Climate-Gate: Leaked

102 Replies to “Climate-Gate: Leaked”

1. Every one is assuming it was a one act play … why not 2? Inside and outside man (may be the same person). If I was trying to cover tracks, it would never be a single act play.

2. THERE IS OIL IN THE ATHABASCA RIVER!!!
   It has been seeping into the enviroment for millions of years. There are bacteria that have evolved to digest this oil.
   The tar sands were dirty long before modern humans came along.
   The development of this oil could be considered the cleanup of natures own oilspill.

3. it appears that the number assigned to the mail files is a unix time_t value in decimal – the number of seconds since january 1, 1970.
   my spot checks have show that they match on year, month, day, minute, and second; the hour doesn’t match exactly (probably a timezone/DST thing).
   i’ve mentioned this sporadically here & there.

4. My understanding is that the Montreal Stock Exchange, for the past couple of years, is remaiking itself to trade carbon credits. It sees itself making billions brokering the exchanges, which also explains why Quebec is — hook, line and sinker — hell bent on supporting these bogus climate (a.k.a. wealth transfer) deals.
   While I’m writing this the EPA is now empowered by the anointed one to impose its draconian carbon reductions. Tool bad the brain-dead floozy making the announcement doesn’t set the example and stop exhaling.

5. Lance wrote: “… I believe that the numbers of the filenames correspond to the order that the emails were archived. If so, the numbers that are missing, represent other emails not captured in FOIA2009.zip.”
   The email file numbers are standard UNIX epoch numbers. UNIX counts time as the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970. This was something realized day one and as far as I’m aware, first published at MarketTicker Forums.

6. I know this will not be a popular view here, but I’m going to say it any way.
   I studied engineering. Unlike physicists, who insisted (for example) that baseballs don’t curve and bumblebees can’t fly, we deal with reality. And I struck out enough to verify the former myself.
   Our first and foremost duty was to provide things that work – bridges that stay up, airplanes that don’t fall from the sky, electricity that’s there when you need it. By and large, I think over the last 150 years, we’ve made huge strides in making all these things better. But I’ve always thought we had another duty as well.
   That is to do more with less. Less steel and concrete to build an apartment tower, less weight and bulk in packaging, less time and energy to transmit information. As a telecom engineer, I know how successfully we’ve achieved the latter.. in the early 1970’s, it cost $0.56/minute to call Vancouver from Toronto; today, it costs only a few cents a minute to call from Toronto to India, and that’s in dollars that have devalued by almost 50%.
   So, I actually do think that conservation, increasing energy efficiency, and reducing pollution are worthwhile goals. My family has a cottage on Lake Champlain. As a child, I could row out in the morning, and in half an hour, land enough fish for the family breakfast. After a huge increase in the use of phosphate fertilizers by nearby dairy farms, we not only noticed that fish levels were dropping, we got periodic instances of blooming algae that made the lake impossible (OK, unpalatable) to swim in. To their credit, various Quebec governments intervened, and the lake is now bouncing back.
   So, do I think CO2 emissions are the major cause forcing global warming? No. But do I agree that we should be moving more to nuclear, which creates more energy for less waste (and I include hydro in that equation – not for places like Niagara Falls, but for the whole-scale flooding of northern Quebec) – Yes. Should we be encouraging the use of hybrid cars? I think so – our nanny drives one child about 5 kms to school, and maybe drives 10 more kms a day for shopping. She won’t even drive on highways, so she actually uses more gas per km than people who do use the highway. Could she live with a completely electric car? No problem. In fact, most people in the GTA (which, last time I looked, is still about 30% of all Canadians) could easily have one car with is either entirely electric or a hybrid, and have one car which uses a gasoline engine for those trips to Florida or Maine.
   My point is this: Doing less with more is good. Do I agree with Copenhagen goals of cap and trade, financial penalties, transfer of huge amounts of money to China and India (who both will increase their emissions far more in the next two years than Canada hopes to decrease ours in ten), and the general bankrupting of colder, northern countries? Not a chance. But do I agree with a general philosophy of finding better ways to do things while using fewer resources?
   ABSO-F***ING-LUTELY. There was a quaint term we used for that.. oh, yeah. Progress. Not even 200 years ago, most people on the earth worked in agriculture. Getting enough to eat was a huge problem. Now, in North America and Europe at least, obesity and diabetes are huge problems based on our abundance of food, while fewer than 2% of people work in agriculture.
   So, people, please – let’s take a tempered tone. Yes, we’re all opposed to false science, bovine politicians, and enormous hypocrites like FruitFly and AlBore. But the general goal of finding ways to do more with less, to increase the productivity of everyone, to encourage the talents of all our population (which is why I’m particularly opposed to fundamental Islam, which seems to suggest that the ONLY duty of women is to produce children, and which, as the father of two brilliant daughters, I think is enormously short-sighted and intellectually bankrupt), and to make everyone richer as a result would seem to me to be a laudable goal.
   Disagree if you wish. But, as I’ve posted here before, while I think exercises like “Earth Hour” are stupid and futile, I also think the response of many here to waste energy to frustrate the “Earth Hour” claims are equally stupid and futile.
   I know there’s a lot of engineers here. Let’s stay true to our twin heritages: find new and better ways to do things, and find ways to do things with less. Mo Strong and his ilk notwithstanding, there is no way for our planet to survive unless we spend more time on making ourselves more efficient.
   Seriously, can any of you, Climategate ignored, not agree that the high speed telecom switching systems, fibre optics, and personal computer advances, have not increased our communication capacity by a number which I personally don’t feel fit to put a magnitude on?
   In the end, my message is this: Fight Copenhagen, embrace conservation. Doing more with less, stop ignoring “tragedy of the commons” effects, and find better ways to do everything. In spite of my reading of the Globe, the Star, and watching CTV, I still believe most Canadians would endorse this type of “religion”. If you think I’m wrong, I’m truly sorry.

7. Wingwalker wrote: “… as far as I’m aware, first published at MarketTicker Forums.”
   http://tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=118702&page=4
   Last post on the page.

8. LANCE! Way to go, dude! Its always easy to see the difference between an MSM “analysis” and one done by a guy who knows what he’s doing.
   You missed all the pop culture tie-ins though. Evil hackers with superpowers, end of the world, noble scientists, blah blah blah. Clearly you’ll never write for the MSM. Good on ya.
   Congrats for this nice effort at hastening the demise of the know-nothing mainstream weenies.

9. Bravo Lance – good work and well written even I understood it. Thanks for taking the time to reveal this information. I agree with your conclusions. When I was a student at a BC university some years back – I discovered some very interesting files on the ftp and wondered why the heck they were on there for everyone to see. I discovered them quite by accident and mostly because I did not know what I was doing and stumbled upon them innocently; however, being the curious sort – I would do some in depth poking around for the fun of it…I did not bother copying anything but there were rough drafts of exams on the server, not my area of study and I would not have taken advantage of the info even if it were relevant to me, but I was surprised nonetheless. I am by no means a hack or techie. People seem to think they just have to give a file a boring name and then nobody will bother to look at it.

10. KevinB, your argument is the ground state most of us operate from who comment here. Doing more with less is indeed progress. Also standard issue common sense, as well as blisteringly obvious and therefore left unsaid most of the time.
    That’s not the debate. The debate is having the freedom to do what you want, or not. The excuse is “the environment”, but the purpose is to control -you-.
    I prefer to make ’em work for it, myself.

11. I think virtually everyone here agrees a clean environment is a goal worth paying a reasonable price for. Greater efficiency of fossil fuel use is a goal worth striving for.
    No one really disagrees with that.
    The thing that has me and so many others upset and what the analysis by Lance makes clear and what Kate’s Bottle Genie clearly shows;
    CARBON DIOXIDE IS NOT THE PROBLEM. THE FRAUD THAT IS CARBON CREDITS IS THE CULPRIT !!
    And yet the climate alarmists, with the whoring of the media, spins that CO2 is pollution. It is not !
    The whole point of climate gate, as Lance proves, is
    THE COVER UP !!
    The United Nation “scientists” have admitted in emails and in fudged data that there is no link between CO2 and global warming.
    The environmentalists should try and convince the Earth’s inhabitants to use energy more efficiently. It would be easier than stomping on an essential gas.

12. “I know this will not be a popular view here, but I’m going to say it any way.”
    KevinB
    Kev,
    I’ll go on a gamble here and say you are dead wrong…I think the vast majority of SDA readers and posters will AGREE with your position. Common sense mostly prevails here and yours is just that: common sense.
    I’ll go a bit further by saying that it is wealth that creates innovation which you prescribe. Cheap fossil fuel was and still is THE driving force for prosperity and human advancement at this time. So is nuclear power like you say. The enviromovement has all but black balled nuclear energy though. Without wealth there is no advancement.
    Copenhagen is set to destroy wealth by further stressing the middle class…That is why it must be stopped. It has nothing to do with the planet or its lifeforms well being, it’s man’s greed and thirst for power that has reached an apex never seen in all of humankind’s history IMO. This is the equivalent of Ceasar, Khan, Napoleon or Hitler dream of world domination and control. The free people of the world are being attacked and most don’t even realize it yet.
    If the EPA in the US is truly going to declare today that carbon dioxide is a dangerous gas it will confirm that the war is intensifying and that climategate is just a temporary set back.
    If the environment has become a religion, it is connected to the church of Satan and not of God.

13. I just received email response from Environment Canada to the email I sent to Jim Prentice. Did anyone else receive one?
    No acknowledgement of the of the “leak” – disappointing!
    Standard IPCC line!

14. Just in time for Copenhagen.
    “EPA: Greenhouse gases a public health threat”
    http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/07/epa.greenhouse.gases/index.html
    That’s what you get when you have an administration stuffed with leftards.
    Next, deniers will be a public health threat, I suppose.

15. KevinB. I can only speak for myself, but it appears that you have stereotyped the readers and posters at SDA. I do not recall reading a post here that stated pollution is good and doing more with less is bad. Pollution and climate change are two completely different subjects – which is the crux of the debate, in my view. Who isn’t for clean rivers, lakes, streams and oceans-many who post here are outdoors men/women.
    The problem is pretending all will be solved by a cap and trade agreement – selling C02 shares. I know of very few industries that are not “green minded” – even the oil and gas industry spends tens of millions on keeping environmental impact to a mini mun. Exceptions would be China, India and a few other supposed developing nations who completely ignore doing anything about pollution because they are poor and want Canada and other “industrialized” nations (by the way we are no longer an industrialized nation, but rather a technological one) who are by far cleaner than they, yet want us to give them billions to clean up their act. The fact is the world is much less polluted now than it was before, the so called environmental disaster has already been averted.
    The problem or debate is really the loss of our human freedoms in the name of environmentalism – the rights millions of Canadian soldiers died for ensure we would not lose any of them and their death would not be in vain. The fanatics are running the show – they believe humans are the problem and that population control is the answer and that is putting it diplomatically – what these fanatics really want is complete control of our everyday lives: our reproduction, , how often we shower or sponge bath, where we live, what and if we can drive, what we can eat (you mentioned obesity and diabetes) how long we can live and whether or not we deserve medical care should we become terminally or otherwise ill, not to mention all our hard earned money, and even our thoughts and ideas are to be controlled; especially the language (words) we can use without penalty. In short, its about money and power. Environmentalism has turned into an excuse to literally enslave the entire population of the world, preferably willingly through evironmental terrorism – scaring the pants off people, literally threatening their lives and livelihood with lies. I hope this sheds some light for you Kevinb.

16. KevinB – I don’t know how you can seriously think that your [very well written] contribution to this forum would “not be popular”. Aside from mocking Earth Hour I really can’t remember anyone here denying the value and legitimacy of conservation, while most go on at length of how frustrating it is that the AGW fanatics are so anti-progress, and anti-science.

17. “Hacked” just never made any real sense.
    You hack into a network and spend who knows how long sorting through the terabytes of data that a place like the CRU would have and pick out a tiny, select 160 meg worth?
    It was obvious to this ol sailor that someone with inside knowledge of who, what and where had to have a hand in the zip file.

18. The email file numbers are standard UNIX epoch numbers.
    Ah. I was thinking mailserver msgID’s, but that makes more sense.

19. Here’s a theory:
    AS we know from the e-mails, Jones threatened to destroy stuff rather than hand it over.
    Perhaps FOIA2009.zip was a file created to park all the most damaging stuff in a safe place. Then all the harmless stuff could be released if need be.
    The whistleblower inside CRU then released the file.

20. KB
    Furthermore to RHTT’s point, GWB made the excellent point in S’toon that: economies that are not functioning well are not innovative. That means that the R&D required to advance technology depends on a thriving economy that depends on affordable energy; therefore, hampering the worlds most innovative economy by raising the cost of energy will retard R&D and technological advancements.
    In a nutshell, only a RETARD would believe that increasing the cost of living will result in more R&D and technological advancements!

21. KevinB; No disagreement here of your pov. In fact I’d also agree that the occasional commenter goes over the top with ‘piss-in-the-soup’ type hyperbole, but that’s what it is, hyperbole. In the same way that most hunters and fishermen/women are active conservationists, there are always a few spoilers. Slaughtering bears for their gall bladders or slaughtering Bald Eagles for their feathers certainly go against the grain of society in general and hunters in particular.
    Me? I’m just fed up being lied to, manipulated, and generally screwed over by every level of government including their bastard offspring, the Crown Corporations and their ilk.

22. My favorite line:
    “I don’t need to be told to conserve energy, I’m just cheap!”

23. kevinb – as noted, most of us agree very much with your views on the protection of the environment. And please, don’t confuse pollution and CO2.
    Lake Champlain, on another note, is being cleaned up, not simply by the Quebec government but by the federal Canadian govt – and the State of Vermont and the US federal govt. Harper, in particular, has been very active in an agenda of Clean Water.
    What we are against, is the transformation of an agenda of a valid, science based environmental responsibility, to a religious cult that is based on a basic assumption that Man is Sinful; that his Sins will result in an apocalyptic end; and that Salvation can only come via a reduction of our economic mode, and also, an enormous transference of wealth to industrializing countries.
    This religious cult, with its key narrative of Man the Sinner, Apocalpytic End, and Redemption by turning away from Material Goods – operates within the template of all religious cults from time immemorial. They all follow the same narrative.
    It acts as a cover for a political agenda to reduce the industrial and economic capacity of the West. There is nothing wrong with increasing the industrial capacity of the other nations; indeed, this is vital and necessary. BUT such an agenda should not deplete and harm the West- and as noted, such an action would destroy the basis of freedom and innovation in the West; the middle class..
    And that’s what AGW is about; it’s a religious cult on the surface; and a cynical and malicious political agenda at its base.
    BartF- that same question was on FOX the other day; the Senator replied that Obama has to acknowledge that the Executive is not in charge of law-making; Congress is – and Obama doesn’t have the constitutional power to ignore Congress. We all know that he’s tried to turn Congress into a rubber stamp; that he denigrates and condemns any who dissent from him – but he’s not as powerful as he thinks he is.

24. Thank-you very much, Lance. I followed your explanations without a problem. I am not an expert on the transmissions of the internet so I am comparable to most internet users, we do know how to USE the technology, we don’t know how it works! If Canada had a curious or responsible msm, this information that you have provided would have been a well paid contract and would have been featured on the front page of every newspaper!
    The one most impressive ‘fallout’ of this egregious ‘hopychangie temperature’ scandle is the generosity of so many knowledgeable people offering information, facts and news to those of us who would otherwise have no access to the information or the means to digest the same. Kate, here at sda, and her amazing posters and commentators have offered their expertise to all of us – free of charge. Meanwhile we pay the fools that work for CBC/other msm(with exception of Fox News) to do NO work, offer NO insight and provide NO expertise. This gift of time and true concern for fellow human beings will never be forgotten by the likes of me. Thank-you from the bottom of my heart – this is truly the most wonderful Christmas gift possible from all of you to all of us.

25. Patrick Armstrong, that makes perfect sense. Who better to gather all the incriminating data and documents than the incriminated.

26. KevinB,
    I too would agree with most of what you’ve said. I think the best way to convince people to conserve just about anything is to price it at fair market value. Currently Ontario grossly subsidizes their electricity prices. When “it”‘s cheap people use a lot of “it” (see “free” health care…). Energy prices go up, people use less, find ways to conserve etc….market forces do work wonderfully well.

27. First, let me say that I’m gratified that so many of you have responded saying that you are in support of what I posted. At the risk of sounding a bit dyspeptic, there are times when negative comments about electric/hybrid cars, reducing emissions, etc. seem to be the norm. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll add a few more comments:
    ET: I do agree that it was joint effort from four levels of government that have helped Lake Champlain. However, there is an enormous causeway just over the Vermont border that restricts waterflow to the north to a very significant degree. Add to that the fact that Mississiquoi Bay is extremely shallow (you can wade out over 100 yards at the very north end, and not even be up to your knees), and that the heavily supported Quebec dairy industry had so much phosphate laden run off that the “Pike River” hasn’t had any pike in it since I was a teen, and even though I haven’t been a fan of the provincial government for years, I have to acknowledge they took the point on this issue. I’ll also add, and maybe Tim from Vermont could support this, it’s my understanding that most Vermont farmers used less fertilizer, which is why the southern portion of the lake appears to be cleaner.
    And Terry Tory: I’ll admit I haven’t given this a whole lot of thought, but I think there’s a serious question – does innovation cause wealth, or does wealth cause innovation? In one sense, it’s indeed a “chicken and egg” question, because I believe the two are irretrievably caught up with each other, but I also remember my grandmother telling me there’s no one as inventive as a lazy man.
    At any rate, if I offended anyone, I apologize. I do kinda hope that when the next Earth Hour rolls around, people will just shrug, rather than willfully waste power and fuel.

28. “You definitely do not want multiple machines naming files based on a Unix timestamp.”
    Well, what generally happens with email archival is that each user has their own spool and that archive spool is generally located in one place. So it is possible to keep a spool per user of every email they sent and received that is different than the spool they use for reading their email.
    But the file names were probably created by whoever created this archive for release to cover their tracks. On most email servers, the file name of the actual email is generally a function of the message-id. If the files had been left alone with the names in the original format, it might be easy to determine which server they were snagged from. Each machine having its own sequence of message-ids. Leaving them intact would be a clue as to where the messages came from.
    The filenames given in the released archive can be easily created with a bash do loop where the Date: header is parsed, converted to Unix time, and the message renamed to the (unix-date).txt then you go down the entire list of files using “touch” to change the date of all the emails to some random date. This is apparently what is done with the emails because all of the file mod dates are Dec 31 2008 even though the last email is dated Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:17:44 -0000
    Now what is interesting here is that very date on the last email. The date on the email is in GMT (-0000). But the date stamp generated for the filename is 19:17:44 which is 5 hours ahead of the time on the email header. GMT +5 puts the computer’s local time zone in Russian Zone 4 in winder or Zone 3 in summer time.
    I am suspecting that the machine that parsed Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:17:44 -0000 generated 1258053464 as the time. That is where things get interesting.

29. I believe that this ‘hacking’ wasn’t reported immediately because they knew it was an inside job and immediately went into damage control. It was not reported to the police until it was made public,and then they came up with the ‘hacking’. Damage control,once again.There is something rotten in Denmark,and it ain’t just the free hookers.

30. KevinB, the issue is totalitarian global control.
    At this juncture, showing support for Earth Hour instead protesting it sends the wrong signal to those who will be measuring our sheep-like compliance.
    When the Climate Crisis is a dead issue, with our side winning, I’ll think about whether or not conservation as a political statement makes sense.
    Forced rationing through legislation, coupled with punitive taxation, is not something we should encourage our politicians to attempt by observing a Communist initiative like Earth Hour.

31. You say, “It simply isn’t reasonable for the FOI Officer to have kept the collection on a CRU system where CRU people had access, but rather used a UEA system.”
    Yet after the leak the CRU took their internet facing system down, apparently as a security precaution, at first replacing it with an ’emergency’ site, and now with a page on the UEA site.
    So did they know the FOIA folder was accessed from their CRU site? Or have they just been in a panic and confused themselves?
    Or is taking the CRU site down an attempt to misdirect us?

32. Oz:
    At this juncture, showing support for Earth Hour instead protesting it sends the wrong signal to those who will be measuring our sheep-like compliance.
    When the Climate Crisis is a dead issue, with our side winning, I’ll think about whether or not conservation as a political statement makes sense.
    Thank you for making the negative case so concisely.

33. Hey Lance, have you given any consideration to the idea that the documents might have been attachments to the emails and that’s why they are so disorganised?

34. Hi Alan. Regarding attachments being the ./documents dir? No,I don’t think so.
    1. For one thing, email attachments don’t include directories, only files.
    2. Attachments are dealt with very differently by what is essentially a text only system (email). The are always encrypted into a text format: Base64, Mime, Quoted-Printable, etc. They would have to be extracted from the email and converted on the fly and dumped into the ./documents directory.
    3. It would be a serious pain in the butt for the writer of the collection program.
    Cheers,
    lance

35. You’re only half right. Wealth is necessary for innovation, but it’s only half the equation. Necessity, or demand is the other half.
    For example, let Western Canada focus on innovation in drilling and uranium mining, and let the Japanese work on windmills.
    The only people interested in wind tech in a fossil fuel rich environment are the ones who have figured out how to harvest taxpayer subsidies. There is little chance of advancing the technology in such an environment.

36. Lance thanks for the quick response.
    1. Zip files contain directories.
    2. If you have a look at some of the emails you will note that they reference as attachments some of the files that are in the documents folder. Eg:
    1199994210.txt
    Attachment Converted: “c:eudoraattachtrend_profiles_dogs_dinner.png”
    and
    1159800386.txt
    Attachment Converted: “c:documents and settingstim osbornmy documentseudoraattachcommunicating_climate_change.pdf”
    Attachment Converted: “c:documents and settingstim osbornmy documentseudoraattachPOSTER SNC.pdf”
    Attachment Converted: “c:documents and settingstim osbornmy documentseudoraattachRulesOfTheGame.pdf”
    3. It’s pretty clear that if it was a hack the files have been selected which means someone’s read them, so it wouldn’t be all that hard to save any attachments. That could also explain why the timestamp information of all the emails and some of the documents has been modified.

37. Yes, zip files contain directories. So do tar’s, cpio’s, gzips, 7z’s, arcs, rars, lzps and probably a few more that I’m missing.
    I guarantee you that whoever wrote the code to export those emails didn’t take into account the numerous types or archives. That person would have had to then manually go into those files and for each type of archive, extract it.
    Remember, I’m arguing that the process is automated, so that process would be automatic. Your _interactive_ email program doesn’t even do that for most of those I listed. It asks for an external program.
    Could they have been dumped into a dir and post-processed, sure. However that still ignores the fundamental point I make about the documents directory that there are files missing. Not just missing, but excluded.
    2. Alan, Look real carefully at those Attachment Converted Lines. What do you think wrote them, the mail client, the mail server, or the email archive program?
    3. Selecting all of one persons email in or out is simple with the perl module I linked to…which calls Mail::Message on a per message basis.
    Cheers,
    lance

38. KevinB, I agree with the other posters above that the vast majority of posters to this site agree with you in that we should be good stewards of the earth and produce society’s needs in a non-polluting manner.
    You made some great points.
    In my full time career of farming for 40 years, I and my neighbours have continually made changes to our farming practices when “cleaner” options were discovered and made available. For example, there is no dirt flying around through the air in this neck of the woods.
    That being said, however, I have to agree with Oz when he stated that “At this juncture, showing support for Earth Hour instead protesting it sends the wrong signal to those who will be measuring our sheep-like compliance.”
    If we all give in to those that would regulate every aspect of our lives we will go into a dark age such as the Russians experienced under the Soviets.

39. I think your theory may be over complicating what probably was just stupidity on Jones part.
    Jones compiled this lot himself as a house keeping exercise resulting from a FOI request.
    He intended to conceal them, not reveal them should he be forced to comply with FOI.
    The folders contain many files that could be embarrassing to an impartial scientist, but that would not have been subject to any FOI request, eg. RulesOfTheGame.pdf.
    The directory structures are just what you would expect were you to have a clean-up of sensitive data from more than one workstation to a network drive.
    The e-mail names are just a time stamp unique to the receiving mail server.
    Being a network directory, it would have been accessible to all users subject to network/share policies.
    Academic users are particularly ignorant of security requirements necessary to prevent access to networked drives from inside or outside the university.
    My guess is another UEA staff member came across the info already collated (but not zipped)and copied to a flash drive.
    Virtually impossible to detect as opposed to an upload/download/hack which would leave a trail of evidence hard to hide.
    There is no need for complex theories and data compilation progs etc, just one (justifiably) paranoid man wanting to remove files he didn’t want seen from various UEA workstations (which he would have had full access to).
    Just my tuppence worth;)

40. Kate:
    You’re only half right. Wealth is necessary for innovation, but it’s only half the equation. Necessity, or demand is the other half.
    I don’t want to get in a huge argument here (a prolonged discussion is an entirely different thing), but how exactly does one calculate demand? When Columbus set out across the Atlantic, there was already the Silk Road, and the routes discovered by Prince Henry to the far East for their spices and tea. I don’t recall, although I’m fair to be corrected, that Spain was particularly rich in the late 1400’s, so how and why Columbus was able to gain Isabella’s favour (and please no Tiger jokes) and launch what I think today would be considered a fairly expensive and risky expedition was allowed to happen. Was this a risky chance by Spanish government that turned out to be immensely profitable, which contrasts hugely with our modern view that government can’t pick winners? Was it just luck?
    I mean, I look at JFK’s determination to put a man on the moon. In itself, going to the moon truly meant nothing to us. However, because of the demands of miniaturization and power/payload calculations, one could easily say that his decision led the way to PC’s, the Internet, and the incredible communication ability we have today. Unintended consequences, to be sure, but important consequences nonetheless.
    But one could say, easily, that in 1961, the US was the most wealthy and powerful place in the world. So, again, I ask, not as a aggressive question, but as an intellectual one, do we need wealth before we innovate? Or does our innovation lead to wealth? I really think it’s an interesting question, and I’d really like to hear some in depth responses from our confreres.

41. KevinB, another thing. One of the threads above discusses the closure of a steel mill in order to meet some imaginary emissions standard. This story reminds me of something one of my uncles was shown when in 1982 he visited relatives living in a Kolchoz not far from the city of Orenburg, which is located in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.
    They showed him a factory built on the banks of a small river in the 30s or 40s by the Soviets. It was brick construction, about 3 stories tall and covering a number of acres. It was empty, had no windows and had never been put into production and had sat like this for 50 years by the early 1980s.
    The reason for never having been put into production was that nobody had given thought as to how this building was to be powered. This was a rural area and had no electrification or rail lines.
    This sort of thing is what many of the people posting on this site fear if this socialistic nonsense wins out. So occasionally the rhetoric gets a little heated and silly.

42. Lance,
    One thing that doesn’t work for me here is that Paul Hudson was sent some of these emails on October 12. As the last emails in this batch were from November 12, he obviously wasn’t sent the emails by somebody who had stumbled upon this cache of FOI collateral. That leaves two possibilities:
    1) There are two leakers. One who sent the emails to Paul Hudson and another who later stumbled upon this cache and zipped it up for the world to see.
    2) There is one leaker who had access to emails before October 12 and again after November 12. Perhaps a sysadmin.
    Maybe I’m missing another obvious explanation here.

43. Alan, I didn’t expect you to go and slag me over at Watts when we were having such a nice discussion here.
    FWIW, do this at your terminal:
    $> cd ./FOIA/mail
    $> grep -i attachment ./*
    – pick one attachment file name, copy it into your buffer
    $> find ../documents/ -name
    where filename == paste from your buffer.
    Email me the ones you find.
    Alternatively, grep the mail directory for the filenames in ./documents.
    Now stop being an idiot about attachments and timestamps that have _nothing_ to do with what I wrote about.
    Cheers,
    lance

44. This is a really well done job of laying out the issue of the e-mail cache.
    Good for you Lance …. I suspect you will be referenced and quoted often in the near future.

45. Will, I don’t think Hudson had the emails, I think he verified their veracity by saying he’d _received_ some of the emails question, as in To:
    Several of the Oct, 09 emails reference him.
    Cheers,
    lance

46. KevinB; re the ‘space race’…that was an anomaly. It was a) a political response to the Soviet threat of dominance and b) a military program wrapped in civilian guise. The aerospace industry saw the demand and AND the potential for huge economic gain, and responded with enthusiasm!
    If it had been left solely to the private sector, raising capital etc., it simply wouldn’t have happened.

47. those Greenpeace ads are a bit pretentious on one hand, but then again, to have effective advertising sometimes you gotta make some waves

48. Great analysis. Thank you. Here’s a slightly different take:
    They are the residual emails of a batch which had already been *sanitized* from the CRU systems, in order to illegally prepare an incomplete response for a future FOIA request. The emails in question were *not* going to be provided under a FOIA request.
    These are deleted emails from a sanitized batch which were foolishly or purposely archived and/or discovered by an insider or whistleblower (perhaps the sanitizer himself). The insider then had pangs of conscience or an axe to grind and released them surreptitiously.

49. Machiavelli describes Anthony Cary as a “climate expert” but he is no such thing. He’s an employee of a foreign government who is a high commissioner (ambassador). That doesn’t make him an expert. And from what I can find under Google, he continues the time honoured tradition of British high commissioners by overseeing an operation best known for its collection of gossip about Canadians and little else.

50. I like jallen’s theory on this. If this was merely a collection of material for an FOI request, it would have more email regarding the collection and analysis of their data products. Those emails are missing, and what’s left is dirty laundry.