East Anglia University are trying to spot hoaxes

Oh the irony?

Three years after the scandal that was ClimateGate, the University of East Anglia has a campus wide poster program to teach staff and students how to protect themselves from pfishing. (Thanks to reader pickabelief). Could this be a plan to protect the university from more embarrassing hacks and leaks too?

(Given other standards at UEA*, we have to ask if this is the rapid-response-squad?)

*With apologies to good scientists and workers at UEA. You didn’t ask for this test, but if you want to protect your reputation, you need to speak up. You could start with explaining why you do things differently to the people who use tricks to hide declines, avoid FOIs, and consort to delete taxpayer funded email records.

Some at UEA applaud work where random numbers produce the same “result” as a poor-censored-and-truncated-proxy does, and you might think, rightly, this is not science. But as long as sloppy, inept activist-scientists use the UEA brand to bolster their credibility, everyone who tacitly supports them gets tarred with the same brush.

The hoax that matters is the one that billions of dollars depend upon ($257 billion are invested in renewables per annum and $176 […]

THAT famous email explained and the first Volunteer Global Warming Skeptic

Years before Climategate, THAT email, from Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes told us everything we needed to know about the scientific standards at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia. THAT email was the tip of the iceberg, and below is what lay underneath the surface — the things that were said behind the scenes at the time. Geoff Sherrington has pieced together a sequence of climategate emails, his own emails, and parts of Warwick Hughes work to recreate the sequence.

And for the true skeptic-aficionados, here’s a new layer of history to the skeptical chronology. Where did this volunteer audit movement begin?

Who would have guessed that at least one skeptic, Hughes, was asking for the data Phil Jones worked with, as long ago as 1991? (That was way back in the days where people worked with hard copy print outs, and drew graphs by hand!) Does Hughes rank as volunteer Skeptic Number 1?

UPDATE: I asked Warwick, and he thinks the first unpaid skeptic was Fred Wood in 1988*. — Jo

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Guest post by: Geoffrey H Sherrington, Scientist.

This is the longer story behind one of […]

Who are the deniers now?

The people are rising up in protest. Today my inbox theme is of people emailing me with responses of the questions they are putting to the Establishment — at universities, institutes, and political parties – to the ABC, UWA and The Greens in particular. In all the cases they received answers that deny there is a problem, but between the lines you can tell that those forced to write the replies are feeling the heat.

And may the heat escalate.

I’ll be publishing as many as I can.

This story below came in this morning about Roger Helmer MEP (UK), who was invited to speak to the VC of East Anglia (ie. Climategate central). He asked if he could bring “two friends”, which was fine until they turned out to be Monckton and Delingpole, at which point the UEA’s staff were suddenly forced into a demeaning dance, doing all they could to limit the damage by artificially splitting up the group into separate appointments.

Squirm squirm squirm. There is fear in their eyes… why go to so much trouble to prevent a few skeptics being in the same room at the same time?

7 out of […]