Thread by @ClimateAudit

Next installment on BBC' fictionalization of Climategate: The Trick. Teaser: it isn't the Truth about Climategate, it's the opposite. Prior threads:

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1450420409757732866

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1450494229235572744

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1450916794697404423

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1451219111300800517

https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1451242325540212744

2/ The Trick portrayed Climategate hack as part of conspiracy by Russian intel services, US fossil fuel corporations and "follow the money" to derail Copenhagen, rather than spat between CRU and Climate Audit about withholding data, together with open-door UEA web "security"

3/ we left off at beginning of August shortly after I
had exposed that CRU, after refusing station data due to supposed confidentiality agreements, had nonetheless placed data on a public FTP site (which it took private after exposure while issuing new passwords to CRU staff).

4/ before continuing the chronology, a brief editorial comment on Trick notion that Climate Audit and/or its readers were involved in some plot to detail Copenhagen: I checked pre-hack Climate Audit and there wasn't A SINGLE article on or opposing Copenhagen.

5/ there was virtually no discussion of "policy" at Climate Audit. I disdained right-wing US arguments that climate policy interfered with "liberty". If climate was as huge an issue as claimed, I privately thought green advocacy of wind was as bad as laetrile for cancer

116/ liked to compare my parsing of Hockey Stick to a CIA analyst saying in 2002-3 that sometimes an aluminum tube is just an aluminum tube and not evidence of WMD, while simultaneously allowing for possibility that Iraq war might be otherwise justifiable, but not on tubes

117/ ironically, this comparison came more or less full circle with my recent focus on serious deconstruction of Steele dossier - not just arm-waving declaration that it was BS, but real digging into its construction - a focus that contributed to outing of Igor Danchenko as PSS.

118/ the promptness of report of the WMD Commission on intel failures in relation to Iraqi WMD - and failure of intel agencies to validate information - stands in stark contrast to years of obfuscation by intel agencies on Russiagate hoax.

119/ Iraq was connected to my climate career. Looting of Baghdad Museum took place on Apr 9-10, 2003. Rumsfeld's notorious "How many vases" quip was on Apr 11. I was dumbfounded and horrified at early reports of museum looting and, on Apr 9, 2003, asked Mann for data.

120/ back to Climategate, CRU had (fraudulently) refused my FOI for station data on grounds that they had confidentiality agreements that prevented distribution to "non-academics". So I and others asked CRU for copies of the confidentiality agreements in the supposed tsunami.

121/ even after CRU realized that they'd left a copy of the station data on their own FTP site and I had a copy, they continued their charade. On Aug 8, I reported on their response climateaudit.org/2009/08/11/cru…

122/ on or about Aug 8, they published a short webpage cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/avail… together with a pdf containing 4 scrungy documents none of which contained any restriction on "non-academics". cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/avail…

123/ the "confidentiality agreements" were a joke. In particular, they did not justify Jones' sending the data to people who offered the (very vain) Jones a co-authorship to add to his H-index, but not to potential critics, tho this was argued by Jones defenders.

124/ in The Trick, the issue of confidentiality agreements comes up briefly when Sir David asks Trevor Davies of UEA why Jones doesn't archive the refused station data. Davies says: "it wasn't theirs to give". Except that Jones had given data readily to his pals.

125/ the news that CRU did "not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data" came as a total surprise. Jones ludicrously blamed loss on "data storage availability in 1980s". BS. Offices in 1980s had plenty of file cabinets

126/ ironically, Jones' loss of "original raw data" was satirized by comedian Jon Stewart, whose commentary on Climategate was much more insightful than any of the whitewashing "inquiries", none of whom squarely faced the issues.
cc.com/video/v9n1tt/t…

127 by Aug 12, the spat between Climate Audit and CRU reached the august pages of Nature nature.com/articles/46078… (reported at CA here climateaudit.org/2009/08/12/nat…).

128/ the Nature article was accompanied by a longer discussion by Olive Heffernan at a Nature blog on Aug 12 blogs.nature.com/climatefeedbac…. Interesting to re-read the comments which, unusually in that period (and division is worse now), include comments from both sides of the aisle.

129/ however, the spat was winding down somewhat. On Aug 12, I did a longer article on the supposed confidentiality agreements, climateaudit.org/2009/08/12/the… further exposing the sham assertions by UEA and CRU.

130/ the next day, CRU refused to send the station data provided to Georgia Tech to Ross McKitrick and Roman Mureika, varying their fabricated excuses a little from prior refusal. Later, they would refuse requests from Jonathan Jones and others.
climateaudit.org/2009/08/13/cru…

131/ nothing much happened for next month. I went to the Erice conference and then sightseeing in the last two weeks of August. I began Sept 2009 by commenting on new multiproxy reconstruction by Kaufman et al, more what I was interested in. (Kaufman later becomes PAGES2K player)

132/ my first article on Kaufman et al 2009 climateaudit.org/2009/09/03/kau… observed that he had copied the contaminated Korttajarvi lake sediment series used in Mann 2008, also using it upside down.

133/ the first Climategate documents appear to have been exfiltrated on Sep 16, 2003. Exfiltration timestamps were bleached from emails and on most documents, but a few weren't.

134/ In next instalment, I will characterize documents by order of exfiltration and see what we can deduce about Mr FOIA from his path through CRU documents. This will be mostly fresh analysis. So stay tuned.