Re: For your eyes only

Now this is both entertaining and incriminating…

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt 

 From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: For your eyes only
Date: Thu Feb 3 13:11:46 2005

….

Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order – so congrats etc ! Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it ! ….

Emphasis mine. Note what it comes down to here… Phil Jones would rather destroy data than hand it over… as he’d be required to BY LAW. Why does Phil Jones matter? Because he and Michael Mann (the target of the above email) are responsible for producing the “Temperature record of the last 1000 years,” better known as the “hockey stick.”

If Jones would rather destroy data than make it public… can we really rely on his results in order to inform decisions? When i worked in aerospace, I had to produce a number of codes realtign to rocket engine performance, typically performance reconstructions, with extrapolations regarding theoretical future performance. Not only was my data open to review… so were my spreadsheets and codes. And yet here we have “scientists” afraid that critics will get a look at their codes. Why is that? Are they afraid that the codes will be found to be flawed? Are they afraid that their codes will be found to have built-in fraudulent assumptions?