but yawn…Ross has his knickers in a twist, not for the first time either. DC could waste a lot of time refuting his half truths and misleading statements, but is it worth it? McKitrick has been discredited and refuted so many times already.
McKitrick is still cited in the media. DC could send his analysis to any journalist who has used McKitrick as a source. The real journalists amongst them may amend their story, the bad one’s…well, we then know the bad one’s.
the Guardian has an article that goes into a lot of details about computer forensics. Maybe someone can clarify for me what this all means.
“Secret message hidden among fresh climate email files”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/29/secret-message-hacked-climate-science-emails
Snapple, it just says that another README file’s included, but it’s encrypted.
The perp didn’t tell the compression software to encrypt filenames, but just their contents (most important, of course).
So since the file names were in the clear, those who’ve inspected it have seen that one of the encrypted files is called “README.txt”.
So the story is essentially … “Secret message [in a file named README.txt is] hidden among fresh climate email files”
It means nothing, actually, The encrypted file, once decrypted, might simply say “f*** you, world!”. Or any phrase of your choice.
[DC: It might say that, but you can’t. Sorry. ]
(snark warning) With the new satellite-based maps of ground water (http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-texas-drought-visible-national-groundwater.html), it could be that southern US and Northern Mexico is in drought, but to confirm this one would actually have to travel there.
Anonymous–When I was in college, I worked for a hydrologist during the summer. A young man would go around to each well in the state and attach graph paper to a rotating cannister and needle that bobbed up and down with the water in the well. Every month, the young man would put on a new paper to measure the ground-water levels.
My job was to plot all these graphs individually and then to put all the information together. I did this with a pencil and my (non-science) brain. It was really just arithmetic.
When I asked for the young man’s job, the boss said that girls couldn’t have that job because people would think that someone’s wife was driving a state car.
Some things have really changed in 40 years!
Snapple, dhogaza:
The all/README file in FOIA/all.7z is potentially interesting because, unlike the other files in FOIA/all.7z, the README was most probably of the SwiftHackers’ own composition. It may just contain something like “screw you, world!”, but then again, it may also contain other useful information, say a web page hyperlink that leads to further clues.
The other stuff in Hickman’s article relate to the time stamps on the files and directory in all.7z. I’m not completely sure what the 17:00:05 times mean myself, but there’s one aspect that looks pretty clear:
— frank
Is it possible that computer experts who work for the authorities will be able to crack the code and read the ReadMe file?
I wouldn’t expect the Norfolk police to have those capabilities, but surely the British government has people who know how to decipher encrypted files and trip-up hackers. I read how the British got the Enigma machine and read the German code during WWII.
I don’t know how all this works, but perhaps the authorities even knew who these hackers were and sneaked that ReadME into the file. Perhaps the hackers didn’t notice that, and the message is really for them. Maybe it is the hackers who should read that message.
In the olden days, when someone was passing confidential papers, the authorities would give each suspect a slightly different document and then see which one was passed. Of course, you need someone in the enemy camp to see the message.
This is only wishful thinking by someone who gets confused taking attendance on a computer.
The file names of the encrypted email files names might be interesting. Are these time stamps of some sort? If a pattern could be discerned, that raises the possibility that the 5000 emails unencrypted emails could each be matched to their compressed, encrypted counterparts in the protected archive of 220,000.
Also of interest is how the 5000 were generated. Presumably key word filters were used. But some emails were not retained as there are holes in the sequence. Does this mean that duplicates resulting from overlapping filter output were eliminated, or were some deliberately removed from the final archive for some other reason?
I haven’t noticed any particular pattern in the numerical sequence of the 5000 emails. The few neighbouring emails I’ve looked at seem unrelated. But I haven’t looked at this very much.
I hope that the encrypted file, once decrypted, will say “f*** you, hackers!”
Congressman Markey says that the U.S. intelligence agencies should become involved in the search for the hacker. Hopefully, this has already happened. The CIA has a Center for Climate Change and National Security, so the CIA might be trying to snare the hackers.
Some climate scientists have security clearances and do work for the CIA, so the hackers may slip on a banana peel if they are targeting some of those scientists.
Hopefully, U.S. intelligence services are looking for the hackers, since the
hackers are targeting U.S. government agencies and programs with their propaganda.
I read that the National Intelligence Council, which does research on climate change, also does research on transnational organized crime. The NIC has stated:
“Transnational criminal networks are actively targeting U.S. … government programs.” [That might mean those hackers are targeting our scientific programs and our scientists.]
The NIC has posted a document called “The Impact of Climate Change to 2030.” This document is a collection of research and conference reports. On June 25, 2008, Dr. Thomas Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, summarized this report in Congress.
In his testimony before Congress, Dr. Fingar stated:
“Our primary source for climate science was the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which we augmented with other peer-reviewed analyses and contracted research. We used the UN Panel report as our baseline because this document was reviewed and coordinated on by the US government and internationally respected by the scientific community.”
I would not be too critical of the Norfolk Constabulary. They actually have information and a video on their site about how to respond to floods caused by climate change. Here is one example but if you google Norfolk Constabulary floods there are many other links.
http://www.norfolk.police.uk/newsevents/features/2009/floodingareyouprepared.aspx
Here are some links about the NIC, climate change, and transnational organized crime:
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/09/national-intelligence-council-impact-of.html
The hackers should notice that the same people who research climate change also research transnational organized crime.
Markey’s statement is here:
http://markey.house.gov/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=4611&Itemid=125
Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who is persecuting the world-famous climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann, might want to read “The Impact of Climate Change to 2030.” In my opinion, Cuccinelli persecutes climate scientists because his father is a consultant/lobbyist for the natural gas industry. His father’s company, Quest-Fore, gave $96,000 to Attorney General Cuccinelli’s campaign, according to a report published on the Internet.
The mendacious Cuccinelli and his deputy W. Russell claim that Dr. Michael Mann is being investigated for fraud, not because he is one of the world’s foremost climate scientists. That is a transparent lie. Dr. Mann is being hounded by operatives for the fossil-fuel industry who are operating against our national security from their outpost in the Virginia Attorney General’s office.
Dr. Michael Mann earned two Ph.D.s from Yale and a Nobel Prize (2007) for his work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report.
Dr. Mann and Dr. Kump have co-authored a book titled “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming.” This book is based on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report and more recent research.
Our intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council (NIC) accept what the IPCC scientists say, but when he sued the EPA, Attorney General Cuccinelli cited an article from the Russian government’s official press agency RIA Novosti as “proof” that climate scientists are fudging their research. Some others who sued also cited that article.
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2010/10/attorney-general-cuccinelli-ties-his.html
Cuccinelli and those Libertarian types want to destroy U.S. government agencies, but they uncritically repeat allegations disseminated by Russian government agencies.
I think the hackers will be exposed, and hopefully they will take down a lot of selfish, greedy, powerful people with them.
Not likely unless the person doing the encryption used a passphrase like “password” or “passphrase” or “abcdef”. They’ve used strong encryption which, with a reasonably long and non-obvious passphrase, isn’t crackable in practice (brute force methods even using the most powerful supercomputers on the planet would take lifetimes, at least).
Actually, Polish mathematicians who had access to a commercial version of the 3-rotor Enigma machine figured out how to crack it. They were helped by the fact that, while training, the German Army used sequential keys to specify the rotor settings (“AAA” today, “AAB” tomorrow, etc) which allowed them to figure out the physical rotor wiring eventually making use of redundancy in the data, and statistically analyzing patterns in the possible mappings for specific rotor combinations, etc.
They brought it to the Brits along with the first “Bombe” cracking machine, which was built out of Enigma copies made by the Poles. The Brits were able to design an all-electronic “Bombe” which was orders of magnitudes faster, and stole most of the credit besides …
The German Navy used a 4-rotor version of Enigma which the British weren’t able to crack. If you’re familiar with the story of the British boarding a sinking German U-Boat and grabbing the one-use pads of keys and the set of actual rotors used at the time, the importance of this was *precisely* the fact that the 4-rotor version plus (in general) much tighter operating standards meant the Brits had been unable to read the U-Boat communiques. While at the same time they read the German army’s mail.
Current strong encryption algorithms are literally billions of times harder to crack, though … modern systems are cracked when someone figures out how to step around the encryption (by stealing passphrases, etc).
Deep Climate, Snapple:
In the 2009 data dump, the file names were timestamps derived from the “Date:” fields in original e-mails interpreted as -0500/-0400 time zone times. Perhaps the same is true for the latest all.7z (but I’ve not checked).
But from what I see, even if we can match known e-mails to the locations of their compressed counterparts in all.7z, it’ll still be hard to derive the encryption key from this information, if that’s your drift. Essentially, we’ll need a mathematical shortcut to get from the plain e-mail and the encrypted e-mail to the encryption key — that is, a known-plaintext cryptanalytic attack — and no such attack is currently known to the public for AES-256.
dhogaza:
Then again, if the passphrase is reasonably long and not reasonably obvious, then perhaps the SwiftHackers will need to, um, write it down somewhere… 🙂
— frank
Frank …
No such attack whatsoever, and “the public” includes academics and commercial security people (there is no evidence that government is ahead of the curve, given salary and stock option opportunities, cryptology-minded mathematicians are motivated to go private, such as RSA).
Yes, indeed, as I said above, ” modern systems are cracked when someone figures out how to step around the encryption (by stealing passphrases, etc).”
It would probably involve a crime on someone’s part to find a written copy. And I wouldn’t support that crime any more than I do the crime that led to the e-mail leak. But someone could try to gain the confidence of the perp and become one of the “inner circle”, and AFAIK, that would be perfectly legal 🙂
Anyone aware of attempts to read the zip file using dictionaries? Won’t help if the password is of a strong randomly generated variant though.
Another option is to look for hints in comments that suggests the author knows more then is released already. I.e. facts or quotes that have not been disclosed yet. I would be a silly mistake of the hackers to do so, but people are keen to show they know more then others and like to gossip.
Cynicus:
One of the reasons why it’s suggested one use a passphrase rather than password is to forestall dictionary attacks.
My guess is whoever encrypted this isn’t stupid enough to use a simple password that can be found in a dictionary.
Since Watts has encouraged his readers to crack it, I’d think at least one would try a dictionary attack.
And I think we can depend on the rest to accidentally and additionally try the most common misspellings of common words …
I vote for either “Peace on Earth” or “Our Purity of Essence”.
“You are the highest bidder – congratulations!”
Ah, but perhaps their nefarious scheme is to force all the institutions running climate models to halt those efforts and instead dedicate their supercomputers and budgets to password-cracking, eh?
What is the point of posting encrypted emails that nobody can read? Is it a kind of blackmail? Are the hackers trying to protect themselves from legal action by showing that they can cause more damage?
I think the idea is that the passphrase will be shared among a select group of people who will continue to cherry pick the contents.
Cherry picking doesn’t work quite so well if the full content is exposed.
The Guardian wrote an article that quoted the hackers who said that most of the emails are encrypted for “various reasons.” Perhaps these emails are not very interesting, but encrypting them makes them seem interesting. The other thing that is interesting is that the hacker seems to understand that there was really nothing to the comment about “hiding the decline.”
Here is where the hacker discusses encryption:
“Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline. This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets. The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase. We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/22/fresh-hacked-climate-science-emails
Each email file starts with the string “date: ”
If each file can be extracted from the encrypted archive, then it should be possible to to determine the keyword..
Finding out which search terms and which search engine were used would probably be interesting, perhaps even useful.
— frank
To me, the encrypted e-mails aren’t interesting, but the all/README file might well be. Also, I understand that .7z encryption uses a “key stretching” technique, which makes dictionary attacks a whole lot slower (in this case, 524,288 times slower) than without key stretching.
While we’re on the subject, I also tried contacting the web administrator at files.sinwt.ru (the site which originally hosted the FOIA2011.zip file), but didn’t get very far. 😐
— frank
Has anyone else also tried finding out more about the upload of the .zip file to files.sinwt.ru, or to tease out clues regarding SwiftHack by other ways? How did these pan out?
The clue trail seems to have gone really, really cold, again…
— frank
Dhogaza–you make some good points.
If you click on the yellow highlighting at the bottom of the article linked below, Guardian journalist Leo Hickman comments about the hacker’s claim that the emails are “encrypted for various reasons”:
“One of the most intriguing statements. Why wouldn’t the vast majority of the remaining emails be released, instead of being hidden behind a password? Wikileaks, famously, did much the same thing, but the password was inadvertently revealed months later. Is it intended as a threat? Or a future bargaining chip? Do those emails really contain anything of interest? If they do, why continue to wait rather than releasing them now, or even back in 2009?”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/nov/25/clues-climate-email-hackers-message
I saw how that Congressman Don Young from Alaska tried to bully a scholar named Douglas Brinkley who had come to testify. These people who are ruling us are nothing but thugs. http://www.minnpost.com/donshelby/2011/11/22/33335/a_video_of_rep_don_young_every_american_should_see
I made a post about Congressman Young’s abusive treatment of Dr. Brinkley and linked a few articles and videos. http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/12/alaska-congressman-don-young-tries-to.html
Young was even subject to a long federal investigation for taking illegal money, but he was never charged. The FBI brags a lot about its anti-corruption campaign, but they hardly ever get the big boys. They spent 10 years following Russian spies who couldn’t steal secrets, but maybe they should go after some of these politicians who are getting all that fossil fuel money from a company that built Stalin’s oil refineries in exchange for repressing dissent. Oh wait, that’s legal.
I used to trust the FBI, but then I saw they published a white paper that is based on vague allegations by a KGB defector and disinformation by Russell Seitz. The paper even suggests that famous climate scientists who researched nuclear winter are KGB dupes. I think the FBI are the dupes. Who gets their science and history from the KGB and Russell Seitz? I guess now we know the answer.
I have been complaining to the Tampa FBI’s Patrick Laflin about this ridiculous white paper, since he loves it so much. I wonder who wrote it. I know that a member of the Cuccinelli family works for a firm called CACI that does national security work for the FBI. It really makes me wonder who the FBI “belongs to,” as the Russians say. The FBI brag endlessly about catching Russian spies that evidently can’t steal secrets, but they smear great scientists who are trying to protect our country as KGB dupes.
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/06/higher-education-and-national-security.html
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/10/russian-academy-of-sciences-hosts.html
http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/11/dr-alan-robock-explains-nuclear-winter.html
I have been doing some wishful thinking about the stolen emails posted on the Internet.
The emails were posted on a short-lived “Russian server” and quickly downloaded by collaborators and/or bloggers who were evidently notified about the new cache of emails. Most of the emails were encrypted, so only collaborators who are privy to the password would be able to read most of the emails posted by “FOIA” on the “Russian server.”
Although the email file was subsequently posted elsewhere on the Internet, the mysterious “Russian server” used by the anonymous “FOIA” seems to have vanished into thin air. It is possible that some denialist bloggers should have heeded that folksy advice about not buying “a pig in a poke.”
Possibly it was just a virtual machine spun up for the purpose, or possibly it’s a physical server and they just stopped listening on that IP once everyone they wanted to have a copy managed to download it …
There seem to be various places where people can read the stolen emails. One place seems to be here. http://foia2011.org/
It is difficult to know what is true because the Russian server that originally posted these emails from “FOIA” has vanished into thin air.
The truth is that these pathetic, low-life criminals who stole the CRU emails really can’t contend with the peer-reviewed science, as honest scientists do; rather, the dishonest culprits try to discredit the scientists by mischaracterizing the cherrypicked quotes they mine in the emails and by cloaking themselves and the encrypted emails an air of mystery.
Emails is where people hash things out; it’s not finished, peer-reviewed research.
The hackers claim they are interested in freedom of information, but they mischaracterize the climate scientists’ discussions and cloak themselves and their motives in secrecy. The hypocritical anonymous hackers employ the disreputable tactics of political operatives in dictatorships who are practiced in kompromat.
Maybe they aren’t the KGB/Gazprom, as I originally speculated in my first posts on Climategate, but they are no different than the KGB. These criminals are now attaching themselves to the Denialist Party; they have become “the sword and shield” of the Denialist Party, and it doesn’t seem that our police do anything about it. Indeed, the FBI white paper is smearing climate scientists who research nuclear winter.
Hopefully I am wrong, and the FBI just posted total baloney up because of some idiot; but it seems like a secret political police who smear climate scientists is beginning to emerge in the U.S. instead of police who enforce the law. All these political operatives for the fossil fuel companies seem to have influenced the FBI. The FBI wrote about nuclear winter without consulting climate scientists.
I hope I am wrong, but the anonymous author of the official government FBI white paper right on the FBI website scares me more than the obviously criminal anonymous “FOIA” hacker.
I hope the “Russian server” will turn out to be some trap set for the hackers; but when I see the brazen disinformation called an FBI white paper, I feel scared.The FBI should consult scientists and historians of science who have researched the history of nuclear winter research; instead, their expert is a KGB defector who makes up a vague conspiracy theory about climate scientists and the history of nuclear winter when many facts are known and published. And Russell Seitz, according to the book’s footnotes. He is a person who always knows more than everyone else, even though he reportedly never earned a Ph.D. Evidently, Mr. Seitz he is so smart that he doesn’t need a Ph.D. [See Lawrence Badash, “A Nuclear Winter’s Tale,” page 249.]
Once upon a time, Russell Seitz was briefly affiliated with something at Harvard. Somehow. Big deal. So was I. I was a dancing cowgirl in the famous Harvard Law School play. And some boys from MIT taught me how to square dance. But that didn’t make me an expert on climate science.
Pete Earley, the author of “Comrade J,” the book the FBI consulted for their white paper, couldn’t even spell the name of a Russian scientist correctly. More than once, “Comrade J” spelled Kondratiev/Kondratyev as Kondrayev [sic!]. Earley left the T out of Kontratyev’s name, so that’s not just some different transliteration.
A person who had studied the scientists’ writings and read the history of the nuclear winter debate wouldn’t make such an ignorant error.
One of the Russian scientists who studied nuclear winter even works in the USA these days. One of the Russian scientists disappeared and was probably murdered by the KGB after he had done work in the USA. The FBI “expert” on nuclear winter doesn’t mention anything about why that would have happened.
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/06/higher-education-and-national-security.html
For what it’s worth here is Sieitz’s public proile at Linked in …
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/russell-seitz/5/395/868
Independent Think Tanks Professional – Greater Boston Area
Past: Fellow of the Department of Physics at Harvard University
Education: Harvard University
Fellow of the Department of Physics
Harvard University
2009 – 2011 (2 years)
Russell Seitz’s Education
Harvard University
1969 – 1991
So it appears he may no longer be a Harvard Fellow. He commented here a while back, asking John Mashey to investigate Oreskes and Conway, as I recall.
Kirill Kontratyev (1920-2006) was a physicist who became a major figure among Russian “skeptics”. As I recall, he was quite involved with Energy and Environment in the early days.
According to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirill_Y._Kondratyev_%28physicist%29
“His skepticism about global warming is said to have influenced the views of Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, on climate change.”
The Wikipedia points to a Google translation of a Russian article about this, but I couldn’t seem to load it.
He co-authored various books that eventually found their way into the Springer-Praxis catalogue. Praxis is best known for publishing Donald Rapp’s Assessing Climate Change.
Perhaps all that’s needed is some age-appropriate marketing, so that next time Fuller, Mosher, Montford, Prancer and Blitzen could present the Climategate™ advent calender and stick to all the olde seasonal favourites.
It could run all the tried and tested traditional memes that are loved so well ,from say, ‘subvert peer review’ on the 1st December all the way to ‘hide the decline’ on the 25th. It’s not like anybody ever gets tired of those!
Anything but the recycled, sub-standard, half-hearted re-runs this time around that went down like a Blackberry upgrade.
Dear Deep Climate,
That is Kontratyev, but many years ago he did research on dust in the Karakum desert and had an international reputation. He did research on Caenex in 1970-75. This was before people worried about nuclear winter or climate change. My impression is that his insights about aerosols earlier in his career were later helpful to understanding nuclear winter. His old stuff is quoted by many climate scientists. However, then he got VERY OLD and was trotted out by denialists. He was born in 1920 and died a few years ago well into his his 80s.
As for his skepticism about global warming, consider the Wikipedia source–“CO2 science.” Here is the article Wikipedia links to. http://www.co2science.org/articles/V7/N9/EDIT.php
This article reeks of propaganda. All the usual suspects are mentioned–Illarionov, for example. Kondratyev was an old man and was used (evidently by Andrei Illarionov) because of his former, internationally-recognized achievements. To the extent that Kondratyev knew what he was doing, he probably thought he was having ties with Western scientists like in the old days when he worked on CAENEX.
Do you really think that Illarionov and Putin are influenced by what a very elderly Russian dedushka says? Many people can barely copy down a phone number at 86.
Illarionov worked for Chernomyrdin, who was the head of the Soviet gas ministry and also as an adviser to Putin.
Kondratyev’s anti-AGW views go back at least to the 90s and the Kyoto Protocol. See chapter 2 in the Springer-Praxis publication Global climatology and ecodynamics: anthropogenic changes to planet Earth
Above, I mentioned Springer-Praxis and Donald Rapp’s Assessing Climate Change (which according to Rapp himself contains up to 20 extended copy-and-paste passages that he failed to block quote, including some the Wegman report and a Soon and Baliunas article, among others).
Here is an Eos review of Rapp’s book, by Marvin Geller, annotated in detail by Rapp himself:
Click to access Review,climate.change.pdf
A short sample (!):
Geller: Rapp quotes extensively from blogs, non peer-reviewed literature, and articles that have appeared in nonclimate journals.
Rapp: The unfair implication here is that I relied primarily on blogs. There are 286 references in my book, of which about 90% are from peer-reviewed literature, about 5% are from websites by recognized climate scientists, and about 5% from blogs.
Geller: He justifies this by suggesting that there is a conspiracy among climate alarmists to suppress publications by naysayers in the peerreviewed climate literature.
Rapp: The only conspiracy is in regard to the “hockey stick.”
Geller: However, as a practitioner in the atmospheric sciences for four decades, I have not witnessed such a conspiracy.
Rapp: Dr. Geller may be a practitioner, but I note that when I carried out my independent investigation of climate, coming in from the outside, I did not find it useful to include any of Dr. Geller’s publications in my 286 references. I did not know who Dr. Geller was, and I simply used what seemed to be the most important publications. Perhaps he is miffed that I did not refer to his work?
===========================================
In other Rapp news, he appears to have finally been taken off the USC SERC page (to Joseph Kunc’s regret no doubt).
http://www.isi.edu/projects//serc/faculty_staff
I think that Kontratyev was a very elderly man who was probably manipulated because nobody in his right mind was willing to be a denialist shill. The exploitation of Kondratyev suggests that younger Russian scientists were not interested in being stooges for Putin or Illarionov. The really smart Russian scientists want to be scientists. They want the respect of the international scientific community.
I think the exploitation of Kondratyev shows that Russian scientists are a fairly independent bunch, and that the denialists are a desperate bunch of pathetic, low-down scoundrels who took advantage of a very old man.
One of Russia’s most famous climate scientists, Vladimir Alexandrov disappeared in Spain during a scientific conference at the on nuclear winter in March 1985. That was about the time that Chernenko died and Gorbachev was elected General Secretary.
Alexandrov had done work in the USA, and may have been seen as a threat to the defense establishment in the USSR. Some propagandists claim he was going to denounce the science of nuclear winter so he was killed by the KGB. I think he was committed to his research on nuclear winter, so he was killed by the KGB.
Rapp doesn’t provide any evidence for his claim that the hockey stick is a conspiracy. Does he mention that other people have also made hickey stick graphs? Has he done his own experiment? He just spreads conspiracy theories about Western scientists who are much more capable than he is.
Deep Climate-
You wrote Martin Geller, but it is Marvin. You might want to fix that.
[DC: Fixed. Thanks!]
Here is where “Russell Seitz …a Fellow of the Department of Physics at Harvard University” posts these days. He certainly thinks he is an impressive, clever fellow.
http://takimag.com/contributor/Russell%20Seitz/72#axzz1fbrAjcLQ
Getting back to the CRU emails:
I’m wondering about the removal of the files.sinwt.ru sub-domain. I’ve been looking at the Google caches for this sub-domain and it appears that its removal was preceded by a disable notice (in English). So it appears that the file upload/download service was abruptly discontinued (or at least moved somewhere else). It also seems they had at least some international clientele.
Main file hosting page (cached as of November 3 [!!!]).
Sinwt.ru files hosting –
Upload File Upload Image Login F.A.Q
File List
The files list is disabled.This page is disabled
Here is the terms-of-service page (cached as of Nov. 17).
Curiouser and curiouser … is it just a coincidence that the main file upload page was disabled in early November? If there was a crawl on November 17, Google should have picked up a newer version of the upload pages, if they existed at that time. Or was the whole thing planned, including disabling and eventual shutdown of the files subdomain, with the knowledge and co-operation of the site operator, well before the new dump of stolen emails?
More files.sinwt.ru weirdness —
Surfing to http://www.sinwt.ru :- turns up a blog which starts and ends in September 2011. Written in Russian. Links to https://mail.sinwt.ru/.
Project Honey Pot :- the IP address for sinwt.ru, 78.47.183.60, actually corresponds to somewhere in Germany. The address doesn’t seem to be involved in any malicious activity that was caught by the honeypot effort.
Whois :- The domain sinwt.ru was registered by a person named “Private Person”, in 2008.
Wayback Machine ;- looking up the pasts of http://www.sinwt.ru and files.sinwt.ru turn up a complete blank.
Curioser and curioser indeed. I’ll be blessed if I can figure out where to go from here…
— frank
Another interesting co-incidence can be seen in the whois history of sinwt.ru. Some time between September 7 and November 14, the admin contact email address for sinwt.ru was removed. The admin contact now points to the website of a Russian domain name registrar (presumably the registrar for this domain).
I presume the investigating authorities have made some efforts to find the adminstrator contact and find out what he knows about the email dump. The evidence above seems to support the idea that he may have had advance contact with whoever released the emails. His email and phone number are available on the web, so he shouldn’t be too hard for the Norfolk constabulary and international partners to find.
Here is the translation of the blog. “Dmitry” posted some pix of Moscow on Sept 4, it looks like.
I don’t understand all this computer stuff, but perhaps time will tell who that server is and who the people with the passwords are.
I am counting on the authorities to do their job; I hope my trust is not misplaced.
When I saw that stupid, mendacious FBI white paper that accused famous climate scientists of being tricked by the KGB, I wondered what was going on.
http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/06/higher-education-and-national-security.html
Seems to me that the white paper is nothing but propaganda against Western scientists. How is that any different than the lies in the Russian media about our scientists that Attorney General Cuccinelli cited when he sued the EPA?
The FBI still don’t take back that misleading white paper.
I never have criticized the FBI before, but what they have done is smear climate scientists. The FBI guy asked me why I don’t criticize the KGB instead of the FBI. Well, usually I criticize the KGB; but if the FBI smears famous Western scientists and gives credibility to Russell Seitz and a KGB defector who claims that nuclear winter is a KGB hoax, then I will criticize the FBI. They are acting like the sword and shield of the Denialist Party, not an honest law-enforcement organizaton.
The FBI needs to read about the well-documented history of the nuclear winter debate and consult with government scientists and academics before they publish sly denunciations of some of the most famous Western climate scientists. Shame on them!
“Some propagandists claim he was going to denounce the science of nuclear winter so he was killed by the KGB. I think he was committed to his research on nuclear winter, so he was killed by the KGB.”
Please read some primary sources for a change : Boris Ponomarev read ‘nuclear winter ‘ into the official party line at the 1985 Party Congress.
So why would the KGB whack Alexandrov for supporting it ?
For that matter Snapple might actually read what I wrote in The National Interest in 1986, and since he mentions it, the take on gonzo rhetoric in the Climate Wars I published in 2008:
http://takimag.com/article/climate_of_here#axzz1Y2nc8fO1
also speaks for itself.
It is very odd that he neglects my most recent writing on this subject, in Nature , last july
[DC: You’re making this hard for me. Next time you have exaggerated or unfounded accusations, I’ll simply remove the whole post. Ditto for swathes of essentially repeated information. You do post interesting information at times, but please consider thinking more about what you are saying and writing less. ]
Taki Magazine does speak for itself because it posts misleading information. It dishonestly claims “Russell Seitz is a Fellow of the Department of Physics at Harvard University.”
http://takimag.com/contributor/Russell%20Seitz/72#axzz1fqThktGA
[DC: This may be mistaken if Seitz is no longer connected to Harvard, but there is no evidence of dishonest intent. As of the end of 2010, Seitz was listed as a “Research Scholar” in the physics department (possible equivalent to a Research Fellow in general Harvard parlance), but his name no longer appears in that list. ]
Russell Seitz might want to explain his professional credentials. Does he have a Ph.D. in physics? How long was he at Harvard and in what capacity?
[DC: Seitz’s connection with Harvard in the 1980s is detailed in Brian Martin’s 1988 article in the journal Science and Public Policy, entitled “Nuclear winter: science and politics“. Seitz doesn’t have a PhD in physics, but neither he nor anyone else ever claimed he had.
I presume you’ve read this. It’s a good overview of the controversy. (Orsekes and Conway also have a section on this controversy; in a previous visit here, Seitz made veiled accusations of unspecified misconduct against those authors)].
This is like that conspiracist Kent Clizbe bragging about his CIA affiliation while forgetting to mention that the CIA has a Center for Climate Change and National Security.
I am going to read Dr. Michael Mann. He has at least one Ph.D. from Yale, and his work appears in the specialist literature.
When writers feel the need to mischaracterize and inflate their qualifications, I think they are dishonest. Some scientists have also claimed that Russell Seitz mischaracterized what they said.
I don’t see a link to Seitz’s claims about Ponomarev, but he is more in the information/disinformation business. General Ogarkov, the guy who justified the shooting down of a Korean airliner, is a better guide to Soviet Nuclear policy in the 80s.
What does Ogarkov say in his published books about nuclear winter, if anything? The CIA has some unclassified 1980s document about Soviet views of nuclear wintter. The Center for Naval Analyses has written about Ogarkov. See some articles by Mary C. FitzGerald.
Russell Seitz has a long history of claiming that nuclear winter is based on dishonest science. That seems hard to accept now that scientists are studying how to cool the planet with aerosols. The scientists are considering how to make a small nuclear winter. Why would they be having this discussion if nuclear winter was a hoax?
Nuclear winter is real. It’s not bad science or a KGB hoax. Certainly the Soviet propaganda apparatus may have tried to exploit the issue to prevent Pershing missiles from being installed in Europe, but the propaganda campaign evidently didn’t work. Also, “peace” movements sometimes make Russian people question their own government’s sincerity. Educated people in Russia know that not only American weapons could cause nuclear winter. Those “peace” movements sometimes make people think, in spite of the source. The truth about “peace” movements is complicated.
Gorbachev credits the arms reductions he negotiated to Russian and US research about nuclear winter. Mostly, this research was done as part of American programs. Even Kondratyev’s 1970s research on the Karakum desert/aerosols was part of a US program called CAENEX. I think this research is pretty well regarded. It predates Soviet concerns about nuclear winter and was trotted out after the Americans began writing on the topic.
Valentin Falin was a diplomat and propagandist during the Soviet regime. Sometimes he worked for the Information Department. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Falin
While he was working for Izvestia he wrote an article hinting that the Soviets might cause a nuclear winter by blowing up nuclear weapons in their own forests. The article is titled “Space—the Moment of Truth” (December 14, 1984). Falin said, “No ABM options will change the fact that a precisely known quantity of nuclear devices detonated simultaneously one one’s own territory would have irreversible global consequences.”
This was part of the Soviet campaign against SDI. V. Falin was saying that SDI would not save the U.S. from Soviet missiles because the Soviets could still blow up nuclear weapons on their own territory, precipitate a nuclear winter, and destroy the US.
I think this shows that the Russians hoped to use nuclear winter for propaganda, but this does not make nuclear winter false.
It’s funny that they would talk about the dangers of nuclear winter from US Pershing missiles based in Europe and then threaten to detonate missiles on their own territory.
Basically, they were saying that if they went down they would take us with them.
OK – I think that’s enough on nuclear winter from you. Let others reply, or move on to other topics, as they see fit. Thanks!
How does EOF or PCA capture non-linear relationships?
PCA can be generalized as a non-linear method. A good discussion and example using Pacific equatorial SSTs and using PCs to characterize ENSO can be found in Hsieh, W. W. (2004), Nonlinear multivariate and time series analysis by neural network methods, Rev. Geophys., 42, RG1003, doi:10.1029/2002RG000112.
https://circle-prod.library.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/32805/Hsieh_AGU_2004_2002RG000112.pdf?sequence=1
[Redirected for Snapple]
Break in Climategate case! MacIntyre is mentioned…and others.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/12/15/390674/climategate-uk-police-seize-tallbloke-computers-us-justice-dept-involved/
I HOPE HE GETS A LUMP OF COAL IN HIS STOCKING!
I’m not sure it’s a break in the case. But it does show that the Norfolk constabulary are pursuing leads and getting international co-operation, at least in the U.S.
More interesting is the investigation behind the scenes, especially in Russia to pursue the mysterious goings on at sinwt.ru before the release of the second tranche of stolen emails.
I think the break, if any, might be that 200,000 encrypted e-mails were loaded up as well as the much smaller number that were posted in the clear.
Along with, apparently, word that the passphrase would be shared with a selected set of people.
So the authorities may be thinking that “FOIA” e-mailed some of the bloggers in the denialsphere directly, with, say, that ‘passphrase … and this may’ve led to the Norfolk police convincing a judge to issue a search warrant for Tallbloke’s computers, the DoJ sending (via wordpress) notices to some folks ordering them to not destroy relevant info, etc.
Of course, that’s speculation, and even if I’m right, it could be a dead-end, entirely …
The Guardian says that the Department of Justice Criminal Division is involved.
According to the DOJ:
The Criminal Division develops, enforces, and supervises the application of all federal criminal laws except those specifically assigned to other divisions. The Division, and the 94 U.S. Attorneys have the responsibility for overseeing criminal matters under the more than 900 statutes as well as certain civil litigation. Criminal Division attorneys prosecute many nationally significant cases. In addition to its direct litigation responsibilities, the Division formulates and implements criminal enforcement policy and provides advice and assistance. For example, the Division approves or monitors sensitive areas of law enforcement such as participation in the Witness Security Program and the use of electronic surveillance; advises the Attorney General, Congress, the Office of Management Budget and the White House on matters of criminal law; provides legal advice and assistance to federal prosecutors and investigative agencies; and provides leadership for coordinating international as well as federal, state, and local law enforcement matters.
Yes, DoJ sent notifications to wordpress that were forwarded to Tallbloke and JeffID (at least) ordering them not to delete or destroy stuff.
Obviously there’s coordination going on here behind the scenes between the US and UK authorities, and my guess is that it’s DoJ’s involvement and impetus which led to the Norfolk police getting a warrant for Tallbloke’s computers …
Hi folks, I see that lots of my old acquaintances are commenting here, Snapple, dhogaza, Marco, adelady, even dear friend Ian Forrester. Ian has stated that John O’Sullivan “ .. never was a lawyer but just dishonestly claimed that he was .. ” but offered no evidence to back that up. All that he could do was link to Gareth Renowden’s “Hot Topic” thread where accusations were made again with no evidence.
Presently there are E-mail exchanges taking place between John, his “Slayers”, Andrew Skolnick, me and others trying to encourage John to provide evidence about his claims on Linkedin as recently as October to having studied law and obtained his degree at “ .. University of Surrey/WSCAD Bachelors Degree, Law/Fine Art (History)1979 – 1984 Post graduate teacher training completed at Sussex University 1984-5 .. ”. He has recently changed his profile (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-o-sullivan/19/6b4/84a) but there are numerous others under various names which appear to be “Slayer” John.
More and more evidence is being collected and scrutinised but the interpretation depends upon one’s particular biases. John is being asked to shed transparency (something that is claimed to be very important to the “Slayers” “unorthodox” science association PSI) on his qualifications and his claims to published works in Nationjal Review and other publications. So far his silence on this has been almost deafening.
Andrew Skolnick has claimed that John’s Law Degree was bought in Jan 2010 from a bogus Internet establishment by the name of Hill University. It also appears to me that his degree from the West Surrey College of Art & Design (WSCAD) was in 1983 and was in Fine Art, not Law. Of course I could be wrong, hence my request to John to provide copies of his certificates, but no luck so far.
It also seems that his group of “Slayers” is dwindling. In his ludicrous appeal for charitable donations in Jan. (http://www.gofundme.com/1v39s) to set up PSI as a Community Interest Company (CIC) so that they could take legal action against Agencies of English-speaking Governments he claimed “ .. 36 respected international scientists and related professionals .. ”. In September when asked he could only muster 33 names and three of those have dissociated themselves from the “Slayers”.
I could go on for hours about this but am too busy exchanging opinions with the ”Slayers” so if you’re interested you can get more at Professor Judith Curry’s “Letter to the dragon salyers” thread (http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/15/letter-to-the-dragon-slayers) and at Lucia Liljegrens “Do Industrial Countries Absorb CO2?” thread (http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/do-industrial-countries-absorb-co2/).
BTW, can anyone explain why this blog attracts so many individuals who hide behind false names. What about having the “courage of your convictions”?
Best regards, Pete Ridley
Pete,
The subject of O’Sullivan came up here a month or so ago (as you may be aware).
I posted a long comment, which included the resukts of my follow up with the NYCLA, based on this statement from O’Sullivan.
It had already been established that O’Sullivan became a member of the NYLCA well *after* he made the claim. But how did he manage to become a member, if he was not a lawyer? Read on.
Apparently, Sullivan presented some sort of law degree credentials to the NYLCA that convinced them that he had a reasonable prospect of being admitted to the bar within a year. If one of you hasn’t done so already, you may want to contact the NYCLA to check on just what those credentials were.
Pete, the main reason many individuals here use false names is because of idiot stalkers like you (and “poptech”).
Maybe Pete will have his eyes opened by the antics of his slayer friends. One can only hope so.
Yes, one may live in hope, even against hope. Looking at Pete’s blog, he will have a long, long road ahead of him on the science. But the longest journey begins with a single step.
PS:
I forgot to mention this thread, by John himslelf – see that last paragraph http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/43274.html
Pete R
Hi Deep Climate (whoever you are), there are presently heated exchanges going on about this very subject. John said today “ .. I earned my law degree from University of Surrey in 1982… The Law School at the University of Surrey provided me with training in English law, not American. I more recently obtained certification in U.S. criminal law ..”.
On the other hand Andrew says that John obtained a First Degree in Fine Art from West Surrey College of Art & Design and what appears to be his 2010 Law Degree from Hill University (according to the NYCLA). There is a bogus University of the same name (http://www.hilluniversity.com despite their counter-claims http://www.hilluniversitylegit.com/) which will sell a “Life Experiences” degree in anything to anyone who is prepared to pay the US499, QUOTE: .. Offering “Bachelors, Masters, MBA and/or Doctorate (PhD)” degrees “24 hours a day 7 days a week” the e-mails usually include a toll free number and promise that “no one will be turned down”…..With names like Hill University, Woodfield University which offers “a degree of your choice in just 15 days” based on an individual’s “life experience” .. UNQUOTE (http://fakecertificatesblog.com/tag/hill-university/”. “ ..Other dubious institutions which are not in recognised accreditation registries include Connaught University, Pacific Western University, American Northeast State University, Western University, European University, Hill University, Rochville University and Buxton University .. ” (http://www.mastersdegree.me/masters-degree/masters-degree-in-education/buy-your-degrees-online/).
As I understand it John obtained a Law degree in 1982 from the University of Surrey, a Fine Arts degree from WSCAD in 1983 and a law certificate from Hill University. Of course I am not saying that John didn’t get a Law degree from the University of Surrey or that his certificate is from that Hill University but there is room for doubt. Because of the claims and counterclaims I have repeatedly asked John to settle it once and for all by providing certified copies of his degrees but he doesn’t seem so inclined.
I have felt uncomfortable about the whole “Slayers”/PSI set-up since becoming closely involved with them in Dec. 2010. I undertook a PSI & Due Diligence exercise in Dec./Jan. during which time we had numerous E-mail exchanges and I dissociated myself from them on 20th. Since then others have done the same.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
“Of course I am not saying that John didn’t get a Law degree from the University of Surrey or that his certificate is from that Hill University but there is room for doubt.”
What other “Hill University” is there? Sounds to me like the NYCLA has been extremely gullible.
Ridley should ask the anonymous hacker-criminals why they don’t give their real names. In my opinion, the answer is because the hacker-criminals would be locked up in a federal prison where they belong, and politicians like Cuccinelli would no longer be able to use the convicts’ slick lies to confuse people and to persecute climate scientists.
Cuccinelli’s deputy W. Russell knows who I am, but he is a sleazebag and a coward who won’t deign to answer my complaints. Instead, the despicable “officers of the court” Cuccinelli and W. Russell take their lead from anonymous hacker-criminals! What kind of high legal official depends on anonymous criminals for his science? One who is bought by special interests, and the law should not be for sale.
John O’Sullivan knows who I am. Why don’t you ask him, if he’s not too busy trashing Western climate scientists on the Kremlin-financed “Russia Today.”
The Request for Preservation of Records that was sent to the Tallbloke and others is signed by Trial Attorney Kendra R. Ervin of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division’s Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section.
Kendra Ervin reportedly has a law degree from UVA.
Some denialist bloggers were complaining that the Norfolk police should not have access to what is in people’s computers without probable cause. Why didn’t the denialists say this when Ken Cuccinelli tried to get Dr. Mann’s emails? Cuccinelli didn’t have any probable cause, and the Union of Concerned Scientists explained all his mistakes. Now Cuccinelli is making the preposterous, contemptible claim that his case is not about global warming but only about some vague “fraud.”
I think that if the DOJ Criminal Division is going into the denialists’ computers, then someone is in a lot of trouble. They are the top litigators for the U.S. government.
I am really happy that government litigators like Kendra Ervin are defending the rights of climate scientists and universities who are doing such important work to protect our national security and the security of people all over the world.
An article by John O’Sullivan, ludicrously titled “Michael ‘Climategate’ Mann Suffers Three Legal Blows in Court Escapade,” has been posted on a disreputable conspiracy site that seems to claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.
http://www.omsj.org/corruption/michael-%E2%80%98climategate%E2%80%99-mann-suffers-three-legal-blows-in-court-escapade
I found this site by watching Kent Clizbe’s twitter. He is one of the people in the Slayers group. He claims he was an operative in the CIA, but he doesn’t tell people who trust the expertise of the CIA that the CIA has a Center for Climate Change and National Security. Clizbe’s trick makes people think that the CIA is hunting down climate scientists. Actually, the CIA shares data it gets from satellites and classified sensors with climate scientists. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/science/earth/05satellite.html
The CIA’s Center for Climate Change and National Security “provides support to American policymakers as they negotiate, implement, and verify international agreements on environmental issues.”
http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/01/larry-kobayashi-director-of-cias-center.html
Criminals who hack into scientists’ email probably are interfering with US government programs and with “American policymakers as they negotiate, implement, and verify international agreements on environmental issues.” That’s probably why the DOJ is involved.
According to the National Intelligence Council, “Transnational criminal networks are actively targeting U.S. … government programs.” Perhaps the Climategate hacking was pulled off by a transnational criminal network that was targeting our governments’ climate change programs.
The NIC has also posted a document called “The Impact of Climate Change to 2030.” This document is a collection of research and conference reports. On June 25, 2008, Dr. Thomas Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, summarized this report in Congress.
In his testimony before Congress, Dr. Fingar stated:
“Our primary source for climate science was the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which we augmented with other peer-reviewed analyses and contracted research. We used the UN Panel report as our baseline because this document was reviewed and coordinated on by the US government and internationally respected by the scientific community.”
http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/09/national-intelligence-council-impact-of.html
People are free to criticize US policies, but they aren’t free to break the law by stealing email.
Hi Deep (whoever) – ref. 18th Dec. at 2:45 am – I had my “ .. eyes opened by the antics of his slayer friends .. ” many months ago, but please don’t refer to them as my friends. John O’Sullivan made the same mistake when on 13th Dec. he referred to my “ .. friend and associate, Mr. Skolnick .. ”. I think that Andrew will agree that we have only called an uncomfortable truce while we pursue the common cause of identifying the real motives of the “Slayers” and their reasons for setting up PSI.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
PS:
Gavin’s Pussycat – ref. 18th Dec. at 4:12 am – just because I reject the cobbled together science- fiction in the “Slayers” book (Slaying the Sky Dragon” does not mean that I am going to swallow the political-science offered by the likes of the UN’s IPCC and the “Hockey Team at (un?)Realclimate.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
Pete, as I said, the longest journey starts with a single step. You just discovered a ‘peephole’ into the systemic mendacity of the denialist ecosystem, something that triggered even your BS meter. You don’t know it yet, but that “Slayers” thingy is no anomaly. It is BAU.
Keep your eyes open and learn.
All the best, GP
Hi Gavin’s Pussycat (ref. 19th Dec. at 3:27 am) you have to sigh an oath of allegiance when joining Dr. Mann’s “Hockey Team”? Is there only one string-luller in the team or do you take turns? The UN’s Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) religion is imploding, witness Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban. All we need now is for the IPCC structure to be disbanded.
Of course that won’t stop the power-hungry (Al. Gore, George Soros, Maurice Strong and their ilk) or the politicians getting their hands on our hard-earned money but maybe they’ll be a little more honest about how they go about it. Then again, honesty doesn’t seem to be a concept that they understand.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
Well, Pete, I can see that you and your ilk are quick to dismiss real science as religion, simply because it is associated with the hated U.N. and implies concerted multilateral action, something you apparently abhor. And then you go on to bandy about blanket accusations of dishonesty based on these libertarian conspiracy fantasies. Meanwhile you’re still not ready to learn from actual documented cases of blatant dishonesty (not to mention bogus science) from crackpots like Sullivan.
Thanks for making that very clear.
In future please avoid unsubstantiated generalities and accusations. You might want to familiarize yourself with the comment policy. Thanks!
Pete, sigh. [snip – see below]
Sorry, if you cannot be minimally polite, I’m not going to bother either.
Heck, I happen to know several of the folks you’re demonizing including Dr Mann well enough to have joint papers with, and your innuendo is vile. Get some shame.
[DC: I no doubt erred in giving Pete too much latitude in his wild accusations and personal insults. I’m nipping the cycle in the bud, and also have instituted phase 1 of the troll control protocol (cheerful version). ]
DC I hoped at least you enjoyed the snipped part 😉
I’m having difficuilty getting the most interesting parts of my comment posted, which may be due to the numerous links that i’m providing, which may have put the submission into the “spam” box.. Please be patient while I try diferent approaches.
I have lots of patience, but not an infinite amount.
OK, I’ve had several failed attempts to post that comment so I’ll take it over to Lucia’s “Do Industrial Countries Absorb CO2” thread
(http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/do-industrial-countries-absorb-co2/) and see if it posts there OK.
Drop by and have a chat.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
I like Michael Mann’s book. It explains the findings of the 4th IPCC report: “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming – The Illustrated Guide to the Findings of the IPCC.”
It is just a science book like you would read in school.
The IPCC books are not too difficult, either.
I have confidence in what all the scientific agencies, the National Academy of Sciences, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Vatican and the IPCC are telling us.
The Denialist Party’s propagandists are orchestrating a scientific hoax, not the climate scientists. If you read both sides, you can figure that out pretty easily. The denialists don’t argue honestly. They mischaracterize what the scientists say. Honest debaters take issue with what their opponents actually say.
In this 11-22-11 Examiner article, John O’Sullivan is introduced as John O’Sullivan, Esq.
http://www.examiner.com/environmental-policy-in-boston/climategate-2-sensational-email-release-durban-conference-derailed
John O’Sullivan, Esq. (?) boasts about the bloggers who were given the stolen emails and claims that Dr. Michael Mann is “Firmly in the Dock for Data Abuse Fraud.”
Now those same bloggers are having their electronic communications checked by the DOJ criminal litigators “pending further legal proccess.”
Hi Snapple, can’t you think of something new to talk about. You were saying the same stuff last year. Things have moved on since then, like we’ve had two more UN fiascos, the first at Cancun and the recent one at Durban.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
I did not report on British and US law enforcement activities last year. This just happened. Obviously, the legal authorities are going after the hacker-criminals, not the great scientists who advise our government agencies and the UN on climate change.
It’s going to be TRICKY for Inhofe, Cuccinelli and other denialists to claim that the scientists are liars if the criminal hackers are arrested, tried, and convicted in federal court for computer fraud and for stealing intellectual property . Some of that property may even belong to government agencies who have shared classified information with climate scientists. For example, the CIA shares classified data with some climate scientists, according to the NYT.
These hackers may be in a LOT of trouble if they have stolen government secrets!
Remember that Watergate started as “a third-rate burglary attempt”: http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/gen/resources/watergate/glossary.alt.html
Some one else said it wasn’t the crime it was the cover-up.
Kerry Emanuel has a new post at NAS; it’s pretty good, but his explanation of the origin of NAS makes me wonder if it was biased to begin with or became more biased over time
http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=2325
It’s always been right-wing, but over time became more anti-science.
Read especially Emanuel’s reply to a particularly deluded specimen in the comments. He’s good!
[DC: Enough with the snooping questions. ]
Professor Kerry Emanuel appears to me to be a bit of an enigma. On the one hand he comes across as a staunch CACC supporter, indicated by his Feb. 2010 comment “..the compelling strands of scientific evidence that have led almost all climate scientists to conclude that mankind is altering climate in potentially dangerous ways. .. ” (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/02/15/climate_changes_are_proven_fact/). Available evidence is only compelling to those who have closed their minds to the possibility that changes in the different global climates is a natural phenomenon and that our use of fossil fuels has an insignificant impact.
On the other he says “ .. We have never before dealt with a problem that threatens not us, but our distant descendants. The philosophical, scientific, and political issues are unquestionably tough. We might begin by mustering the courage to confront the problem of climate change in an honest and open way .. ” [DC: This and other irrelevant or “non sequitur” links removed. ]
I wonder how hard it was for him to acknowledge that other more significant processes than global warming could be causing increased hurricane activity. Was it also hard for him to “ .. agree with Dr. Burnett that the requests to destroy emails or to hide data are completely out of line with the ideals of free and open inquiry that constitute a key cornerstone of scholarship .. ” (http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=2325).
[DC: Increased hurricane activity (i.e. frequency)? Or increased hurricane intensity? You have poor command of the facts and positions. ]
In July 2010 Kerry said of “Climategate” QUOTE: .. What the emails show are a few researchers behaving in a manner unbecoming scientists and gentlemen. The true scandal is the attempt to catapult such behavior into high crime and to dismiss an entire scientific endeavour based on the privately expressed sentiments of a few (a very few) researchers working in an environment of ongoing harassment. At the time of this writing, three separate panels convened in Great Britain, and two investigations conducted by the Pennsylvania State University have cleared the authors of the controversial emails of any serious wrong doing, and with good reason. Meanwhile, the gross mischaracterization of what those emails actually contain continues unabated .. ” (http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?doc_id=1444).
There are of course other opinions about Climategate and those “enquiries” which he referred to. They were nothing other than staged whitewash exercises (http://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.com/2010/09/can-there-be-independent-investigation.html).
[DC: You missed the exoneration of Mann by the NSF. I suppose they are part of the “whitewash” conspiracy too. The fact is there was no evidence of misconduct – get over it. You should consider moving onto an examination of GMU and the Wegman case, where the inquiry is apparently stalled despite a mountain of evidence. ]
[DC: Now you get into two long-ago debunked contrarian talking points. As you should know these too are not suitable for discussion here. However, I will point you to a couple of references to set you straight. First up, Schneider’s “scary scenarios” quote.
I hadn’t realized how misleading the contrarians’ use of this quote was. Here’s the end, with the final sentence that is usually omitted by the contrarians.
John Quiggin pointed out this habitual omission and other problems, including how part of the first widely disseminated version of the quote was fabricated by the libertarian Julian Simon. The version used by Daly was heavily doctored for maximum effect. Perhaps you were unaware of this.
Quiggin doesn’t agree with Schneider and thinks he has exaggerated the “ethical double bind”. On the other hand, he makes a very persuasive case, using distortions of the Schneider quote, that it is the contrarians who have chosen effectiveness over honesty.
And, no, I’m not going to discuss this further on this thread. Read and learn, if you can. Or not.
Your link about “Mann’s Nature trick” is also wrong and contains many errors. It claims that the MBH reconstruction only went up to 1980 because the reconstruction turned downward after that time. That is an outright misrepresentation. ]
Kerry Emanuel is hardly an enigma. He’s someone who has conservative beliefs (hence his membership in the NAS [National Association of Scholars], whose willfully ignorant leadership and membership he is valiantly trying to educate), and is also a scientist with integrity who believes in scientific facts, including those which lead to conclusions that might conflict with his preferred world-view. He understands that scientists are human, and that a few private e-mails deliberately taken out-of-context don’t amount to a conspiracy and don’t overturn decades of solid, diligent research. The fact that Professor Emanuel doesn’t buy the junk being peddled by the kinds of sources Peter Ridley likes to rely on should give Mr. Ridley pause to consider whether he’s really running down a rabbit hole, rather than chasing the hot trail of a global conspiracy that he mistakenly thinks exists among corrupted climate scientists to raise his taxes.
Mr. Ridley might also benefit from reading the perspective of another “conservative” scientist, Professor Barry Bickmore of Brigham Young University, on the meaning of “scientific consensus” regarding climate change. It might open his mind to the possibility that scientific conclusions are based on evidence, rather than one’s political beliefs.
> I hadn’t realized how misleading the contrarians’ use of this quote was.
DC perhaps you should be getting out more 😉
Oh dear Deep (whatever) you do love to gag those who disagree with you, don’t you. Buy
[DC: Considering that I let you blather on and on before applying the comment policy, I think the record shows that I was quite patient with you. I guess you mean “bye”. Thanks for that! ]
Wegman scandal makes the news again, this time as one of the top new scientific scandals of the year:
http://the-scientist.com/2011/12/19/top-science-scandals-of-2011/
The Scientist needs a small, but significant correction to their story about Wegman’s retracted paper:
They also should have noted that Said & Wegman’s retracted article in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis was probably the most spectacularly egregious example of a self-refuting paper published in the “peer-reviewed” literature of the first decade of the 21st century (perhaps that’s giving the paper too much credit). And why no credit given to the “resourceful blogger,” Deep Climate?
SwiftHack 2.0: Berbalang, Bernard J, Hetzner Online AG, and swifthack.tk — in decreasing weirdness.
— frank
DC,
Have you seen this?
WTF? Why is the senate listening to rabid deniers and fake skeptics? how did this come to be. Where were the real scientists. This is an outrage.
I noticed Tom Harris (ICSC, ex-APCO 2002-5, ex-aide for Harper environment critic Bob Mills in 2002 etc.) boasting about this appearance – just after he was celebrating the withdrawal of Canada from Kyoto.
More on the current ICSC lineup: The speaker’s bureau and complete list of “advisors”.
Sheesh … Nancy Greene (Olympic skiing champion, longtime climate contrarian and Harper Senate appointee in 2009) was the driving force behind the presentation, in order to hear “both sides”.
y’all tryin’ to become american, or what???
Ross McKitrick, Ian Clark, Jan Veizer, Tim Patterson
I only sat through the first two speakers, but I was impressed with how nearly (and perhaps) all of the scientific arguments were fallacies straight out of Skeptical Science. Unfortunately none of the “skeptics” are listed in the new “skeptics” page.
The skeptics are fairly well known, although. Three of the four turn up in SourceWatch. Clark was the exception. Three of the four turn up in Exxon Secrets. Veizer was the exception. Each has a page at DeSmog. All four are associated with Heartland Institute. R Tim Patterson is listed as one of Heartland’s experts, but with the rest, their association may be limited to their participation in its ICCC6 2010.
Regardless, I did a couple of quick ExxonSecrets network maps.
Heartland Institute: McKitrick, Clark and Patterson
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/index.php?mapid=2066
That chart includes key people from Heartland, plus Clark, McKitrick and Patterson, then the organizations that they are associated with.
The other chart focuses on the three individuals, the four organizations with funding from Exxon that they are associated with, then the people who are key people of these organizations who also belong to at least one of the other organizations. If you look at all key people the thing becomes a tangled web, thus my pruning of the network.
McKitrick, Clark and Patterson: Funded Organizations, Shared Key People
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/index.php?mapid=2067
Ross McKitrick
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ross_McKitrick
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=1008
http://www.desmogblog.com/ross-mckitrick
Ian Clark
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=1280
http://www.desmogblog.com/ian-clark
Jan Veizer
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jan_Veizer
http://www.desmogblog.com/jan-veizer
(R) Tim Patterson
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tim_Patterson
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=1163
http://www.desmogblog.com/r-timothy-patterson
In a Canadian context, the common thread for all four is their association with Tom Harris’s various projects: Friends of Science, Natural Resources Project and the International Climate Science Coalitions, plus various petitions (much of this covered previously here). Plus, McKitrick has a long association with the Fraser Institute as you note.
There will definitely more to come on this, but probably not until after the holidays.
High Park Group (2006-07-01):
Hi Mapleleaf, I had intended not to waste my time commenting here again but thanks for drawing attention to that excellent set of presentations by Professors McKittrick, Clark, Ceizer and Patterson – well worth spending the two hours watching it. There were several intelligent Senators commenting who obviously learned a lot from them.
I wasn’t impressed by staunch CACC supporter Alberta’s Senator (Professor – or was that a slip of the tongue by the committee Chairman?) Mitchell. He really has a closed mind – obviously not a scientist.
I take the opportunity of wishing you all a very merry Xmas and a happy and healthy 2012
Best regards, Pete Ridley.
Another interesting point: three of the four Exxon-funded organizations were also involved in the tobacco disinformation campaign, and those three are apparently libertarian.
From:
Blowing Smoke: 32 Organizations…
http://climate-guardian.com/smoke/
13. Fraser Institute (Libertarian 10)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fraser_Institute
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=107
15. George C. Marshall Institute (Libertarian 12)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George_C._Marshall_Institute
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=36
17. Heartland Institute (Libertarian 13)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=41
As an Albertan I can’t believe how excited we were a few years ago when we got an elected Senator, Bert Brown. That is the first time I have heard him since his election and appointment a while ago. What a disappointment to actually hear him talk. He is a dyed in the wool denier. The disturbing thing is that since he is a farmer, he and his fellow farmers will be the first to be affected by global warming.
Hi Timothy (ref. 23rd December at 7:27 pm and 8:50 pm),
I sat through the entire 2hrs, including the Q&A session and “ .. I was impressed with how nearly (and perhaps) all of the .. arguments .. ” offered in Senator Grant Mitchell’s political rant at the end “ ..were fallacies straight out of .. ” the IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers and the left-leaning MMS. On the other hand I loved the comment by Albertan Senator Bert Brown “I’ve felt like its been a bit of an insult to be called a Denier but it feels pretty good this morning .. ”, although it would have disappointed plenty CACC supporters. All in all I think that the opinions among the Senate committee members pretty well reflects the position among thos members of the general public who have spent time researching the CACC issue – a lot of scepticism but little support.
I think that most open-minded lay-persons would prefer the evidence of an economist & statistican and three highly respected geologists to that of a politician (of any leaning) or to that of a computer programmer and “ .. and former machinist mate in the US Navy .. ”.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
This particular econonomist (McKitrick is not a statistician, by the way) has gotten the climate science and history wrong over and over, and continues to spew false accusations (see the most recent post here and many more besides).
https://deepclimate.org/tag/ross-mckitrick/
Testimony from actual climate scientists would be infinitely preferable to the tired contrarian talking points, all debunked long ago, from this lot.
Also please avoid snide comments about other commenters. That is your final warning. Thanks!
….an economist who doesn’t even know the difference between degrees and radians, yet wishes to be taken seriously when he spouts off on scientific topics? i for one am very impressed.
Peter Ridley wrote:
Peter, in addition to being a programmer and one-time machinist mate, I have written an eighty page paper critiquing Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, an eighty page paper that was a critical history of early 20th century empiricism, taught myself calculus and the math necessary to understand the basics of general relativity and quantum mechanics, earned a master’s in the Great Books Program at St. John’s, and participated in the creation of the British Centre for Science Education. I have a few years of experience dealing with people “skeptical” of well-established science, particularly from my evolution days.
But I attach about as much weight to my unsubstantiated opinions as you do. Telling people what they should think wasn’t my purpose.
Suggesting what sort of research might be performed is — as a lead to anyone who might be interested. In my view, it would be a waste of a person’s time to try and respond to every unsubstantiated claim made by those “skeptics” during their presentation. Links to the appropriate pages at skeptical science would be of greater value. And it would give people the chance to put the emphasis where it belongs: on the actual science and on the background of these individuals who are so busy recycling old denier talking points.
However, since you place so much emphasis on qualifications, here was a study done back in 2004 to see how many peer-reviewed papers written by actual experts in climatology disagreed with consensus.
From the study:
There were those who criticized the Oreskes paper, but the most well known and credible was by Benny Peiser.
From Skeptical Science:
Peiser later retracted the study, admitting that in the literature it was generally accepted that global warming was taking place and we were largely responsible for it. But his paper has since been recycled.
More recently a study was performed of over a thousand climate researchers to see who supported the basic points of the IPCC on global warming.
From the abstract:
For those who are interested, one of the co-authors is Jim Prall. He has a website where he goes into the analysis behind the paper in greater detail. You will find the resources here:
Most-Cited Authors on Climate Science
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/
One of them in particular is an interactive scatter-plot:
Scatterplot of publication stats on climate
http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/climate_authors_scatterplot_vert.html
It shows the number of articles along the y-axis, the total number of citations along the x-axis, color codes whether an individual is one of the ‘concerned signers’ who signed any of 20 declarations affirming the mainstream view of human impact on climate and the need to limit greenhouse emissions, was one of the 619 contributing authors to IPCC AR4 wg1 (2007), ‘non-signer’ who is one of the non-AR4-wg1 authors on climate who signed neither statement a statement of concern nor skepticism, or one of the 495 individuals who signed any of 16 declaration skeptical of mainstream climate science or of the need for GHG cuts.
Passing your mouse over a given “author” brings up some information and clicking brings up even more. I believe it is an excellent way of visually conveying the consensus that exists among climate scientists.
Among the experts who “disagree” with the consensus, you may find people like Lindzen who write editorials proclaiming the consensus bunk, but typically these will be people who have retired (and “gone emeritus” as it is sometimes put). Then there are the people who write papers that are actually quite marginal in what they call into question, but their authors will sometimes hype those papers in the popular press, perhaps claiming that they call into question the foundations of climate science — or perhaps publishing something so fundamentally flawed it should have never seen the light of day. Spencer, Lindzen, and even Michaels, and McKitrick may occasionally do things along these lines.
The consensus is quite strong. Like with evolutionary biology, there may be arguments about the particulars regarding the mechanisms and details, but not with respect to the fundamentals. You will find that although the wording and sometimes emphasis of their statements differ, every major scientific organization that has taken a position on climate change takes essentially the same views as the IPCC.
For a rather extensive list of the organizations, please see:
The Consensus on Global Warming: From Science to Industry & Religion
http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/consensus.htm
Hi again Timothy, you mentioned Tom Harris (International Climate Science Coalition) and it’s a coincidence that only 5 days before that Senate hearing I E-mailed him suggesting that he have a chat with Dr. Vincent Gray (New Zealand Climate Science Coalition) and Dr. John Nicol (Australian Climate Science Coalition) about John O’Sullivan, his “slayers” and their company PSI. Tom had responded to an article by self-aggrandising “Slayer” John O’Sullivan and wished John and Tim Ball good luck in the libel actions that Ball is facing in Canada brought by “Hockey Team Manger” Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Andrew Weaver. John was boasting about how “ .. Climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball and his legal team are confident they will deal their own fatal blow to two lawsuits filed by UN climate extremists, thus putting an end to any claims that man-made global warming has any scientific substance .. ” (http://co2insanity.com/2011/05/05/climate-lawsuits-heading-for-defeat-say-top-legal-experts/#comment-899).
I suggested to Tom Harris that he also took a look at Professor Judith Curry’s “Letter to the dragon slayers” thread (http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/15/letter-to-the-dragon-slayers/) and at Lucia Liljegrens’ “Do Industrial Countries Absorb CO2?” thread (http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/do-industrial-countries-absorb-co2/) for information about the John, his “Slayers” group and his science-fiction publishing company Principia Scientific International (PSI).
Best regards, Pete Ridley
Things have moved on since May and I suspect that John O’Sullivan is not feeling so confident now following all of the recent revelations about his past activities. More recently (perhaps in desperation) he declared “I Just Bet My House on the Outcome of Science Trial of the Century” (http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1323289860/) but that begs the question “What’s his house worth”?
According to John “ .. Ball’s legal fees could exceed $300,000 .. ” (http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/42475.html) and Dr. Ball says that he has “ .. paid out about $10,000 so far and am rapidly depleting my savings, these are meager .. ” (http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/34877.html). John is reported to have said after his 2004 court case (see the links below) ” .. I have been without pay for a year, living on the charity of my family. It has been financially .. devastating .. ”
[DC: I’m not interested in these unrelated court cases. Don’t go there – thanks!] .
7 years later John said “ .. Personally, I’m barely scraping by financially .. I cannot maintain my current level of commitment without some kind of financial remuneration ( especially now that the UK govt has raised tuition fees so drastically and I’ve 2 ambitious teenagers keen to go to university) .. ”
Dr. Ball could probably have saved himself the hassle and expense of these libel cases by simply apologising to Dr. Michael Mann (over his throw-away comment about belonging in “State Pen” (http://www.desmogblog.com/michael-mann-suing-tim-ball-libel) and Professor Andrew Weaver for his unfounded accusations (http://www.desmogblog.com/weaver-sues-tim-ball-libel). Instead of that we see lead “Slayer” and PSI CEO/Legal Consultant John O’Sullivan once again appealing for charitable donations (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/08/help-asked-for-dr-tim-ball-in-legal-battle-with-dr-mann/).
Maybe John’s second public appeal for charitable donations was as miserable a failure as his gofundme effort (http://www.gofundme.com/1v39s) on 17th Jan.
BTW, talking about Professor McKitrick and Dr. Mann, you may enjoy watching McKitrick’s presentation “ .. on the Hocket Stick” (http://wn.com/Ross_McKitrick). It’s only 7 minutes so you may be able to stick it out right through. I love his final comment on the CACC hypothesis “The whole thing is held together by Duck-tape”.
Best regards, Pete Ridley.
Of course, Tim Ball should withdraw his outrageous false accusations. But you’re wrong to assert that the “State Pen” comment is just a throw away line. Ball has been falsely claiming that Mann “cooked the books” and should be in jail for years now. Consider this tirade from 2006.
http://www.charlesmontgomery.ca/mrcool.html
Ball’s bio that appeared in the Calgary Herald and elsewhere contained false statements about his own background, specifically a claim to be Canada’s first climatology PhD and to have been a professor at University of Winnipeg for 28 years (in fact it was 8 years).
[DC: Deleted in entirety.
In this comment, you not only approvingly quoted Ball’s libelous assertion that Mann “cooked the books”, but you added your own assertions to that libel. As you well know, I do not permit such unfounded accusations here.
Contradicting your previous assertion that Ball’s “Penn State/State pen” comment was just a throw away a line (i.e. a joke) you now assert that few skeptics, including presumably yourself, disagree with Ball’s ludicrous charges of scientific fraud and criminality and that Mann “should be in jail”.
I’ve had more than enough. Please don’t bother commenting here again. Thanks! ]
Hi again Deep (whatever), you said “ .. I’m not interested in these unrelated court cases. Don’t go there – thanks! .. ”. I recommend that you think again about that “unrelated” bit.
[DC: On second thought, not only am I not interested in unrelated allegations concerning John Sullivan’s checkered past, but I am also not interested in your Moncktonian conspiracy theories concerning the UN’s supposed agenda for wealth redistribution and global government. You’ll have to take it somewhere else from now on. Thanks! ]
[Rest deleted]
Tattersall’s phantom lawsuit against the Norfolk police — not even phantom?
— frank
Here is the full text of Stepehn Wilde’s appeal letter (as it appeared at Wattsupwiththat.com):
Here is a more explicit list of possible actions that Wilde proposed as possibilities, in response to a query at WUWT:
Laden has amended his post to withdraw his original implication of criminality on the part of Tallbloke, and has also offered Tallbloke the chance to tell his side of the story. Laden’s original post was clearly libellous, not to mention “moronic”, at least according to James Annan and other commentators both pro and anti-AGW. However, Laden is a minor blogger and any inconsequential damages of his original post appear to be mitigated now by his climbdown. Wilde even comments on Laden’s website.
That leaves possibilities ii through vi all of which involve the supposedly “heavy handed” treatment by the Norfolk police, and events or actions relating to the raid.
Sounds like he needs lessons from Levant on ‘How to persuade your deluded blog followers to donate to your legal fund.’
Thanks DC… I stand partly corrected.
Interesting that Wilde doesn’t want to take on the entire UK police, but only “persons responsible”. So any lawsuit won’t be of the form ‘Tattersall v. UK police’, but rather be along the lines of ‘Tattersall v. some hapless policeman’.
— frank
Stephen Wilde AKA Stephen P.R. Wilde seems to comment on WUWT.
Wonder what P.R. stands for.
Search Wilde.
Here is a collection of links to his articles about climate (scroll down) by “Stephen Wilde F.R. Met.S…a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1968”.
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2008/06/stephen-wilde-sixth-article-death-blow.html
One commenter notes:
Stephen Wilde is not entitled to use the letters F.R.Met.S. after his name. He has no science qualifications. The list of real fellows may be checked here: http://www.rmets.org/about/people/fellows.php
I can’t find this lawyer’s firm on the Internet. He is supposed to get the money supporters send to Tallbloke, but it goes to Tallbloke’s pay-pal first.
Does this seem a little sketchy to anyone?
Here Wilde admits that he doesn’t have the right to use “the letters” and claim accreditation, but said he was unaware of that, until it was brought to his attention.
Now, this was back in 2008. Presumably, the accreditation was not granted (it’s not even clear whether Wilde actually applied, only that he was invited to apply).
It does seem as if he may no longer have the right to claim the title of Fellow of the RMS, but it also appears he no longer claims this.[Updated: Both of these statements are wrong, see below – he is a Fellow of the RMS, and that appears to be lifetime designation. ] I suppose that his current status depends on whether the original granting of Fellow status was permanent or not. [Update: It is – see below.]I thought that I typed that Stephen Wilde who comments on climate issues could be two different people, but I must have cut it and forgot to put it back in. Or maybe Stephen P.R. Wilde is really an altogether different person.
It appears to be the same person, as far as I can tell.
it is *proposed* to investigate all options? that’s impressively wishy-washy…
“It is possible that treatment of that nature could be meted out to any persons expressing sceptical views about the so called climate consensus.”
help, help! i may possibly be oppressed at some point in the future!
If you go to the link I cited above
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2008/06/stephen-wilde-sixth-article-death-blow.html
you are directed to a list of Stephen Wilde’s posts at Climate Realists.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1396
Isn’t Climate Realists where John O’Sullivan often posts?
According to this link
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1041
“Stephen Wilde has been a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1968. The first two article’s from Mr Wilde were received with a great deal of interest throughout the Co2 Sceptic community.
In Stephen Wilde’s third and exclusive article for CO2Sceptics.Com, he explores the mechanics and mechanism involved that are attributed to the Earth’s Warming and Cooling, needless to say the presence of CO2 is not part of the process.”
Stephen Wilde makes grammatical errors that are unusual for an attorney.
He spells the plural articles as article’s. He also misspells its as it’s: “The presence of the sun must be a much bigger influence on global temperatures than the greenhouse characteristics of CO2 on it’s own.”
Even highly-educated people make mistakes, but two errors in apostrophes in one post is unusual for an English-speaking attorney or a Ph.D.
I don’t think that Stephen Wilde sounds like a scientist in the Royal Meteorological Society or a lawyer. He sounds more like a sneaky teenager who wrote a note from his mom without checking his punctuation.
Actually, the first part of this post is an introduction and may have been written by another person; but I think they may be the same person.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=1041
Here is the link. http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=8723&linkbox=true&position=8
According to this post from November 25, 2011, Stephen Wilde is an “LLB (Hons.), Solicitor, Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society.”
Notice the date.
Evidently, Stephen Wilde is a lawyer and a scientist who can’t use apostrophes correctly. This seems a little fishy to me.
Fair enough. So the issue is whether he is entitled to use the title of Fellow or not. I would think that if he “dropped the letters” but continued to use the title of “Fellow”, that means he believes he is entitled to do so. He might well be right – but so far I haven’t seen anything definitive one way or the other. (To be clear I’d want to see current RMS policy concerning Fellows who are not accredited but were received into the RMS before the current regime began in the 90s).
Further update:
That’s from the RMS website. As far as I’m concerned that clearly shows that Wilde is entitled to use the RMS Fellow designation.
Wilde’s law firm (Wilde & Co.) goes back to 1991.
Wilde is obviously no litigation specialist, but is clearly a bona fide solicitor.
Anyway, all this may be somewhat moot, as “tallbloke” prepares to take his grievances stateside in the next “phase”.
Her also states that the appeal for legal funds is over for now.
It seems very odd to me that Stephen Wilde became a “Fellow” in 1968, but his law firm only dates to 1991. Perhaps he was with another firm before that; still, seems to me that something is funny here.
His articles about climate show a total lack of understanding about how much CO2 influences the warmth of the earth.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=37
Here is his self-reported biography on Climate Realists.
http://climaterealists.com/bios.php
Based on the dates, the person in the photo seems too young.
He notes: “From age 5 to 17 always anticipated becoming a TV weather presenter but eventually chose Law due to a marginally better facility with words rather than the number crunching of physics in those days.”
He seems a lot like John O’Sullivan who claims to be an expert on the climate and also gave the impression that he was a lawyer.
Here Stephen Wilde posts an article that states: “How Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann Almost Got it Right in 2001.”
One of the other people listed as a contributor to this site is Piers Corbyn. http://climaterealists.com/bios.php
You can google “Piers Corbyn” and Russia Today. He appears on this Kremlin-financed satellite propaganda channel a lot. It’s the modern version of the old Radio Moscow.
Most recently (December 2011), Corbyn claims that temperature controls carbon dioxide and not the other way around. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXNFl6Ft5Hk
The Russians have a history of hiring lawyers and suing people as part of their active measures (political influence operations). There is a book about this called The KGB Lawsuits. The author is Brian Crozier. The Russians have a history of suing their opponents in England because of the libel laws.
In Russia they put the dissidents in jail using slander laws. They also use the libel laws to silence the regime’s opponents in England.
It is my opinion that a lot of this fake climate science is sponsored/amplified by the Russian petrostate’s propaganda. This is how they do what they do. These days, a lot of Russian media is owned by the fossil fuel companies, but Russia Today is owned by the Russian government.
Does Russia Today ever invite Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt on their show and allow them to explain their views?
One thing that bugs me about many climate sites that they talk about Exxon and Koch, but they don’t look at the political influence activities of the Russian petrostate. Even Koch got its start building Stalin’s oil refineries.
In the USSR/Russia, in order to have a business, church, political party or any organization, you need a licence from the government. You can only get the licence if they let you have it. They purge organizations they don’t like by withdrawing registration.
Snapple said:
Isn’t it a bit of a leap to go from regular appearances of Piers Corbyn on Russia Today to “sponsorship” of fake climate science? After all, Russia Today is clearly aimed at the Russian audience. There doesn’t appear to be evidence of Russian petrostate funding of U.S. or U.K. organizations, although some individuals are presumably taking advantage of opportunities in Russia.
In particular, it’s ridiculous to try to tie Stephen Wilde to Russian sponsorship.
Wilde’s bio says that he had a significant career before starting Wilde and Co. Perhaps he’s pushing 70 (which would be consistent with a retirement interest in climate politics), or perhaps the 1968 was a typo.
Wilde’s law firm can’t make a subject agree with a verb (businesses needs) on their own website:
“When it comes to legal advice, all businesses needs someone they can turn to who can clearly and concisely support and guide them to the right conclusions. This is where the team at Wilde & Co. can help.”
http://www.wildesolicitors.com/commercial_law.php
Wilde’s law firm also can’t make a pronoun agree with its antecedent:
“We understand that for most people, buying or selling your property can be one of the most stressful times of your life.”
They should write “their” not “your” since the antecedent is people:
We understand that for most people, buying or selling their property can be one of the most stressful times of their lives.
http://www.wildesolicitors.com/property.php
In England, they have solicitors and barristers (litigators). Barristers can appear in court. Tallbloke says he is turning over donations to Wilde, who seems to be a solicitor, but he can’t appear in court.
I think the solicitor would normally recommend or engage a barrister on behalf of a particular client. But in this case, there are no plans for court proceedings in the U.K. You did look at the latest “tallbloke” post, right?
Actually, if you can trust wiki, the line between barristers and solicitors has become blurred and solicitors appear in some courts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solicitor#England_and_Wales
Leo Hickman (Guardian) also has this twitter:
leohickman Leo Hickman
A nice little detail about the Tallbloke fund: his lawyer, Stephen Wilde, is a ClimateRealists contributor climaterealists.com/bios.php
20 Dec
Even though the English-language Kremlin’s Russia Today mocks the idea that increased CO2 causes global warming, the Russian government has just held a conference titled “Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change.” The conference was organized by the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (ROSHYDROMET).
The conference organizers admits that CO2 is warming the planet:
“Lately, along with mitigation of anthropogenic impacts on the climate system by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, the world community places increasing emphasis on the economy and public adaptation to adverse effects of climate change, including analysis and prediction of emerging challenges and threats.”
http://www.pacc2011.ru/en/about-conference.htm
The RACC website states:
“The PACC-2011 is organized by the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet) on the instruction of the Government of the Russian Federation. It will engage federal authorities and government bodies of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, Russian Academy of Sciences, science, industry and business communities and public organizations and will be supported by WMO, UNESCO, IOC of UNESCO, UNEP, UNFCCC, FAO, and other international organizations and the World Bank. The Organizing Committee will include representatives of international organizations, decision-makers, business and science communities, wide public and G8 stakeholders.”
http://www.pacc2011.ru/en/about-conference.htm
My take on this is that powerful Russians want to know about climate change because they will need to build sea walls and new gas/oil infrastructure on the thawing permafrost, but they aren’t too interested in moving away from fossil fuels because that is how the government and the powerful business interests make their money.
There are different constituencies there, too.
Looks like the phantomness of the phantom lawsuit is now official.
(CAPTCHA over at Google says “rused”.)
— frank
Hi DC,
I hope you’ll permit me to correct a factual error made by commenter ‘Dhogaza’ in your thread. He speculates:
So the authorities may be thinking that “FOIA” e-mailed some of the bloggers in the denialsphere directly, with, say, that ‘passphrase … and this may’ve led to the Norfolk police convincing a judge to issue a search warrant for Tallbloke’s computers, the DoJ sending (via wordpress) notices to some folks ordering them to not destroy relevant info, etc.
1) The Police have emailed me saying I’m not suspected of involvement in any crime.
2) The DOJ notice was sent to Automattic at the request of the Norfolk police, asking them to hold wordpress logs on the server farm in California covering the 22/23rd Nov for three blogs including mine for a period of 90 days. The DOJ was not asking the bloggers involved to preserve anything on their personal computers.
Thanks
TB.
Hi Tallbloke,
Thanks for weighing in.
For the record, and as I have already stated, I fully agree that there is no possible inference of your involvement in a crime. To be fair to dhogaza I don’t see his comment as asserting that you may have been involved in a crime, although the specific speculation as to the nature of hypothetical communication goes beyond the evidence.
However, I do think it is quite possible that the police investigation is operating on the assumption that there may have been some communication between you and “FOIA”, or that there was communication with some third party or parties who were also in contact with FOIA. But if there was such communication, it’s also entirely possible you were/are unaware of these links anyway. I can’t see any other reason the police would confiscate your laptops, and I take it they have not clearly communicated their reasons with you. But again to be very clear, any such communication would not in itself be considered criminal.
Are you planning to release the text of the police email exchange, since you have already released the gist of it? Perhaps that would make things clearer.
Again, I don’t think that dhogaza is asserting that the bloggers *were* asked to preserve anything on their personal computers. Rather, he said that the bloggers were being asked to preserve the comment records for the period in question (which reside in the WordPress cloud). I don’t think that’s quite correct, though. My take is that WordPress was ordered to preserve the records, and that they were locked down as ordered. If so, the notice was forwarded to inform that this had been done, and that you would not be able to alter the comments in any way. (To test this, I suppose you could try and see if you have “edit” capability on these comments; if they are locked down, you should not even be able to enter the editor).
So I would not characterize your comments as corrections of “factual errors”, but they are important clarifications and I thank you for them.
Since I never said you were, as a close read of my speculative comment makes clear, it’s hardly a “factual error” on my part.
I speculated that the police may think that FOIA contacted you directly. This would not be a crime of and by itself, and I never said it was.
2) The DOJ notice was sent to Automattic at the request of the Norfolk police, asking them to hold wordpress logs on the server farm in California covering the 22/23rd Nov for three blogs including mine for a period of 90 days. The DOJ was not asking the bloggers involved to preserve anything on their personal computers.
Nor did I say DoJ did. Please read for comprehension. But the Norfolk police *did* serve a warrant and take *your* personal computer(s).
Whether or not they found anything interesting, I have no idea. I merely speculated as to one possible reason why they may’ve been able to convince a judge that a warrant was justified (and it’s not at all uncommon for search warrants to result in nothing actually being found, though the opposite is true as well, of course!)
DC:
Indeed, which is why I tried to make it crystal clear that I was *speculating*, not summarizing anything in evidence …
Tallbloke seemed to suggest that the legal “U.K. based work” was over, leaving the impression that actions against the Norfolk police or other authorities were no longer contemplated.
But in response to a query from Frank Bi, “tallbloke” said he was exploring this with “civil rights lawyers”, although Wilde would no longer be involved.
Dhogaza:
I think you or whoever you picked up the idea the DOJ asked the bloggers to hold data on our PC’s via wordpress were misled by a factually inaccurate article written by Leo Hickman in the Guardian online. If you revisit that article, you’ll see the corrections I forced Leo to make.
DC: I still have full control over all the data on my blog. I assume wordpress simply copied the log files covering the relevant dates as requested and left the system otherwise untouched.
Wilde & Co themselves recommended I go to specialiists in order to explore the possibility of obtaining ‘the information ‘ supporting the warrant application. I would have thought that would it would be in the interests of all bloggers to know more about that.
Cheers
TB
Sorry “tallbloke”, I don’t see how dhogaza’s statement can be interpreted in the manner you suggest. You’re putting words in his mouth. He only referred to WordPress log/comment data under your control that should be preserved, not to “data on your PC”.
In fact, since you still have control over your WordPress data in the period in question in November, that tends to confirm dhogaza’s original suggestion. Presumably then WordPress forwarded the DoJ order as a way to give it full effect (the order does say that the bloggers should only be advised if necessary to completely effect the order). I trust then you have made no changes.
It appears that Wilde also advised you that you would probably not be able to obtain “‘‘the information ‘ supporting the warrant application”, and for good reason, once he actually learned something about the law involved.
A key issue here is the degree of co-operation that the police might expect from you. It’s quite possible that the police presented evidence that you downplayed the gravity of the CRU hack and dissemination of the stolen CRU emails as a criminal act, glorifying the hackers as supposed “whistleblowers”.
For example, in your post of December 5, you referred to the so-called “Climategate whistleblower”, complete with a large whistle image:
Certainly your parting comments to them would tend to confirm that caution should be exercised in that regard.
Of course, the police should restore any damaged property and make good on any demonstrated losses. And I also understand that it would be upsetting to be the subject of a raid without notice. But so far I see no evidence that the police acted improperly. In fact you yourself disputed that their comportment should be described as “heavy handed” (although I see your solicitor differed on this point in his comment at WUWT).
Again, I said no such thing. I explicitly reiterated I said no such thing in my previous post and am so stating once again! Please read my posts for comprehension. If you persist in misstating what I’ve posted I will be forced to assume it is intentional on your part.
<blockquoteTherefore the applications often contain confidential information about third parties who might have been involved in the investigative process.
Informant goes to police with info on a drug dealer. Police get search warrant and serve it on said drug dealer. Drug dealer gets bail, gets the information upon which the warrant was based, and shoots informant.
One can see how this would tend to discourage people from cooperating with the police …
DC: WordPress forwarded the DOJ notice it had received to the bloggers concerned merely as a courtesy, they were not obliged to do so. Quite the contrary. From the wording of the DOJ notice, it seems they would have preferred to leave us in the dark. WordPress added no advice or instruction additional to the DOJ notice.
Reading between the lines of a reply I got from wordpress’ legal team, they are holding the logs, but have not as yet supplied anything to anyone.
I’m impressed by Automattic’s commitment to our privacy on the wordpress platform and their willingness to share information concerning us even when requested not to do so.
This is about freedom of speech and privacy. All WordPress bloggers of whatever stripe should be pleased to know WordPress is on their side so far as possible within the law.
We don’t know what discussions may have occurred between DoJ and WordPress about the notification to the bloggers. So it is speculation as to whether it was courtesy only, or some other reason. For example, WP might have informed DoJ that their terms of agreement do not permit them to preserve records without notifying the blogger. Or they might have notified DoJ that the bloggers should be advised, as otherwise they might change the part of the records they could access. Short of a clear statement from WordPress on the matter, it’s impossible to know their motivation.
I’m not sure I understand your point here. Are you saying that “FOIA”‘s activity on your blog should be protected from legal investigation?
WordPress has also been known to require bloggers to take down comments under pressure from aggrieved commenters. One commenter managed to get a blanket order from WordPress to have Tamino (Open Mind) delete all comments that referred to him. (Tamino responded by simply taking down his whole archive of posts, to the loss of all of us).
The whole point behind a warrant is to preserve civil property rights by requiring the police to present evidence to a judge and to get the judge’s approval before searching one’s property.
Good luck with this approach, Tallbloke. Hopefully you’ll learn the law more effectively than you’ve learned climate science …
Dhogaza: The innuendo in your comment was that ‘foia’ may have mailed the passphrase to the encrypted 220k emails directly to some bloggers. It would have to be on their own PC’s that they would receive such communications.
So the authorities may be thinking that “FOIA” e-mailed some of the bloggers in the denialsphere directly, with, say, that ‘passphrase … and this may’ve led to the Norfolk police convincing a judge to issue a search warrant for Tallbloke’s computers,
Then in the same sentence you add:
” the DoJ sending (via wordpress) notices to some folks ordering them to not destroy relevant info, etc.”
Nothing wrong with my comprehension. Your ability with composition perhaps… if that is not what you intended, as you now say you didn’t. I’ll let others judge, if they can be bothered.
Once again, the DOJ did not order me to do anything via anybody. On the contrary they wanted WordPress to keep from us the fact that they were requesting WordPress hold logs for 90 days.
For what it’s worth I didn’t interpret dhogaza’s comment as saying that you were ordered by DoJ to preserve data “on your PC”. So I didn’t agree with your original interpretation, and said so before I read dhogaza’s reiteration of the same point.
It is the case however that the DoJ order was aimed primarily at Automattic, not the bloggers. But the wording does entertain the possibility that the bloggers might have to be notified, in which case DoJ wanted to discuss that first. There is no indication that WordPress failed to do that, but as I’ve said before the discussions between DoJ and Automattic are unknown to us, and their content is necessarily speculative.
I also differ somewhat on the issue of how the DoJ order and the search warrant were connected. I see them as complementary, since one addresses known activity of the hackers at WordPress blogs, while the other addresses police consideration (or so it is reasonable to speculate) of possible direct or indirect contact with the hackers or their associates, whether witting or not, via email or other communication.
People with less reading comprehension skills than me, but more than you exhibit, would understand that the connection between DoJ and wordpress and “relevant info” would be clear.
DoJ could only order one to preserve information on one’s private computers via direct action, not by asking wordpress to ask one to not destroy data on one’s own computer.
I’m starting to understand that you’ll grasp the least bit of ambiguity with the tenacity of a pit bull in order to misconstrue what someone says, if that suits you. My poor posts are starting to feel like an e-mail from CRU in that regard …
Even poor old IANAL me knows that the US DoJ can’t order a citizen of the UK to not destroy data on a personal PC possessed in the UK …
Privacy?! As in people have a right not to have their computers hacked into and their emails stolen and disseminated and distorted by lying deniers? That kind of privacy, tallbloke?
I’d love to spend all night here correcting mis-comprehensions Holly, but as Dhogaza so kindly points out, I have much to learn about climate science (as do we all), and as that activity is more productive, I’ll go and get to it.
Cheers all and have a Happy New Year! 😉
Yeah, right, tallbloke, sure you will.
Holly Stick: tallbloke’s refusal to directly answer your simple question tells you all you need to know (though you knew it before you asked it 🙂 )
Well, it sure didn’t take long for Tallbloke’s cognitive dissonance to manifest.
OK, I’m too lazy to actually do it, so just imagine there’s an ASCII art of an exploding brain here. 🙂
— frank
if i understand tallbloke correctly: if you publicise stolen emails, that’s in the public interest. if the cops arrive with a warrant and seize your computer equipment as part of a criminal investigation, that’s a first leap towards the wholesale oppression of right-thinking persons everywhere by the evil climate cabal.
it’s a shame, these events could have been a useful learning experience for him: having your motives and actions picked apart and speculated over by the media and blogs isn’t a very nice experience, especially when accompanied by (implict or overt) accusations of criminal behaviour.
but sadly we just get more of the same (now with bonus self-pity).
ligne, I think some people have a problem with understanding the phrase ‘objective standards’ or ‘reciprocity’.
You can see it in the ‘noun, verb, unconstitutional’ tactic of certain US politicians: a deed is perfectly ‘illegal’ and ‘unconstitutional’ and a whole other list of wrongs if I don’t like it, and it’s perfectly ‘legal’ and ‘constitutional’ and a whole other list of rights if I like it. It’s all about me, me, me, although of course I won’t phrase it in those terms.
And similarly, “Climategate” is a huge, gigantic, humongous, earth-shattering scandal, because scientists were found to say unflattering things about climate ‘skeptics’. The UK police are wrong and evil and guilty of malfeasance because they made poor Tallbloke upset.
Yes, if you read the blogs you can find people actually making exactly such arguments. Pure amazement.
— frank
DC: “Are you saying that “FOIA”‘s activity on your blog should be protected from legal investigation?”
No.
So you do admit that the hacking and dissemination of the CRU emails was criminal activity and is a perfectly legitimate target for investigation. You do see, I hope, that such an investigation is necessary to protect privacy, and bring the criminals who invaded that privacy to justice.
DC: “So you do admit that the hacking and dissemination of the CRU emails was criminal activity”
It’s not even known at this stage whether the CRU emails were hacked or released by a whistleblower.
The only thing that isn’t in any doubt is that their contents confirm that it is in the public interest that they are in the public domain. Even Greg Laden now admits that. 😉
It might be said that Tallbloke denies not only climate science, but common decency and the law.
With such a cavalier attitude towards the latter two, perhaps it’s not so surprising that the Norfolk police thought it might be worthwhile to search his computers …
(and, no, disrespect for common decency is not a crime, I’ll cut that off before Tallbloke whines again.)
I’ve found no evidence of Greg Laden “admitting that”.
I just read the entire thread on the execution of the search warrant on Tallbloke’s computers over at Laden’s blog, and he says no such thing.
Some might wonder if Tallbloke’s telling the truth …
Tallbloke,
So have the police told you why the took your computers?
Not fully. But they have told me they are bringing them back tomorrow.
tallbloke, what were the things that they did tell you about the cause of the warrant? Are you in a position to talk about this, or is it confidential?
— frank
i note my most recent comment is still in moderation.
I’ve screenshotted the comment. I’ll blog it tomorrow if you don’t publish it.
My traffic is great deal higher than yours at the moment.
Your call.
[DC: I wasn’t sure you wanted this public, but I see now that you do. Fine. For the record, all your other comments have gone through. I don’t monitor 24/7, but I do usually review comments at least twice a day, sometimes more. Somehow that’s not good enough for you. ]
Tallbloke said:
Why are you and your cabal of deniers so dishonest? You have no scientific knowledge at all yet you smear honest scientists who are doing a great job despite the harassment they are receiving from the likes of you.
You are playing a childish game which is putting the welfare of future generations in jeopardy.
Grow up.
Ian,
Tallbloke loves this attention, makes him feel important. That’s why he threatened legal action – so he could feel important.
He’ll carry on like this for as long as he can.
Dear Deep Climate:
You wrote above,” Russia Today is clearly aimed at the Russian audience.”
This is not correct. Russia Today owned by the Russian government and is aimed at English-speaking audiences. That’s why it is in English and not Russian. They often have American or English people on their programs who support their line because English-speakers are more credible to people in English-speaking countries.
Russia’s big media are often owned by fossil-fuel companies. They often publish articles that make the same points as western denialists. Gazprom is majority owned by the Russian government and their media support the Putin line.
Sorry my mistake. So where is it available? I’m not aware of its availability in North America.
there’s availabilitiy info on its wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_%28TV_network%29
Russia Today is on cable T.V. and the Internet. It is part of Putin’s propaganda apparatus. The journalists aren’t independent. RC has offices in the D.C. area..The host pretends to represent the “global warming side” but the denialist guest (gets to win the argument. They have on Monckton, O’Sullivan, Piers Corbyn, Patrick Michaels. Where are the famous and reputable climate scientists ?
The fossil fuel moguls and the United Russia Party are pretty tight. I guess it is not so different in the US and Canada. I am a capitalist, but I think that corporations should have rules or else the government just becomes like Russia where the powerful use government to enrich themselves instead of serving the general welfare and security of the people.
I see that Tallbloke is posting and has his knickers in a twist about HIS privacy.This drama queen seems pretty hypocritical to me because he thinks only he has rights. The DOJ Criminal Division’s Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section is nothing to sneeze at. Maybe Tallbloke should hire a lawyer who has mastered grammar and punctuation as well as laws about computer crimes and intellectual property.
If a criminal parks stolen property in your garage, the cops can investigate. If crminals park stolen emails on your computer, the cops can investigate.
[DC:Please get this right. There is no evidence that there are “stolen emails” on tallbloke’s computer. Tallbloke’s blog (hosted on the WordPress “cloud”) was used to link to the stolen emails which were themselves hosted on a German server accessed via a Russian controlled domain. This was certainly a lead that had to be followed up (and even tallbloke admits that it was legitimate for the police to do so). But there is no indication of participation by tallbloke in these crimes, as should be clear from any reasonable interpretation of the news reports. ]
I am sick of all these self-annoited, anonymous hackers who poke their noses where they don’t belong, wreck people’s computers, steal their stuff, and spread viruses. Where is it written that hackers get to make the rules about who gets other people’s information?
I am glad the DOJ is helping the British authorities.Hackers are no different than burglars. All that human rights stuff is nothing but a smokescreen to disguise their larceny.
Exactly right.
On the other hand, Tallbloke’s display of “situational ethics” is disturbing, though he’s not alone (Tom Fuller, Stephen Mosher, Bishop Hill, etc).
I did not say what Talltale has on his computers. I will leave that to the law enforcement. They must have had some probable cause to be looking for something if they got a warrant from a judge and also asked the DOJ for cooperate.
Talltale is a very selfish, childish prima donna who thinks he should have rights but that the CRU and billions of people who depend on their expertise should not. Tallbloke is sympathetic to the criminals who probably represent fossil fuel interests.
[DC: The motivation of the hackers will probably be unknown until they are caught and tried. ]
There are legal means of getting data if it should be made public, but hackers don’t get to decide what is freedom of information. Nobody elected them.
According to the NYT, some climate scientists have security clearances so they can get data from the CIA. The CIA wants to share the information, but not their technologies. Some people may want to listen to fossil fuel companies and denialists who appear on Russia Today, but I plan to listen to real experts.
According to the CIA:
“[the CIA’s] charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources. The Center will provide support to American policymakers as they negotiate, implement, and verify international agreements on environmental issues.”
A National Intelligence Council official testified:
“Our primary source for climate science was the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which we augmented with other peer-reviewed analyses and contracted research. We used the UN Panel report as our baseline because this document was reviewed and coordinated on by the US government and internationally respected by the scientific community.”—Dr. Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis (June 25, 2008 before Congress)
http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2011/09/national-intelligence-council-impact-of.html
Some media want to hear what the CIA says about climate change. The National Intelligence Council has lots of documents on the Internet about what is coming down the pike. (See link above) the CIA doesn’t so much research climate change as support scientists and policy-makers.
Also, you can google the name “Larry Kobayashi” and CIA. According to the Pew Center, he is the head of the CIA Center for Climate Change and National Security. He has been interviewed by journalists. I put the articles about it on my blog.
In my opinion, the hackers are damaging our national security and the security of the entire world. I consider them enemies, not just criminals.
Time for me to throw out another question to the Internets…
Is there any way I can get hold of RealClimate‘s server logs around the time it was attacked (circa 16–17 Nov 2009)?
— frank
e-mail gavin and ask for them.
If there were anything useful there, I’m sure gavin would’ve ferreted out the information by now. I’m sure whoever cracked the RC server knew enough to proxy access rather than connect directly, perhaps using the russian server they had available for storage of the e-mails.
wasn’t the upload done from a hacked computer in Turkey or somewhere?
ligne asked:
Material was uploaded to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, then they hacked into and attempted to upload to Real Climate at one point. Gavin saw the activity and shut down the server. They then uploaded the zip files to a server in Tomsk, Siberia. The connecting IP address of “the hacker’s computer” leads back to an open proxy, masking the true location of the hacker.
Please see:
… and:
However, I remember someone had analyzed the zip files and found timestamps that corresponded to Eastern Standard Time. I remember downloading one of the zipped files and examined it for myself. Same thing.
My recollection is that there were both EDT and EST time stamps,
suggesting that part of the archive was constructed earlier, and the rest added in November before the archive was uploaded. This is consistent with reports at the time that there were at least two separate attacks on CRU servers (one in October and one in November).See below – the time stamp was EDT or EST according to the date/time of each email, translated to the time zone of the machine.
dhogaza: will e-mail Gavin, thanks. 🙂 What I’m curious about is this comment
Surely there was some entry point used.
Deep Climate:
To be more accurate: the time zone computations were applied retroactively, on the hackers’ machine, to the files’ “modification times” — in this case the times when the original authors (e.g. Phil Jones) wrote them. Yes, it’s confusing. So we get the files’ original modification times (from the original creators) as UTC and “local” times (from the viewpoint of the hackers), with daylight saving adjustments computed over dates spanning more than a decade.
There are also “access times”, which in this case would correspond more to the time the hackers accessed the files. But these access times only appear as UTC.
— frank
Frank:
There was an openssh exploit documented in 2009 which had been around awhile, it’s possible the system was just cracked. Once entry was made there are all sorts of ways they might’ve gotten into mysql, none difficult.
Deep Climate, any idea why they would have first tried to upload and disseminate the file from Real Climate? A personal grudge, perhaps?
dhogaza:
Then again, the crackers could’ve also exploited the WordPress engine, the PHP engine, or something else. The degree of pwnage obtainable from each of these entry points, and the traces left on the server, will likely be different.
— frank
It seems to me that OpenSSH wasn’t used as the entry point into RealClimate. My current guess is that the attackers entered through a bug in the WordPress engine. (If that’s true, then the next question is, which bug?)
— frank
Think of it this way: a wordpress exploit would typically not get you shell access to the server.
On the other hand, achieving shell access to the hosting account via an OpenSSL exploit gives you everything, possibly without even requiring privilege escalation.
But it’s all speculation …
Here is a recent document from the U.S. department of Defense titled “Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and International Security.”
Click to access climate.pdf
From the Wikipedia artcle on RT:
So, sorry again, Snapple. RT is definitely worthy of further scrutiny.
Even though the Kremlin-financed media spreads propaganda about the CRU scientists, the Russians do want to know about climate change so they can anticipate how to mitigate the consequences of global warming and protect their gas and oil infrastructure. They are talking about a lot of pie-in-the-sky technologies to cool the planet, but they don’t talk about renewable energy. They do admit that CO2 is warming the planet. See this government-sponsored conference.
http://www.pacc2011.ru/en/about-conference.htm
People should really consider why the Kremlin’s Russia Today
provides a platform for Pat Michaels, Piers Corbyn, John O’Sullivan, and Lord Monckton. Piers Corbyn was just on RT.
People should really consider why the Cato’s expert on climate change, Andrei Illarionov, is a former Putin Adviser who also worked for Chernomyrdin (Head of the Soviet Gas Ministry and Gazprom).
Denialists sometimes give the Libertarian line against big government, but they mainly go after British/American government agencies, universities, and their scientists. They have no qualms about being used by the Russian propaganda apparatus.
At least two of those Russian spies got jobs with a fossil fuel company or with a media company financed by fossil fuel interests.
Last year, RT featured interviews with Corbyn and O’Sullivan.
http://rt.com/news/climate-change-fools-sceptics/
The third interview segment is with O’Sullivan, who claims that there is no “valid climate record”.
At 1:23
“The real issue is corruption …”
At 2:40:
“This is a monumental fraud”.
Question about FOIA requests to get emails. We agree that stealing emails is wrong; and that asking for an entire body of thousands of emails to serve a fishing expedition is wrong. Those cases are obvious. But is there ever a case where it’s legitimate…
a) …to make any FOIA request for any emails of someone at a federally funded research facility?; (what would constitute extenuating circumstances?)
b) …to ask someone else who has made such a request, a narrow question about whether the emails indicate possible misconduct on a particular issue?
c) …where there is a prior description of misconduct, reportedly from a document available online, to check to see if such a document is available?
(a) There are surely some circumstances where FOIA is legitimate. But your request (“any emails of someone at a federally funded research facility”) sounds like a fishing expedition, at least as phrased.
(b)This sounds like the blanket request you would like to make was already made by someone else. I don’t know what information is publicly available about this prior FOIA request, your relationship if any to this other person, or the source of your apparent knowledge. Again very difficult to answer without more information.
(c) If you can’t identify the document enough to determine on your own whether it is online or not, then can you identify it well enough to ask for it or confirm its existence via FOIA? Again, I don’t feel there is enough information about this to respond.
I think my position is similar to that of MT: requests for information from researchers are best limited to requests for research products. So instead of asking for e-mails, it might be better to ask for data — raw data, or cooked data — and even then. And of course, if the data turn out to have come from some other place, then ask that other place.
— frank
Sorry, bad wording. I meant narrow requests, not blanket ones.
Sorry, bad wording. I meant narrow requests, not blanket ones.
No relation to the entity that made the other request, no knowledge of the scope of other request.
The more I think about it though, the more I do feel uneasy with the whole idea, even when it is inordinately tempting.
In the Guardian article about Tallbloke, it says that the police took his modem. I wondered why they would take a modem, but in the US, there is a crime called access device fraud. This is different than computer fraud. It can be a separate charge.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_18_00001029—-000-.html
Maybe in England there is also a similar law.
Actually, the Guardian article says the police took a router. I don’t know if that makes a difference.
Most people seem to have a combination router/modem, but Tallbloke says the police took his router. It would be interesting if Tallbloke would be clearer. Does he have a router and a modem?
It’s probably an integrated router-modem. I don’t see any implication of criminal activity related to the hacking or upload of the stolen emails in this.
The router probably contains a log of MAC and IP addresses that were connected to. If one of the laptops were used to download the latest batch of CRU emails from sinwt.ru, then the router and/or laptops may contain relevant information. But the actual download of the emails is something that hundreds of people did, and is an act that in of itself has not yet given rise to criminal charges (nor should it in my opinion).
Yes, I would guess one integrated device. But then, it is fairly straightforward (esp. for someone with Tallbloke’s skill set) to convert a discarded PC with interface card to such a device running a stripped-down version of Linux/iptables. In that case, it wouldn’t be implausible that it stores an access history.
Tallbloke writes that the police took “two laptops and an adsl broadband router.”
The title of the article says “many computers” were taken, but then he says that two were taken.
According to this old guardian article, Piers Corbyn’s weather prediction company–Weather Action–has clients that “include gas and electricity companies, farmers and retailers.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/1999/nov/24/14
I wonder who the gas companies are. Since Piers Corbyn often appears on the Kremlin-financed Russia Today, maybe his clients are Russian gas companies or their affiliates.
This article from “Russian News from Russia” repeats Corbyn’s line from Russia Today.http://news.windowstorussia.com/carbon-dioxide-has-zero-effect-on-global-warming.html
“Russian News from Russia” is run by a couple—Sveta works for Gazprom: “Sveta is a IBM ASI400 specialist and one of the very few left in the world. She works for Gazprom Bank and of course is responsible for keeping the bank servers going under all conditions. Sveta is a Moscow born Russian. Sveta has a degree in Math and Computers from Moscow University…” http://news.windowstorussia.com/about
At the same time, Gazprom is a player in the carbon dioxide emission credits. I wouldn’t trust them on this, even though I think carbon credits are a good idea if it doesn’t turn into a racket.
The NYT had a good article about Gazprom and carbon credits. Probably people should read the whole article, but this snip notes:
“Gazprom’s customers in Europe — in particular utilities that burn gas to generate electricity — often need to offset their emissions under a European Union pollution trading scheme or the broader Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
Through its marketing and trading subsidiary in London, Gazprom in 2007 began offering utilities a bundled product of fuel along with credits needed to burn it. Gazprom buys the credits on the market or through investments in alternative energy projects elsewhere in the world.”
Now that’s a racket! Sell both the gas and the credits…
I know that Interpol monitors carbon credits because they sometimes catch people, but the Russians are very good at paper crimes. Ever read Dead Souls? Ever read how criminals turned the worthless paper roubles into valuable hard currency roubles? I am not against this idea of carbon credits, but this process has to be monitored. The Russians got a lot of credits because the date was set at 1990. Their economy was in the tank–much lower than usually.
There is an article in the NYT about the new developments in the investigation of the CRU hacker/s.
Dr. Mann is quoted:
Who can guess what that will be, but it is a very good development. I am proud that the DOJ section that deals with computer fraud and intellectual property is cooperating with the British investigation.
I linked on my blog so you can see the cool picture.
http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2012/01/game-is-afoot-uk-investigation-of.html
New York Times: Police Inquiry Prompts New Speculation on Who Leaked Climate-Change E-Mails Leslie Kaufman, January 1, 2012.
Nothing new, there, DC, but it’s interesting that the NYT is still paying attention …
FOIA
Once there was a hacker, who wouldn’t say his prayers,
And ghostwrote under “hats” at night away up stairs,
‘Till Deep Climate heard him holler and de Smog Blog heard him bawl,
But when they turned the ‘puter on, he wasn’t there at all!
They searched him in the chat rooms, on-line, and in the press,
(And even down in Gitmo, the Drudge Report suggests;).
But all they ever found of him was just his pants and round-abouts…
The coppers will get ya if ya don’t watch out!!
This looks good: the parent group of the American Tradition Institute that’s trying to get hold of Michael Mann’s e-mails … has been whacked in Montana for trying to avoid disclosure of their own election campaign contrbutions.
Today Libya, tomorrow … SCOTUS?
— frank
As a resident of MT, I was watching this case. ATP was trying to overturn a longstanding law in MT which flat out prohibited corporate contributions to political campaigns. This law had been in place for close to a century and was originally enacted in response to the abuses of Anaconda Copper and other powerful mining companies on Montana politics.
If ATP has the money, this will almost surely be going to the SCOTUS where I fear it will be overturned. (fictitious) Corporate rights to free speech flow from the 1st amendment to the US constitution which, through the incorporation doctrine rooted in the 14th amendment also applies to the states. So we get to keep corporate money out of state politics (to a certain extent) for the next election cycle, but eventually the law will be invalidated.
Caution, IANAL.
Harvard Business Review has an interesting piece which summarises a discussion between editorial director Justin Fox, and historian Brian Murphy.
What the Founding Fathers Really Thought About Corporations
“Imperium in imperio”.
Trying to corrupt politicians and rig elections is in line with their name, ya know …
Rattus – you’re right, citizen’s united will lead to this decision being overturned by SCOTUS barring an unexpected change in the court’s composition due to death or retirement …
Another of [Tallbloke]’s phantom lawsuits in the works?
— frank