Groundhog Day at Hot Topic

New Zealand's answer to Punxatawney Phil, trufflehunter Gareth Renowden has finally crept out of his den, sniffed the air acrid with the stench of hot "stolen" emails, timidly declared "nothing to see, move on" and scuttled back into his burrow until the warming returns, which according to some climate scientists might be a while.

"I've been reluctant to weigh in on this issue, because commenting on stolen and possibly edited documents strikes me as unethical"

Coming from guy who reviews rivals books by liberally misquoting them, that's a little rich.

And this would be the same Gareth who believes the public have a right to know where public policy and any funds at all are involved:

Don't be so precious, Owen. You seek to influence public policy in NZ, and the Heartland Institute is happy to provide funds (and write letters) to support your position. The relationship between the two is a matter of legitimate public interest.

It's good that Renowden recognizes the supremacy of the public interest, because so does common law. It is held by the Privy Council down that a matter of serious public interest can trump confidentiality or privacy. The usual test is "iniquity", which can mean something as minor as dodgy behavior or as serious as murder. It does not have to be criminal conduct to be iniquitous, it can be morally wrong or injurious to public interest.

The Lords in Lion Laboratories [1985] wrote:

"Some things are required to be disclosed in the public interest in which case no confidence can be prayed in aid to keep them secret and [iniquity] is merely an instance of just cause and excuse for breaking confidence".

Renowden makes several fatal errors in his attempt to legally analyse the emails scandal. The first is a complete presumption that the information was hacked by outsiders. The chances of a hacker breaching firewalls and then escaping with nearly 200mb of data that he has to suck in from different places (and know where to find), plus get through passwords and the like, are slim to nil. The time involved in downloading 200mb is significant, and if there had been an intrusion that big for that long, I'm sure we would have heard about it by now.

Instead, it is far more likely to have been an inside job.

Regardless, the public interest in this, represented by the massive amounts of public money these scientists command and their ability to affect the lives of every living person, well and truly outweighs any right to confidentiality. And that's without even addressing the reality that they were public servants whose work and computers were paid for by taxpayers, and everything they produced was owned by taxpayers.

Having dealt with this weakness, Renowden announces, ex cathedra, that quotes in the emails have been taken out of context, that they don't disclose dodgy behavior around peer review or data fudging, nothing to see here, move on. Except, he offers no evidence in support of these bald assertions.

Instead, he says the central nub of the whole thing is cui bono, who benefits? Follow the money he recommends. Which is great, because the link here shows CRU boss Phil Jones received somewhere in the region of NZ$35 million in study grant funding since 1990. Nice work if you can get it, especially with the all expenses paid side trips on the public teat.

Don't you worry your little self about all this Gareth, leave it to the experts on climate fudging to explain all this to the public.

UPDATE: I see one of those callow spotty faced leftie youths I referred to in the above mentioned link, one George Darroch, has surfaced on Hot Topic confidently taking a swipe at Poneke over the latter's claim there has been no warming since 1998. That would, of course, be this George Darroch.

And in case anyone has forgotten, climate scientists have now run the numbers and, after adjusting for natural weather events, found 0.0C warming in the past ten years. Sorry George, what was that?

Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius -- in other words, a standstill

Comments

[Shane Ponting]

"The time involved in downloading 200mb is significant". For me that's 100 seconds - is that really significant? But I agree with the rest of the analysis, and the likelihood is definitely stronger for a case of insider leakage.

[Hobby Hunter]

money money

[John Boy]

Scientists? Maybe in the Maori party science wing where they study fleecing but apparently an embarrassment everywhere else.

I was a fan of the Maori sovreignty movement but always had that nagging reservation that tribalism and greed would pop back to the surface when the need to act in a civilised manner was removed. Nagging voices are sometimes worth listening to.

[CM]

I don't understand why all the deniers are assessing all these emails on the basis that they are all genuine, when only those who sent and recieved them can confirm that is the case. It's not as though these emails were taken by an independent third party without an agenda.
But no, apparently skepticism is all of a sudden left at the door. Strange how that happens.

[CM]

>>>>Regardless, the public interest in this, represented by the massive amounts of public money these scientists command and their ability to affect the lives of every living person, well and truly outweighs any right to confidentiality.<<<<

I therefore demand to see all your emails from the last 10 years Ian. If climte change is happening and it's partly our fault, and we CAN do something about it, but we don't because of people like you, then the public interest component far outweighs any privacy issues you might have.

[Thomas Everth]

Ian, your posturing as the know it all is sickening.

"The chances of a hacker breaching firewalls and then escaping with nearly 200mb of data that he has to suck in from different places (and know where to find), plus get through passwords and the like, are slim to nil. The time involved in downloading 200mb is significant, and if there had been an intrusion that big for that long, I'm sure we would have heard about it by now.

Many prestigious business and organizations have been hacked in the past. In the time of broadband downloading 200Mb is few seconds and a hacker could well remain undetected for an extensive amount of time to have a good look around.

Also as per your persistent guff about warming having stopped, as a proponent of the 'all natural, its the sun etc.. ' talk you should have noticed that we are at the bottom of the 11 year solar cycle. The difference between top and bottom solar flux is about the same as 7 years worth of CO2 rise at current rates. So if you add the two what do you get? A bit of a plateau for about 7 years or so with the warming trend to pick up speed in the coming upswing of the cycle.

[Bamm Bamm]

I understand that a Green Party MP has been written to about the above CRU hactivism email, its contents and then serious questions were then raised about the Greens policies on climate change.

Results will be published here, if the Honourable Member replies.

[Bamm Bamm]

Thomas:

Check the emails. You will find that the CRU received a Basic Science Grant from the Russian Federation. Follow the dots.
Yes we are at a Solar Min - so what?

But in the desert in Iraq there are the remains of old cities that were once full of people, green pastures, crops, and agriculture.
Now there is nothing but sand. Why?

Because its warming - and nothing to do with CO2!

[Serf]

When we pay our carbon taxes to the bank of Rothschild and the other usual suspects via the world government and they decide who has a business and who does not, I'm sure the climate will come to a standstill and stop changing, even though all that industry is off to the 2nd and third world and they have to make no cuts to their output of the poisonous C02, the evil, evil, harmful ungreen C02. So Thomas you and me and the rest of the once industrialized modern world can hunker down in a new all loving Neofeudal(the UNs own words) earth worshiping Fascist(look up the meaning in a dictionary) CCTV monitored hellhole with low paid green jobs for all, no bill of rights and a nice carbon card to go with it just to make sure we don't have too much protein.
Read the Copenhagen treaty PDF, and count all the new taxes and intrusive laws we will have no say over, its really really loving. This isn't about the Climate, this is about the end of freedom and sovereignty and the beginning of serfdom. only 14 days to go Thomas I really hope we sign up because it would take all the other signatory's of the treaty to let us out and you know they will never do that, yippee!

[Bamm Bamm]

Münchhausen Governments with Carbon 'Indulgences' to be bought and sold for Transgressions!

Bring on the Inquisition!!

Go Ian~!

[CM]

Ian, when are you going to allow your emails to be released? Obviously it'll be someone who doesn't agree with you that selects which to release. They even play around with them a little, who knows.

[Ian Wishart]

When I get a taxpayer grant of 35 mil to do climate research, and in an office paid for by the taxpayer, then my emails will be available under the OIA just as they were when I worked at TVNZ.

Until then, as a private citizen working for a private company. No.

Not that there's much to the emails. Lots of advice on how to lengthen or enlarge one's member, or my lost inheritance from a long forgotten tribal Nigerian ancestor...or a range of other fascinating titbits.

[Realitycheck]

Any "old time" farmer worth his salt could have told you that we are NOT in a warming trend, that we have been cooling. I live in Michigan, where the winters have been getting warmer and the summers MUCH cooler. The garden I grow every year has seen fruit and vegetables that taking longer to ripen because of the lack of warm temps. This year tomatoes barely ripened and green peppers (which need warmth to grow properly cause they don't like cold) were immature in September. The Earth has cycles and we are simply in the "down phase" coming into an Ice Age, such as what happened in Europe (I think it was the 1800's).

The real question is this: Is it a small manageable Ice Age or a big one?

[Shane Ponting]

Ian, seriously? We should talk about your email accounts because those enlargement emails and nigerian scans are easy to block (without keyword banning).

It's been years since I got one (although if I want one I just reconfigure everything and the floodgates open to thousands per day, the reason why I'm savvy on this lol).

[Shane Ponting]

In the time of broadband downloading 200Mb is few seconds

200MB divided by 5 seconds (which is on the longer side of a "few seconds") = 40 MB/sec or multiply by 8 and you get 320 Mb/sec. Only those with lots of moolah can afford that sort of bandwidth and you are assuming the pathway in question can even handle it - it would only take a single 100Mbit link at CRU to triple the transfer time, add the roundtrip latencies, protocol overheads etc and your few seconds argument becomes the exaggeration that it is.

Again, yes the possibility of it being a purely external attack is there but it's dwarfed by probabilities and historicities which show insiders are far more often the ultimate cause of the leak...

[robk]

"When I get a taxpayer grant of 35 mil to do climate research"

Come on, CM, can't you organise this grant for Ian so we can all read his e-mails? :-D

IF climate 'alarmists' like CM and Renowdon are so happy with possible signs of corruption in certain circles - what does that say? Apparently this corruption is considered to be the norm.