Can Phil Jones Cut-and-Paste?

Looking through the ClimateGate II emails, I noticed a while back this message from Phil Jones to Osborn, Briffa, and Amman:

date: Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:00:05 +0100 (BST) 
from: P.JonesatXYZxyz.ac.uk 
subject: CA 
to: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk, k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, ammannatXYZxyzr.edu 

This is a confidential email 

Have a look at Climate Audit. Holland has put all the 
responses and letters up. 

There are three threads - two beginning with Fortress and 
a third later one. 

Worth saving the comments on a Jim Edwards - can you do this Tim? 

Most are just rants, but his seem to imply he knows 
what he's talking about. 

Cheers 
Phil 


PS - don't think I've forgotten Wengen. The best thing to stuff 
this lot is the Wengen paper coming out. 

This reveals that:

• Phil and colleague read Climate Audit in detail, even in 2008
• Phil parses the responses carefully - concluding that Jim Edwards "knows what he's talking about"
• Phil asks Osborn to save Jim Edwards' comments (can Phil not cut-and-paste for himself?!)

I checked one of the Climate Audit posts in question. It is here. Sure enough, Jim Edwards is helpfully providing arguments to the CRU, as he skeptically picks through the information presented by Steve. No wonder Phil was interested! Did Osborn manage to cut-and-paste any of Edwards' arguments into future FOI responses? These guys can't even evade FOI requests on their own - they needed to plagiarize their legal arguments!

Real Climate Comment Deletion Ongoing

In recent days there has been a fascinating exchange of information concerning Yamal (see: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/05/yamalian-yawns/ and http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/09/uea-submission-to-tribunal-on-wahl-foi/ (and follow up postings on ClimateAudit).

Things seem to be looking difficult to explain - without considering the possibility of 'unscientific' rocessing of scientific data by the CRU team. Strangely Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt have strenuously occupied them selves claiming that this is a 'molehill' (Mann) and worthy of intensive positioning posts (Schmidt).

I (ZT) made a comment or two on the Real Climate thread linked above, pointing out where Gavin Schmidt's comments were factually incorrect. Strangely my posts were permitted, except the one above, which took issue with a reply to one of ZT's earlier comments. This particular comment did not wind up in the Bore Hole - and I assure you that I entered the captcha code correctly. So it seems that Real Climate are continuing their time tested tradition of deleting comments.

Are There Fingerprints in the Climategate Archives?

Are there differences in the recipients of Climategate I and II email messages? To analyze this I used the following commands:

egrep -i "^To:" *.txt |\
       tr -cs A-Za-z0-9 '\012' |\
       tr A-Z a-z |\
       awk '{ count[$1]++}END{for(w in count){print w " " count[w]}}' |\
       sort -n -k2

These commands pull out the 'To:' line(s) from each email, turns these lines into a set of individual words, lowercase these strings, then count the frequency of occurrence of each string. Finally the results are sorted numerically, based on the count field. The results of this is a long screenful of output with some extraneous strings, such as 'txt' with a count number, like this:

mann 918
phil 603
keith 624
ucar 640
de 645
t 791
hulme 815
osborn 885
com 903
m 970
k 1086
p 1181
briffa 1548
jones 1753
gov 1892
edu 2746
uea 4654
to 5729
txt 5736
ac 6404
uk 7232

Filtering this by hand to remove the strings like 'txt' and 'uk' yields the following counts for the top five recipients and senders:
CG I

mann 183
osborn 200
jones 313
briffa 373

CG II

hulme 815
osborn 885
briffa 1548
jones 1753

So - Keith Briffa was the leading recipient of emails in CG I and Jones is the leading recipient of emails in CG II. Whether this is symptomatic of significantly different sources for the email archives, I do not know for sure, but it is suggestive of a difference.

Climatology, the Mayans, Etc.

As commented on Watts Up With That:

The basic 6 point plan if you want to run society….

1. Claim that some natural variation is caused by sin (of some sort)
2. Demonstrate the validity of your assertion through convenient observations (black death, drought, climate fluctuations, etc.)
3. Keep all the records yourself
4. Institute no-sin policies (that do not apply to you)
5. Collect taxes to fund your organization
6. Wait for your cult to be overthrown in 1,000-2,000 years or so

Worked for the Mayans, etc. why does everyone keep spoiling things for the Climatologists?

And the WUWT moderator, Robt, appended: ["run" society, or "ruin" society? Robt]