Willis Eschenbach has an open letter at WUWT which absolutely excoriates Phil Climategate Jones for his lies to the public and to Willis. The letter is quite strongly worded, places the FOI lies in context and is worth a read. The critique is strong enough that it extends not only to Phil, but to his teammembers as well as to the kangaroo investigations of Climategate.
I think it is time for the government to find a new panel and see if they can find any wrongdoing this time. Of course they shouldn’t choose more foxes as hen-house guards in the future but that might be asking too much. I’m kidding of course, even if a less blatantly-biased panel was created, the truth is already public and I rather like the fact that the people charged with investigating cliamtegate 1.0 look so stupid.
the Air Vent 
Graham Stringer’s on it.
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Steve Hilton, Cameron’s green guru and chief strategist, says he’s not sure he believes in global warming anymore. He now finds climate change a ‘complex issue’.
The political climate is changing over there, it’s already changed here in the US, the helpless rest of Europe will have no choice but to tag along, and finally, the West and the East shall meet.
We’re all BRICs now.
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I like your optimism Kim.
Here is Eric Steig playing the “shame card” at Andy Revkin’s:
******
Andy,
When this whole thing erupted in 2009, I wrote privately to both you and Tom Yulsman to tell you that I was very disturbed by the way you had jumped quickly to making assumptions about what the emails mean, without taking the time to actual consider the possibility of context. Tom’s excuse was that it was reporter’s responsibility to ‘report the news’ and that he felt justified in jumping the gun because he knows that where there is smoke, there is usually fire. I pointed out that a better analogy coming from those particularly individuals who are promoting this stuff, there was usually smoke and mirrors. To Tom’s great credit, he largely agreed with me and we had a nice friendly exchange about this.
Of course, Phil Jones was the main target and the main scientist hurt by all this, and the most important ‘legitimate question raised’ was whether he had manipulated data. As you know very well, this was definitely proved to be false by the BEST group. (And the fact that Muller claims that his work does ‘not disprove climate gate’ doesn’t change this fact.). There is no evidence that Jones manipulated the data to make global warming look worse, and in fact all the evidence suggests that the CRU work tends to reduce trends!
Now, two years later, I am very glad to see you trying to emphasize the context more, and emphasizing that this is all a distraction to the reality of climate change. Yet you are also still doing the same thing you were two years ago. You are claiming that the emails ‘raise questions’ and that they are ‘disturbing’. This is not journalism, Andy, it’s tabloid journalism. It’s equivalent to the kind of thing the mainstream media did in the 1950s around communism, the kind of thing many outlets are doing now around muslims (remember how quickly everyone jumped on the assumption that it was some muslim or other, not Tim McVeigh, in Oklahoma?).
I’m disappointed and sad, and once again you should be ashamed.
Eric Steig
WA
November 24th, 2011
1:20 pm
Comment 40:
“You’re Driving a Bus Full of Kids With a Curve Ahead.
Are debates over the meaning of e-mail discussions of climate science missing the big picture?”
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/are-debates-over-climate-emails-a-distraction/?sort=oldest&offset=2
*****
Jeff –
If communications lines are still open with Eric can you invite him to do a guest post? He clearly does not see any issue with the content of these emails and he apparently agrees with Andy that they are a distraction from the “reality of climate change”.
I’ve followed for some while now and I would like to know what is meant by the “reality of climate change”. I’d think it would be very simple to give a list of, say, the top 10 realities along with a rating of “rock solid”, “not sure” and “supposition”.
Hopefully the opportunity to a have direct post on a sceptic blog with his best data and arguments will be something Eric would value.
Curious,
The last time I talked to Dr. Steig was when Ryan did his post outing him as a reviewer. I think he made some comments here since then but I doubt very much that he would consider posting here. Real Climate does have a mission and from the emails you can see that ‘disappointment’ is a commonly used word for those who aren’t fully in support of the cause.
An honest investigation? Surely you are joking. If you are lucky the field will get buried. Why? There is too much money in it with too many bodies attached. Out of context but relevant:
http://classicalvalues.com/2011/02/the_dumbest_/
The open letter by Willis Eschenbach is excellent.
The motive Willis suggests for Professor Jones – “Hey, it was only a small lie, and it was for the Noble Cause of saving the world from Thermageddon.” – has likely been used many times by “bigger fish” to justify sacrificing the integrity of government science and constitutional government for the same Noble Cause over the four-decade history of this global climate scandal.
Click to access 20110722_Climategate_Roots.pdf
curious said
November 27, 2011 at 11:40 am
Here is Eric Steig playing the “shame card” at Andy Revkin’s:
“I’m disappointed and sad, and once again you should be ashamed.”
—
I think I hear the world’s smallest violin playing…[sniff].
Jeff,
in the interest of tying up loose ends, has anyone ever seen the copies of the Climate Data that Jones sent to a couple of his friends?? It would settle the question as to whether the FOI requests were stonewalled because they didn’t have the data or because Jones simply wasn’t going to release it and destroyed it. It would also settle what condition the data was in. We could also ask why Jones didn’t ask his friends to send copies of the data rather than going for the nuclear option.
Obviously I am of the opinion that Jones wasn’t THAT bad of a record keeper and DID destroy the data rather than giving it to someone who just wanted to find something wrong with it. It makes you wonder, was he worried that he would find something wrong with the data itself or the how Jones manipulated the data or…??