Another interesting week on the FOI front. While the climate change row continues – triggered by an FOI investigation – continues to dominate the national headlines, locally there have been some fascinating stories. They include the length of times bodies have remained unclaimed in hospital mortuaries, dirty scalpels in hospitals, public bodies paying to go to the party conferences, the demise of UFO investigations and porn found on school computers…

1. Body unclaimed in a mortuary for 10 years

A body has lain unclaimed in a council morgue for the past 10 years, a Yorkshire Post investigation has revealed after it used the freedom of information act to ask local hospitals for information. Airedale General Hospital at Keighley said it had also held a body for 12 months in recent years at the request of the police due to an ongoing murder inquiry. Sheffield City Council, said it kept the body of “a wealthy man” for 18 months during a will dispute. Fascinating stuff which asks a lot of questions.

2. Operations halted after filthy scalpels found

Sticking with hospitals, More than 300 surgical instruments have been returned to NHS hospitals dirty or broken by private contractors hired to sterilise them, The Glasgow Evening Times reported after using FOI. The instruments, including scalpels, forceps and microscopes, have had to be returned by NHS Lanarkshire over the past year because they were unsterile or damaged, which has led to claims that operations are being cancelled because of shortages of essential equipment.

3. Racially abusive civil servant keeps job

Here’s a very interesting one. A blogger [I was unable to work out who, if you know, please let me know] was aware that a senior diplomat convicted of racially aggravated harassment for a foul-mouthed anti-Israeli rant in a gym had been given a new role at the Foreign Office and wanted details, so turned to FOI. The Jewish Chronicle reports Rowan Laxton, 48, the then head of the South Asia desk at the FO, was exercising in a gym when saw a television report during Israel’s action in Gaza and shouted “f—— Israelis, f—— Jews” and was subsequently prosecuted. I’d have assumed that personal information get-outs would have been used by the Foreign Office to answer questions about what happened to Mr Laxton inside the FO, but apparently not, because they confirmed what action had been taken against him.

4. How much to exhibit at the party conference?

The Wolverhampton Express and Star reports this week that the public body that oversees public transport in the West Midlands, Centro,  spent £13,942 of taxpayers’ money promoting itself at the Tory party conference. An interesting use of funds or a way of courting the likely new government? Either way, it’s another interesting find from the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

5. Council cash spent on councillors’ meals

This sort of story appears in various guises but I’ve included it here as another good example of a politician using it to get information, and then the newspaper involved applying the context. At a time when the rest of us are suffering a recession, hospitality costs rising at Worthing Council won’t go down well.

6. Residents use FOI for planning application information

Rumours regularly abound about what might happen to land, and possible planning applications. Residents in Canterbury got straight to the point by asking the council for details of any discussions with a university about one area of land. The council confirmed talks had taken place – a good reference point for journalists hitting walls of silence when pursuing such issues?

7. Dangerous dogs

In the week a four-year-old was killed in Liverpool by an illegal dog, the Daily Post in North Wales reports of 70 such attacks in North Wales in three years. Every parents’ nightmare – and information which can hopefully prompt more action for tougher laws?

8. UFOs

Seriously, I’ve included this not just because UFOs can drive traffic, even though it’s pointless traffic. But amidst all the “please can I have details of xxxx UFO sightings in XXXXX” requests, came thisone reported in Defence Management: that the UFO investigation service has been closed down. Now we’ll never know if the truth is out there.

9. School pupils caught with porn on school computers

Schools are notoriously reluctant to release this information – and for good reason normally. So the Galloway News used FOI to find out which schools had suspended or disciplined pupils for find the wrong content online. I think this request went to the local council.

10. Not enough doctors

Clever use of FOI by the Conservative Party this week. It sought to prove that there was a doctor shortage in casualty departments across the UK.  They did this by submitting FOI  requests to hospitals to ascertain the number of staff in A&E departments during two sample dates in March, one during the week and one at the weekend, showed that “almost one in three hospitals did not have a doctor of sufficient seniority and experience in the hospital on one of the sample nights.” So FOI becomes a representative sample. A clever use.

“More than €65,000 in foreign travel costs have been racked up by two ministers for education since the last general election, new figures reveal. The costs run up by current incumbent Batt O’Keeffe and his predecessor Mary Hanafin include over €15,000 on chauffeur hire and almost €3,000 on VIP airport lounges …” (more)

[Shane Phelan, Independent, 2 December]

Après avoir publié le premier article de ce blog (regarde de l’autre côté),
Un événement s’est produit et je désire le partager avec toi.
Il y a quelques temps, je finissais mon premier manuscrit intitulé “Fruits de nos passions” – je le publierai bientôt dans mes prochaines colonnes.
Animé par le désir de faire éditer mon livre, je pris contacte avec quelques maisons d’édition souhaitant donner aux jeunes auteurs une chance de sortir de l’ombre.
Dans mon livre, je me suis parfois inspiré de Baudelaire, le poète français auteur du célèbre “Fleurs du mal”. A ma grande surprise, la seule maison d’édition qui m’envoya un contrat fut… Les éditions Baudelaire.
Il s’agissait d’un contrat d’édition à frais d’auteur (l’auteur doit participer financièrement au projet). Mais le problème était que la somme demandée était assez élevée (près de 3000€) et non négociable.

La magie du jour est que juste après la publication de l’article dont je parle plus haut, je consulte mon mail et découvre un mail de la part de la maison d’édition qui m’invite à revoir ensemble la somme à payer à la baisse.

Je t’ai parlé dans le premier article de la phase où tout semble perdu au point que tu ne penses même plus à ton projet avec autant de zèle qu’à ses débuts. Pendant près de 6 mois, j’ai tourné le dos à mon projet d’édition en me disant que cette somme pouvait me servir à autre chose laissant la place à “la Nature”…

Demain, je vais reprendre contact avec l’éditeur afin de prendre connaissance des nouveaux éléments du puzzle de mon projet littéraire.

Et toi, qu’as-tu as partager aujourd’hui ?

Pour finir :
Un jour un homme pria son Dieu pour qu’il pleuve car la sécheresse faisait ravage. En guide de réponse, son Dieu lui demanda de se rendre au sommet de la montagne et de regarder le ciel.
Au bout d’un moment, il vit apparaitre un petit nuage.
Quelques heures plus tard, il se mit à pleuvoir.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

La sorcellerie est l’ensemble de pratiques surnaturelles, courantes dans les sociétés primitives, qui sont censées notamment produire des maléfices. Il importe cependant de souligner que la sorcellerie est toujours d’actualité dans nos sociétés contemporaines.

Le dédoublement est le fait pour le sorcier de pouvoir par des incantations détacher son esprit de son corps afin de pouvoir influer d’une manière invisible mais réelle sur les choses et les personnes qui l’entourent. Une fois sorti de son corps, le sorcier peut prendre l’apparence de certains animaux tels que la souris, le poulet, le cafard, le corbeau, etc. Cette pratique permet au sorcier d’espionner sa cible, d’écouter discrètement des causeries dans le monde visible pour ensuite faire un rapport dans le monde invisible. Le sorcier utilise la technique de dédoublement pour avoir les informations de dernière minute afin d’être précis lors des attaques qu’il va exercer sur les biens et les personnes  pris pour cibles.

 Le diable exploite les défauts de  l’homme telles que la colère, les rancunes, la haine, la jalousie. En somme le péché est l’arme que le diable exploite pour atteindre l’homme. Au contraire, l’amour, la charité, la prière sont des armes qui ébranlent le sorcier et les hommes mystiques.

Voici l’heure de sortir de votre sommeil, nous dit saint Paul dans sa lettre aux Romains (Rm 13, 11 – 14) : «  aujourd’hui en effet, le salut est plus près de nous qu’au moment où nous avons cru. La nuit est avancée, le jour est tout proche. Rejetons donc les œuvres des ténèbres et revêtons les armes de la lumière. Conduisons-nous honnêtement, comme en plein jour, sans ripailles, ni beuveries, sans coucheries, ni débauches, sans querelles, ni jalousies. Mais revêtez le Seigneur Jésus-Christ et ne vous abandonnez pas aux préoccupations de la chair pour en satisfaire les convoitises. »

Information Commissioner's Office, UK

Here’s some more context for the email leaks at CRU and Phil Jones doing everything he can to prevent the release of data and code.  Willis Eschenbach’s Freedom of Information Act request is well documented at Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit mirror site.  It is truly an informing read.

That really puts things in context, doesn’t it?

(in risposta a “Curioso incidente sulla via per… IV” su Ocasapiens)

Devo aver passato qualche “livello” speciale, quando due persone cominciano a scambiarsi argomenti su di me

Qualche precisazione:

1. Non sono Claudio Costa, non ho mai scambiato messaggi con Claudio Costa, non penso di avere la stessa opinione sui cambiamenti climatici di Claudio Costa, e a dire il vero non ho mai approfondito l’argomento

2. Non so a quali domande avrei risposto, secondo Claudio Costa e non mi interessa saperlo. Se scrivo un commento, mi piacerebbe che si rispondesse al mio commento, o non si rispondesse per niente, invece di rispondere come se il mio commento fosse qualcos’altro

3. Il commento sullo stare sott’acqua nel 2050 era una metafora. Categorizzarla come fantasia mi sembra come lamentarsi che una rosa bianca sia bianca. Una metafora per dire cosa? Per dire che vista la potenziale drammaticita’ delle conseguenze del riscaldamento globale, perdersi in stupidaggini del tipo fare i “nervous”, “defensive”, “tribal” e “jumpy” mi sembra quantomeno controproducente. Cosi’ come nascondersi dietro l’IPR.

4. L’Oca a volte si risponde da sola. “Nessun ricercatore è tenuto a condividere le proprie fonti con estranei alla sua ricerca finché non la pubblica”. FINCHE’ NON LA PUBBLICA. Grazie. Dopo, ci pensa la Legge.

5. A frignare sono solo coloro che non riescono a sostenere un dibattito su un qualunque argomento. Nel nostro caso, da una parte quelli che urlano alla cospirazione internazionale con a capo il CRU (una stupidaggine), dall’altra quelli che si arrampicano sugli specchi dopo aver visto come e’ stato trattato chi ha chiesto una lista di stazioni. Vogliamo fare scienza o psicanalizzare Mann e Jones??

6. Il numero di richieste FOI era prima 12. Poi 58. Adesso 80-100. Alla faccia della “costatazione”: sembrano i bersaglieri di Enrico Montesano, in dieci erroneamente sconfinati in Svizzera, che fra una telefonata e l’altra diventano dieci milioni. Permettetemi di dire che fra un dato inverificabile e l’altro, ormai ai numeri che escono dal CRU credero’ solo se potro’ toccare le prove “con mano” (e’ un’altra metafora).

7. A proposito di fantasie, continua la nostra Oca a sognare Big Oil e King Coal, nonostante non sia mai stata capace di dimostrare in alcun modo che esista un “fronte scettico unito” (una impossibilita’ logica, visto che fra quelli sbrigativamente classificati come “scettici” ce n’e’ di tutti i tipi). La invito a iscriversi alla lista CLIMATE-L (Climate Change Info Mailing List ) dove potra’ verificare la preponderanza delle iniziative dei credenti nei cambiamenti climatici catastrofici, con una serie di iniziative che non mi sembrano di poco costo o gratis. Emperor Global Warming, I say.

Comunque non voglio assolutamente infierire. Fra le poche certezze, dopo il ClimateGate, quella che a parte i soliti noti nessuno ma proprio nessuno, scettico o credente, ha mai avuto accesso o ha mai replicato i dati del CRU.

Non siamo neanche sicuri se al CRU hanno mai replicato i dati del CRU. Lo sapremo solo al termine di una eventuale inchiesta indipendente.

Insomma, non c’e’ gusto a infierire su chi rantola e boccheggia, per cui invito a trattare la summentovata con i guanti bianchi, in materia di clima (altrimenti e’ come fare un giro al Museo di Storia Naturale con Fratus…un’esperienza sicuramente patetica).

L’unico dubbio che mi e’ rimasto e’ perche’ Hubble ha condiviso con Hoyle, ma Jones non puo’ condividere con quel ricercatore universitario inglese in un campo vicino al paleoclimatico (non Eschenbach…ma non posso rivelare oltre) che ha commentato nel mio blog, sotto uno pseudonimo,

“I also submitted a F.O.I. request to CRU and got the bum’s rush. In the light of the emails (like thise quoted above) I have now made an official complaint to the F.O.I. Commissioner. I am a U.K. academic so there is no excuse for not releasing to a fellow scientist.“

C’e’ un bellissimo blog di Judy Curry (voglio vedere chi la definisce “scettica”!!!) sul sito camirror.wordpress.com . E’ un sito di McIntyre quindi non so se osera’ leggerlo, l’Oca, comunque la Curry dice fra l’altro:

“the problem seems to be that the circling of the wagons strategy developed by small groups of climate researchers in response to the politically motivated attacks against climate science are now being used against other climate researchers“

“Contro altri ricercatori in campo climatico”. Non sono sicuro che l’Oca voglia difendere quello, anzi. Qualcuno passi gli antidepressivi e i farmaci per curare la paranoia al CRU, si rimettano i “wagons” in fila invece che in circolo, e proviamo a ricominciare dalla Scienza.

A brown paper envelope for the digital age, Wikileaks.org is now home to more than 1m documents that governments and big business would rather the public did not see. The site – similar to Wikipedia in style, but otherwise independent of it – serves as an uncensorable and untraceable depository for the truth, able to publish documents that the courts may prevent newspapers and broadcasters from being able to touch. This month it has come of age in Britain, hosting the Minton report on the activities of oil trader Trafigura, even while the firm was trying to use its solicitors to prevent the press from revealing its contents. It was Wikileaks, too, that this week published a membership list of the British National party, revealing how few activists it has. Earlier this year, Lord Oakeshott, using parliamentary privilege, pointed those curious about Barclays’ tax activities to Wikileaks to read the evidence. Useful in Britain, it is invaluable in less free societies, such as China, where the authorities play a cat-and-mouse game with Wikileaks’ Swedish webhosts to try to block access. So far Wikileaks has stayed ahead, with technology leaving the law lagging behind. The site exists in a sort of legal limbo, not private, but not yet fully accepted by courts as part of the public domain. It takes power away from the powerful and hands it to citizens, controversial but essential example of what the web does best: offering unrestricted dispersal of information so that people can judge for themselves.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/22/in-praise-of-wikileaks

IMHO
Wikileaks is another excellent example of Libertarianism working! Please feel FREE to check out what is happening in YOUR AREA that the government and big business and the MainStreamMedia Presstitutes DO NOT want YOU to KNOW!

PLEASE SPREAD THIS LINK!!

http://wikileaks.org/

For more on this topic please see my Libertarian vs Authoritarian Today’s REAL Politic blog. Its time to take the power back!

 http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/libertarian-vs-authoritarian-todays-real-politic/

The Wiki phenomina has been a great benefit to all of humanity that can access it. It has been shown that the worst offenders for posting FALSE informations are the very authorities that claim its full of false information.

According to the BBC, WikiScanner found that some editorial contributions to Wikipedia had originated from computers operated by the Diebold company, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Vatican.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiScanner

It has been shown that Wikipedia contains LESS factual errors per catagory than the encyclopedia Britanica,even with the Vatican and other world authoritarians filling it with LIES!

It is thanks to Wikileaks that the Trifigura gag order was by-passed and the public got to hear ,NOT just about the polution and corrupt business practices BUT also the effort put into covering these work practices up ,rather than CLEAN the practices up!

You can be very sure that YOUR POLITION will be doing everything he/she can to find away to CLOSE DOWN this ESSENTIAL SITE that ensures our very liberty at a time of global government DECIET AND CONSPIRACY!!! Wait for the effort to cast doubt on the reliablity of such sourses etc..etc.. This is the typical response , attack the messenger when you cannot attack the message!

For more on this topic please check these blogs.

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/us-government-making-a-killing-on-war/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/us-government-terrorists-still-in-power-iran-contra-to-911/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/the-fedbank-bailouts-and-fascist-coups-the-great-depressionnaziscommies-and-the-bush-family/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/the-record-of-the-federal-reserve/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/a-short-history-of-global-domination-or-rockefella-rothschild-and-the-capitalist-communist-nwo-con/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/governments-traitors-terrorists-and-drug-dealers/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/are-us-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-well-intended-mistakes-what-we-now-know-from-the-evidence/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/tony-blair-liar-and-traitor-and-eu-reject/

http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/iranian-oil-bourse-the-real-reason-for-war-with-iran/

BUT I do have to give praise to the Guardian for running such an article in praise of an uncencored and uncontrolled  internet news site.

REMEMBER

THERE’S NO JUSTICE , THERE’S JUST US!!!

A council with 100,000 unsuitable images on its computers, a police force revealing it doesn’t investigate almost a quarter of reported crimes and the rising cost of parking fines – here are 10 stories made possible this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.

1. Buying British

Councils up and down the country are tasked with promoting their local economies, and they often nick ideas from each other – hence why nearly every town seems to have a German Christmas market (started in Birmingham, I think) or a big wheel (started in Manchester, again, I think). But how far do councils go to ensure they are supporting the local economy through their purchases? The Countryside Alliance used FOI to ask councils if they had a formal policy in place to ensure they tried to buy locally – the answer was that 74% did not.

2. Naughty images on council computers

Sticking with councils for the time being,  The Nottingham Evening Post turned up an interesting discovery when it asked the local council how many unsuitable images had been found on its computer. The report states that the council has a software package it uses to track such things – is it possible other councils do the same? Is it worth asking any council how many instances of unsuitable images or unsuitable content being accessed has been reported in the last year? Interestingly, the NEP report says the council considered abandoning its probe into dodgy photographs when it saw the scale of the problem. That’ll solve it, then!

3. Parking fines

If there was an award for effective use of FOI by a campaigning body, then the Taxpayers Alliance would surely win it. This week, it released information on how much councils make from parking fines. Not surprisingly, the numbers are going up. Councils have their own reasons for this, but surely strict parking rules are as good a reason as any for shoppers to head straight for the nearest free-to-park out-of-town complex?

4.Repairs, repairs, repairs

To North Wales and the North Wales Weekly News, which used FOI to find out how much it had cost to repair a bridge which drivers kept, er, driving into. A local story in every sense,  it’s a good example of the sort of the council information which we often don’t think about asking for – every area must have something the council has to keep repairing?

5. Donny day ahead of gay pride

A good old-fashioned “documents released” story has proved what a lot of people in Doncaster were suspecting, it seems. They have a directly-elected mayor there and he’s planning a Doncaster Day of celebrations – at the expense of funding several other festivals. I suspect this is a real talker in the town, and one made possible through FOI. Perhaps this is another good example of getting evidence via FOI?

6. Overstretched ambulance services

WalesOnline reports the findings of a Welsh Assembly Member who turned to FOI after becoming convinced an ambulance shortage was resulting in police taking injured and sick people to hospital. Turns out she was right.

7. A cautionary tale

The other week, Panorama led with the over-use of cautions for serious crimes. Great national numbers, but local FOIs on the same issue are starting to bring in results. The South Wales Evening Post is one such example, reporting this week that arsonists and violent offenders are among those being let off with a “slap on the wrists.”

8. Screening out crimes

Perhaps worse than a suspected criminal receiving a caution, from the victim’s point of view at least, would be the police not investigating at all. The Bournemouth Echo reports that 22% of all reported crimes are “screened out” in Dorset, which means they aren’t investigated. Presumably a similar policy is in place across the country?

9. Metal Theft

An different sort of crime is reported by the Cambridge News thanks to FOI. It reports that figures were obtained through the act which set out just how big a problem metal theft had become – with schools, churches, nurseries and clinics among the places reporting that metal had been stolen. A recessionary crime?

10. Rowdy kids on buses

This one’s a bit different, from the Dundee Evening Telegraph. It found out that kids chucked off school buses for rowdiness were now being taxied home from school at the council’s expense. The council had refused to answer questions about the incident, until the “Tele” put in an FOI about the incident. Answers followed shortly after. So while not a case of information being released through Freedom of Information, it is a case of information becoming available because of FOI.

* * *

*These FOI stories were found searching for the term “FOI” or “Freedom of Information” in Google News. Journalists seem split on whether to say how they found the information or not, hence I suspect many more stories benefitted from FOI research.

Mercredi 25 novembre 2009 Un quotidien italien dresse le bilan des diocèses de France. On regrettera l’utilisation impropre du terme “schisme”.

Extraits d’un article de Paolo Rodari, paru dans le quotidien italien Il Foglio, le vendredi 13 novembre 2009 et intitulé “L’Église de France perd de son influence au Vatican et des séminaristes dans ses diocèses” :

“Les statistiques 2008 sont éloquentes (celles de 2009 sont attendus dans les prochaines semaines) : les prêtres diocésains ne sont plus que 15 000 et leur âge moyen dépasse 75 ans. Contre une centaine de prêtres qui sont ordonnés chaque année, 900 meurent ou quittent les ordres. Dans certains diocèses, les paroisses sont regroupées en “ensembles pastoraux”, où il arrive qu’un seul prêtre desserve dix, vingt, voire quarante églises. Il y a des diocèses qui d’ici dix ans, n’auront pas plus de dix prêtres en activité.

Le chiffre le plus inquiétant est celui des séminaristes: de 4 536 en 1966, ils ne sont guère plus de 500 aujourd’hui. Des diocèse comme Pamiers, Belfort, Agen, Perpignan n’ont plus de vocations. Les ordinations sont très peu nombreuses : depuis Vatican II, le nombre a chuté de façon alarmante : 825 prêtres ordonnés en 1956, environ 90 en 2008. Même Paris est à l’unisson des autres diocèses. Dans les années 80-90, Paris était considéré comme une exception dans le paysage français : une Église prospère, un séminaire florissant, des finances en excédent. C’étaient les dernières heures de la grandeur, celles de l’axe-Wojtyla Lustiger qui voyait fleurir les vocations. Le clergé parisien était nombreux et jeune. Aujourd’hui – selon les données 2008 -, Paris compte environ 50 séminaristes pour une dizaine d’ordinations chaque année (sept sont prévues en 2010).

Du point de vue des fidèles, la situation n’est guère meilleure. Le déclin de la pratique religieuse, considérable dans les années 70, se poursuit inexorablement. Les pratiquants sont une infime minorité (4% si “pratiquer” c’est aller à l’église une fois par mois) d’âge relativement mûr. Résistent – et c’est là un fait qui donne matière à réflexion – les mouvements comme l’Emmanuel, les Frères de Saint-Jean ou la Communauté Saint-Martin et, surtout, les groupes traditionalistes. Aujourd’hui, environ un tiers du total des séminaristes français est d’ores et déjà issu de ces communautés. Avec 388 lieux de culte dominical, soit plus de quatre par diocèse, la sensibilité tridentine fait sentir son poids. Elle a profité, paradoxalement, d’une certaine interprétation «laxiste» du Concile. Face à une Église trop ouverte aux sirènes du monde, s’en est créé de fait une autre qui n’a jamais voulu accepter cette sécularisation. Et aujourd’hui, c’est précisément cette dernière Église – celle que l’on appelle traditionaliste – qui représente une espérance. Et il ne s’agit pas de l’Église lefebvriste car elle n’a rien à voir avec le schisme d’Écône. Née dans l’Église catholique, elle tient à demeurer dans l’Église catholique nonobstant sa sensibilité propre. En 2008, les séminaristes de ces communautés étaient 160, soit plus ou moins un tiers du nombre total de séminaristes diocésains. Et les effectifs sont en augmentation.

Ce sont des données qui font réfléchir, et peuvent parfois même inquiéter. De fait, les sentiments sont partagés au sein des évêques français réunis à Lourdes pour leur assemblée générale. Eux, les évêques français, ont été (pour la plupart) parmi les opposants les plus résolus du Motu Proprio “Summorum Pontificum”. Elles, les communautés traditionalistes, l’ont accueilli avec joie, parce qu’il les a renforcées dans ce qu’elles sont : une partie de l’Église catholique. Et, tôt ou tard, chiffres à l’appui, l’épiscopat devra leur en donner acte.”

By Steve McIntyre from his camirror.wordpress.com site.

For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here. Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true.

The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001. Nor was the decline shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.)

A retrieval script follows.

For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red.
Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions. The relevant IPCC 2001 graph, shown below, clearly does not show the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction.

Contrary to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the decline is “hidden in plain sight”, the inconvenient data has simply been deleted.

The reason, as explained on Sep 22, 1999 by Michael Mann to coauthors in 938018124.txt, was to avoid giving “fodder to the skeptics”. Reasonable people might well disagree with Gavin Schmidt as to whether this is a “a good way to deal with a problem” or simply a trick.

Figure 2. IPCC 2001 Fig 2.21 showing Briffa, Jones and Mann reconstructions together with HadCRU temperature.

Retrieval script:

##COMPARE ARCHIVED BRIFFA VERSION TO CLIMATEGATE VERSION

#1. LOAD ARcHIVED DATA

url<-"ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/n_hem_temp/briffa2001jgr3.txt"
 #readLines(url)[1:50]
 Briffa<-read.table(url,skip=24,fill=TRUE)
 Briffa[Briffa< -900]=NA
 dimnames(Briffa)[[2]]<-c("year","Jones98","MBH99","Briffa01","Briffa00","Overpeck97","Crowley00","CRU99")
 sapply(Briffa, function(x) range( Briffa$year[!is.na(x)]) )
 #      year Jones98 MBH99 Briffa01 Briffa00 Overpeck97 Crowley00 CRU99
 #[1,] 1000    1000  1000     1402     1000       1600      1000  1871
 #[2,] 1999    1991  1980     1960     1993       1990      1987  1997
 Briffa= ts(Briffa,start=1000)

#2. LOAD CLIMATEGATE VERSION
 loc="http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=146&filename=939154709.txt"
 working=readLines(loc,n=1994-1401+104)
 working=working[105:length(working)]
 x=substr(working,1,14)
 writeLines(x,"temp.dat")
 gate=read.table("temp.dat")
 gate=ts(gate[,2],start=gate[1,1])

#Comparison
 briffa=ts.union(archive= Briffa[,"Briffa01"],gate )
 briffa=window(briffa,start=1402,end=1994) #
 plot.ts(briffa)

X=briffa

par(mar=c(2.5,3,2,1))
 plot( c(time(X)),X[,1],col=col.ipcc,lwd=2,ylim=c(-1.2,.5),yaxs="i",type="n",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="")
 for( i in 2:1) lines( c(time(X)),X[,i],col=i,lwd=1)
 axis(side=1,tck=.025)
 labels0=seq(-1,1,.1);labels0[is.na(match(seq(-1,1,.1),seq(-1,1,.5)))]=""
 axis(side=2,at=seq(-1,1,.1),labels=labels0,tck=.025,las=1)
 axis(side=4,at=seq(-1,1,.1),labels=labels0,tck=.025)
 box()
 abline(h=0)
 title("Hide the Decline")
 legend("topleft",fill=2:1,legend=c("Deleted","Archived"))

l'Espoir et le Fil de l'Epée

A l’heure où le sujet de l’identité nationale anime les débats, une lecture récente me renvoie à ce sujet déjà évoqué ici. Un jeune (et brillant) avocat,  Alexandre Duval-Stalla a donné, il y a deux ans déjà, le fruit d’un long travail fouillé, d’une compilation nourrie, personnelle  et éclairée de deux destins d’exception qui un jour se croisèrent pour former le lien d’une inextinguible amitié. Cette remise en mémoire de la vie de Charles De Gaulle, de dix ans l’aîné d’André Malraux et celle de ce dernier sont à relire d’urgence, car tout y est dit de ce qui fait la France et des valeurs de notre identité française.

J’emprunterai ici à Daniel Rondeau, qui préfaça ces “Biographies croisées” avant même qu’elles ne soient achevées, la fin de son exergue : “D’un côté l’homme du destin et de l’Histoire, de l’autre celui d’une fantasia permanente de l’intelligence dont les affirmations chargées d’une étrange énergie poétique claquent sur la toile mouvante du passage du temps. Chacun d’eux a trouvé son meilleur lecteur. Voilà qu’aujourd’hui un jeune homme nommé Alexandre Duval-Stalla se penche sur ces deux vies longtemps parallèles qui ont fini par ne plus former qu’une seule histoire. Duval-Stalla nous la raconte. Ce n’est pas si banal, il nous parle d’un temps où notre pays était gouverné par deux écrivains. Tout cela paraît loin. C’est très loin. Mais c’est la façon qu’a trouvée un homme de trente ans de parler de notre temps.”

Eh bien moi qui ai connu ce temps-là, je trouve ce jeune homme admirable, qui a su où puiser pour façonner son propre “Coeur intelligent”,  pour emprunter à Alain Finkielkraut dont le sujet de  la littérature, nourriture de l’intelligence, est le plus récent plaidoyer.

En ce temps de disette morale et d’athéisme triomphants, il est réjouissant de voir ainsi ramenés en lumière ces esprits qui appartiennent déjà à l’Histoire sur laquelle repose encore notre aujourd’hui. Car on peine à imaginer ce que serait la France, son territoire, son image, son patrimoine et sa culture si elle ne les avait pas rencontrés.

Par delà cette vision commune d’une France pérenne et généreuse, Charles de Gaulle était animé d’une foi catholique profonde et puissante, ce qui n’était pas le cas d’André Malraux qui résuma pourtant de la plus pertinente manière cette finalité mortelle qui l’obsédait : “Vous savez mieux que moi que nul n’échappe à Dieu”.*

*au père Bockel

WUWT blogging ally Ecotretas writes in to say that he has made a compendium of programming code segments that show comments by the programmer that suggest places where data may be corrected, modified, adjusted, or busted. Some the  HARRY_READ_ME comments are quite revealing. For those that don’t understand computer programming, don’t fret, the comments by the programmer tell the story quite well even if the code itself makes no sense to you.

To say that the CRU code might be “buggy” would be…well I’ll just let CRU’s programmer tell you in his own words.

• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps12.proFOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps15.proFOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps24.pro; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses "corrected" MXD - but shouldn't usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
• FOIA\documents\harris-tree\recon_esper.pro; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass Esper et al. (2002) series,
; anomalies against full NH temperatures and other series.
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid
; the decline
• FOIA\documents\harris-tree\calibrate_nhrecon.pro;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid
; the decline that affects tree-ring density records)
;
• FOIA\documents\harris-tree\recon1.pro
  FOIA\documents\harris-tree\recon2.proFOIA\documents\harris-tree\recon_jones.pro;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid
; the decline
;
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txt17. Inserted debug statements into anomdtb.f90, discovered that
a sum-of-squared variable is becoming very, very negative! Key
output from the debug statements:
(..)
forrtl: error (75): floating point exception
IOT trap (core dumped)
..so the data value is unbfeasibly large, but why does the
sum-of-squares parameter OpTotSq go negative?!!
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txt22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software
suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the
definitive failure of the entire project..
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtgetting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been
introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren't documented. Every time a
cloud forms I'm presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding sites, some with
references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look up the station metadata with
one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will be wrong (another station will have
it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too.
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtI am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as
Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO
and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I
know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh!
There truly is no end in sight.
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txt28. With huge reluctance, I have dived into 'anomdtb' - and already I have
that familiar Twilight Zone sensation.
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtWrote 'makedtr.for' to tackle the thorny problem of the tmin and tmax databases not
being kept in step. Sounds familiar, if worrying. am I the first person to attempt
to get the CRU databases in working order?!!
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtWell, dtr2cld is not the world's most complicated program. Wheras cloudreg is, and I
immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for
completely unfathomable reasons, didn't include months! So we read 50 grids instead
of 600!!! That may have had something to do with it. I also noticed, as I was correcting
THAT, that I reopened the DTR and CLD data files when I should have been opening the
bloody station files!!
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtBack to the gridding. I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by
Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station
counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived
at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented
sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps?
Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding
procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtHere, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING - so the correlations aren't so hot! Yet
the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is
supposed to happen here? Oh yeah - there is no 'supposed', I can make it up. So I have
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtWell, it's been a real day of revelations, never mind the week. This morning I
discovered that proper angular weighted interpolation was coded into the IDL
routine, but that its use was discouraged because it was slow! Aaarrrgghh.
There is even an option to tri-grid at 0.1 degree resolution and then 'rebin'
to 720x360 - also deprecated! And now, just before midnight (so it counts!),
having gone back to the tmin/tmax work, I've found that most if not all of the
Australian bulletin stations have been unceremoniously dumped into the files
without the briefest check for existing stations.
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtAs we can see, even I'm cocking it up! Though recoverably. DTR, TMN and TMX need to be written as (i7.7)./code>
• FOIA\documents\HARRY_READ_ME.txtOH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm
hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform
data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\mxdgrid2ascii.proprintf,1,’Osborn et al. (2004) gridded reconstruction of warm-season’
printf,1,’(April-September) temperature anomalies (from the 1961-1990 mean).’
printf,1,’Reconstruction is based on tree-ring density records.’
printf,1
printf,1,’NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY’
printf,1,’REMOVED to facilitate calibration. THEREFORE, post-1960 values’
printf,1,’will be much closer to observed temperatures then they should be,’
printf,1,’which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful’
printf,1,’than it actually is. See Osborn et al. (2004).’
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\summer_modes\data4sweden.pro
  FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\summer_modes\data4sweden.proprintf,1,'IMPORTANT NOTE:'
printf,1,'The data after 1960 should not be used. The tree-ring density'
printf,1,'records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer'
printf,1,'temperature in many high-latitude locations. In this data set'
printf,1,'this "decline" has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and'
printf,1,'this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring
printf,1,'density variations, but have been modified to look more like the
printf,1,'observed temperatures.'
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\combined_wavelet_col.pro;
; Remove missing data from start & end (end in 1960 due to decline)
;
kl=where((yrmxd ge 1402) and (yrmxd le 1960),n)
sst=prednh(kl)
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\mxd_pcr_localtemp.pro; Tries to reconstruct Apr-Sep temperatures, on a box-by-box basis, from the
; EOFs of the MXD data set. This is PCR, although PCs are used as predictors
; but not as predictands. This PCR-infilling must be done for a number of
; periods, with different EOFs for each period (due to different spatial
; coverage). *BUT* don’t do special PCR for the modern period (post-1976),
; since they won’t be used due to the decline/correction problem.
; Certain boxes that appear to reconstruct well are “manually” removed because
; they are isolated and away from any trees.
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\briffa_sep98_d.pro;mknormal,yyy,timey,refperiod=[1881,1940]
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
(...)
;
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\summer_modes\pl_decline.pro;
; Plots density ‘decline’ as a time series of the difference between
; temperature and density averaged over the region north of 50N,
; and an associated pattern in the difference field.
; The difference data set is computed using only boxes and years with
; both temperature and density in them – i.e., the grid changes in time.
; The pattern is computed by correlating and regressing the *filtered*
; time series against the unfiltered (or filtered) difference data set.
;
;*** MUST ALTER FUNCT_DECLINE.PRO TO MATCH THE COORDINATES OF THE
; START OF THE DECLINE *** ALTER THIS EVERY TIME YOU CHANGE ANYTHING ***
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\maps12.pro;
; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\mann\oldprog\calibrate_correctmxd.pro; We have previously (calibrate_mxd.pro) calibrated the high-pass filtered
; MXD over 1911-1990, applied the calibration to unfiltered MXD data (which
; gives a zero mean over 1881-1960) after extending the calibration to boxes
; without temperature data (pl_calibmxd1.pro). We have identified and
; artificially removed (i.e. corrected) the decline in this calibrated
; data set. We now recalibrate this corrected calibrated dataset against
; the unfiltered 1911-1990 temperature data, and apply the same calibration
; to the corrected and uncorrected calibrated MXD data.
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree6\summer_modes\calibrate_correctmxd.pro; No need to verify the correct and uncorrected versions, since these
; should be identical prior to 1920 or 1930 or whenever the decline
; was corrected onwards from.
• FOIA\documents\osborn-tree5\densplus188119602netcdf.pro; we know the file starts at yr 440, but we want nothing till 1400, so we
; can skill lines (1400-440)/10 + 1 header line
; we now want all lines (10 yr per line) from 1400 to 1980, which is
; (1980-1400)/10 + 1 lines
(...)
; we know the file starts at yr 1070, but we want nothing till 1400, so we
; can skill lines (1400-1070)/10 + 1 header line
; we now want all lines (10 yr per line) from 1400 to 1991, which is
; (1990-1400)/10 + 1 lines (since 1991 is on line beginning 1990)

Glenn Beck and Others Expose Climategate

November’s issue of the Freedom of Information Journal is now available for NHS Western Cheshire and Community Care Western Cheshire staff to view over the extranet.

This issue contains stories about Freedom of Information exemptions, confidentiality, the Information Commissioner and animal experiements.

Secret legal advice ordered Scottish Ministers to keep Law Society exempt from Freedom of Information. BLACKED OUT DOCUMENTS containing secret legal advice issued by taxpayer funded Scottish Government lawyers show that Scottish Ministers WERE ORDERED by the legal profession to allow the Law Society of Scotland to keep its much coveted yet little-talked-about exemption from Freedom of Information legislation. The censored advice, issued by lawyers working for the Office of the Solicitor to the Scottish Executive, who are themselves, fully paid up members of the Law Society of Scotland has led to a policy by the present Scottish Government since it was elected in May 2007 to mislead members of the public, consumer groups, law reformers and FOI campaigners on the question of making Scotland’s legal profession accountable under Freedom of Information legislation.

Scottish FOI Commissioner Kevin Dunion. The so-far secret documents relating to the Scottish Government’s attempts to keep quiet about their involvement with the Law Society/FOI issue, have only now been grudgingly released by the Scottish Government in an attempt to persuade Scottish Information Commissioner Kevin Dunion from ordering the full disclosure of the legal advice, which has led to a policy of misleading the public for several years on the question of making the regulator of Scotland’s legal profession comply with Freedom of Information laws.

Secret papers disclosed during FOI investigation show Scottish Government ‘is afraid’ of Law Society of Scotland’s legal challenge against Freedom of Information compliance.

The move to keep the Law Society of Scotland free from scrutiny under Freedom of Information legislation will avoid any possibility that clients, the media and the general public could use FOI laws to find out key details of regulatory procedures at the Law Society itself, which are famed for allowing crooked lawyers to continue working no matter what they do to clients, discover actual records of complaints histories of Scottish solicitors, the criminal records of solicitors and staff working in the legal services sector, and also allow clients access to their own personal files held by solicitors, which are often ‘held to ransom’ by solicitors demanding payment before being handed over, in a vastly edited format.

While Scots are forced into the dark chasm of FOI exempt dealings with the Law Society of Scotland, the Law Society of England & Wales while also not FOI compliant, have an open policy of replying to Freedom of Information requests from the public, as I reported earlier, here : Criminal records of lawyers : Scots public kept in dark over convictions while England & Wales get ‘right to know’

Emails between Civil Servants show Scottish Government fear Law Society action against Freedom of Information Scrutiny. A legal insider said last night : “I understand the Law Society warned the current SNP Scottish Executive and the previous administration that it would legally challenge any attempt by Scottish Ministers using Section 5 of the FOI(S) Act to bring them into compliance. The documents now released seem to confirm this.”. He went on : “The civil servants talking about how the Law Society would challenge against any such move, using ‘legal privilege’ and ‘client confidentiality’ is very much spot on in terms of what tactics the Law Society would use to prevent itself being made compliant with FOI legislation although I also understand from colleagues that an option of Judicial Review would have been used by the Law Society, should the then Scottish Executive or present Scottish ‘Government’ have proceeded to bring the Law Society within the scope of FOI.”

One Scottish Government civil servant wrote in an email between legal departments : “I am aware that the LSS (Law Society of Scotland) is not subject to the FoI Act and I suppose that any attempt to bring them into line with the spirit of FoI would be resisted on the grounds of legal privilege/client confidentiality.”.

However letters sent out on the authorisation of the Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill to FOI campaigners claimed “No decision have yet been taken as a result of [a consultation on Freedom of Information in Scotland'] and Ministers are currently considering the requirement for any action on the issues considered, including coverage of the [FOI] Act” clearly portraying a deliberate policy by the Scottish Government to mislead the public with regard to FOI issues & the legal profession in Scotland.

Scottish Ministers will fight to prevent public knowing why lawyers are exempt from FOI legislation. While the legal advice apparently ordering Scottish Ministers to allow the Law Society of Scotland to keep its exemption from FOI legislation was made during the previous administration, the current SNP controlled Scottish Government have now forcibly warned Scotland’s FOI Commissioner, Kevin Dunion, that they will fight to keep the public from knowing that Ministers have in effect been bullied by the Law Society of Scotland into keeping the Scots legal profession free of public scrutiny which would come with FOI compliance.

Law Society of Scotland & Faculty of Advocates remain secret, unaccountable to FOI scrutiny. The Law Society of Scotland is one of two key regulators charged with overseeing Scotland’s legal profession, the other being the Faculty of Advocates who also enjoy complete immunity from Freedom of Information legislation, making the two regulators of Scotland’s legal profession a dangerous unaccountable duo of self regulators who are subject to no oversight other than a passing glance from the beleaguered, scandal hit Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, who have spent the last year rubber stamping investigations into crooked lawyers carried out by the Law Society & the Faculty.

SLCC Chair, Jane Irvine supports making the Law Society compliant with FOI legislation. Ironically, while the Law Society of Scotland & Faculty of Advocates are both exempt from Freedom of Information, and have threatened the Government to ensure their exemptions remain, the former Scottish Legal Services Ombudsman, Jane Irvine, who was appointed Chair of the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, actually supports making the Law Society of Scotland comply with Freedom of Information laws, confirming this in a previous article I reported here : Legal Complaints Chief supports ‘consumer advantages’ of removing Law Society’s Freedom of Info immunity

Iraq War : SNP MPs badgered for Cabinet Minutes release on war ‘legal advice’ but now SNP Scottish Ministers will use public money to protect Law Society from FOI & fight release of Scottish Govt’s lawyers advice. This fight by the Scottish Government to keep information from the public which involves elements of the Scottish legal profession bullying the Government into submission over FOI protection for the public is in stark contrast to the SNP’s position over the FOI battle for release of Cabinet meeting minutes from the Westminster Government in relation to the Iraq war, where, in a similar situation of legal advice against FOI release, UK Government lawyers based in Westminster also argued it would be against the public interest to release the Cabinet Minutes.

The now famous but still secret Cabinet Minutes containing references to the legal advice given to the Government on the legal basis of the war in Iraq, were ordered for release by England’s FOI Tribunal which backed the original decision by the Information Commissioner for England & Wales, Richard Thomas, ordering the release of the Westminster Cabinet Minutes. However, Scotland has no FOI Tribunal, therefore the FOI Commissioner, and even applicants to the FOI Commissioner’s office must rely on going to the Court of Session in Edinburgh to force the release of information that Scottish Ministers may resist disclosing to the bitter end.

A senior official with one of Scotland’s consumer organisations branded the Scottish Government’s stance over the legal advice as “a grave mistake” and condemned the lack of attention to a clear public interest in making Scotland’s legal profession’s senior regulator comply with Freedom of Information legislation.

He said : ““The current arrangement consumers face with the regulation of legal services in Scotland, where the Law Society of Scotland & Faculty of Advocates are exempt from FOI legislation, yet the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission is FOI compliant, is not in the public interest.”

He continued : “The public interest would undoubtedly be served if the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty were made to comply with Freedom of Information, but such a move will require action from the Scottish Government. It appears this will never take place, according to the documents which have now been disclosed, and even worse, it appears the Scottish Government have been deliberately misleading public enquiries on this issue for several years.”

Former Law Society Chief Douglas Mill threatened legal challenge against complaints reforming legislation LPLA Act which created the SLCC. This is of course not the first time the Scottish Government have been threatened with legal action by the Law Society of Scotland, where in 2006, during the Scottish Parliament’s consideration of the Legal Profession & Legal Aid Bill, which went onto create the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, the then Law Society Chief Executive, Douglas Mill, threatened a legal challenge against the then Scottish Executive and the Scottish Parliament, claiming that lawyers had a human right to regulate complaints against their colleagues. I reported on that earlier threat of a legal challenge by the Law Society, here : Law Society of Scotland threatens Court challenge against Scottish Executive over LPLA legal reform Bill

A Scottish Government insider commented on his colleague’s frantic discussions over the Law Society & FOI compliance, saying : “The problem here is the many dark secrets of the legal profession will end up being revealed under FOI if they are made to comply with it.”

“If you find out through FOI your lawyer is a habitual crook and has rolled hundreds of clients, you are not going to use them or their firm for anything. I believe it is the desire of the Law Society and the profession to protect their secrets which we are seeing as the Government’s driving force of maintaining an indefinite exemption rather than groundless arguments of client confidentiality.”

Clearly, the public interest would be served by making the Law Society of Scotland & Faculty of Advocates compliant with Freedom of Information legislation and continuing the present secrecy which allows both of these powerful regulators to remain outside the law and outside the reach of public scrutiny & accountability is only helping those within the profession who are exploiting such weaknesses for their own benefit against the public and all users of legal services in Scotland.

Foreword: Willis asked me to carry this post here. What follows is a long and detailed series of email exchanges that outline the difficult task of getting data so that scientific replication/reproduction can be done by people external to the tight knit group of scientists that make up climate science today. This is a must read for anyone trying to understand the issue and the dodges of the UK FOIA that CRU has been doing.

One of the foundational components of the scientific method is the idea of reproducibility (Popper 1959). In order for an experiment to be considered valid it must be replicated. This process begins with the scientists who originally performed the experiment publishing the details of the experiment. This description of the experiment is then read by another group of scientists who carry out the experiment, and ascertain whether the results of the new experiment are similar to the original experiment. If the results are similar enough then the experiment has been replicated. This process validates the fact that the experiment was not dependent on local conditions, and that the written description of the experiment satisfactorily records the knowledge gained through the experiment. From Rand and Wilensky 2006

CRU’s decision to withhold data and code from public inspection is not only against the scientific method, given the impact their work has on governmental policies and taxpayer funded programs, it is, in my opinion, unethical. – Anthony Watts

Guest post by Willis Eschenbach – originally posted on Omniclimate with an updated version here per Willis’ request.

UPDATED 11/24/09 8:30PM PST

People seem to be missing the real issue in the CRU emails. Gavin over at realclimate keeps distracting people by saying the issue is the scientists being nasty to each other, and what Trenberth said, and the Nature “trick”, and the like. Those are side trails. To me, the main issue is the frontal attack on the heart of science, which is transparency.

Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.

As far as I know, I am the person who made the original Freedom Of Information Act to CRU that started getting all this stirred up. I was trying to get access to the taxpayer funded raw data out of which they built the global temperature record. I was not representing anybody, or trying to prove a point. I am not funded by Mobil, I’m an amateur scientist with a lifelong interest in the weather and climate. I’m not “directed” by anyone, I’m not a member of a right-wing conspiracy. I’m just a guy trying to move science forwards.

The recent release of the hacked emails from CRU has provided me with an amazing insight into the attempt by myself, Steve McIntyre, and others from CA and elsewhere to obtain the raw station data from Phil Jones at the CRU. We wanted the data that was used to make the global temperature record that is relied on to claim “unprecedented” global warming. I want to give a chronological account of the interactions. While we don’t know if all of these emails are valid, the researchers involved such as Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann that clearly indicate that they think they are authentic They certainly fit with my experience. I have only included the relevant parts of emails, and indicated where I have snipped by an ellipsis (…).

The story actually starts with Warwick Hughes, a climate researcher who had previously been in cordial contact with Phil Jones, the lead researcher of the CRU. I find only one email in the archive (0969308954) where Phil emails Warwick, from 2000. This is in response to some inconsistencies that Warwick had found in Phil’s work:

Warwick Hughes to Phil Jones, September ‘04:

Dear Phillip and Chris Folland (with your IPCC hat on),
Some days ago Chris I emailed to Tom Karl and you replied re the grid cells in north Siberia with no stations, yet carrying red circle grid point anomalies in the TAR Fig 2.9 global maps. I even sent a gif file map showing the grid cells barren of stations greyed out. You said this was due to interpolation and referred me to Phillip and procedures described in a submitted paper. In the last couple of days I have put up a page detailing shortcomings in your TAR Fig 2.9 maps in the north Siberian region, everything is specified there with diagrams and numbered grid points.

[1] One issue is that two of the interpolated grid cells have larger anomalies than the parent cells !!!!?????
This must be explained.

[2] Another serious issue is that obvious non-homogenous warming in Olenek and Verhojansk is being interpolated through to adjoining grid cells with no stations, like cancer.

[3] The third serious issue is that the urbanization affected trend from the Irkutsk grid cell neare Lake Baikal, looks to be interpolated into its western neighbour.

I am sure there are many other cases of this, 2 and 3 happening.
Best regards,
Warwick Hughes (I have sent this to CKF)

Phil to Warwick, same email:

Warwick,
I did not think I would get a chance today to look at the web page. I see what boxes you are referring to. The interpolation procedure cannot produce larger anomalies than neighbours (larger values in a single month). If you have found any of these I will investigate. If you are talking about larger trends then that is a different matter. Trends say in Fig 2.9 for the 1976-99 period require 16 years to have data and at least 10 months in each year. It is conceivable that at there are 24 years in this period that missing values in some boxes influence trend calculation. I would expect this to be random across the globe.

Warwick,
Been away. Just checked my program and the interpolation shouldn’t produce larger anomalies than the neighbouring cells. So can you send me the cells, months and year of the two cells you’ve found ? If I have this I can check to see what has happened and answer (1). As for (2) and (3) we compared all stations with neighbours and these two stations did not have problems when the work was done (around 1985/6). I am not around much for the next 3 weeks but will be here most of this week and will try to answer (1) if I get more details. If you have the names of stations that you’ve compared Olenek and Verhojansk with I would appreciate that.

Cheers
Phil

OK, so far we have a couple of scientists discussing issues in a scientific work, no problem. But as he found more inconsistencies, in order to understand what was going on, in 2005 Warwick asked Phil for the dataset that was used to create the CRU temperature record. Phil Jones famously replied:

Subject: Re: WMO non respondo
… Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. …
Cheers Phil

Hmmm … not good. Or as they say in “1984″, double-plus ungood. Science can only progress if there is a free exchange of scientific data The scientific model works like this:

• A scientist makes claims, and reveals the data and methods he used to come to his conclusions.

• Other scientists who don’t agree attack the claim by (inter alia) seeing if they can replicate the result, using the first scientist’s data and methods.

• If the claims cannot be replicated, the claim is adjudged to be false.

Obviously, if the data or the methods are kept secret, the claims cannot be verified. Attacking other scientist’s claims is what what scientists do. This adversarial system is the heart of science. Refusing scientific data because someone will attack it is an oxymoron, of course they will attack it. That’s what scientists do.

When I found out about this, I couldn’t believe it. I thought, a scientist can’t do that, can they? This is science, not hide and seek. So I wrote to the University of East Anglia (of which the CRU is a Department) on September 8, 2006, saying:

I would like to obtain a list of the meteorological stations used in the preparation of the HadCRUT3 global temperature average, and the raw data for those stations. I cannot find it anywhere on the web. The lead author for the temperature average is Dr. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit.

Many thanks, Willis Eschenbach

I got no response from Phil Jones or anyone at CRU or UEA. So I filed a Freedom of Information act request for the data.

Now at this point, let me diverge to what was happening at CRU during this time. The first reference to Freedom of Information in their emails is from 2005, before they had received a single request. Immediately, they start to plan how to evade requests should some come in:

Tom Wigley, Former Director CRU, to Phil Jones, 21/01/2005

Phil,
…

I got a brochure on the FOI Act from UEA. Does this mean that, if someone asks for a computer program we have to give it out?? Can you check this for me (and Sarah). …
Thanks,
Tom.

Phil replies to Tom:

Tom,
…
On the FOI Act there is a little leaflet we have all been sent. It doesn’t really clarify what we might have to do re programs or data. Like all things in Britain we will only find out when the first person or organization asks. I wouldn’t tell anybody about the FOI Act in Britain. I don’t think UEA really knows what’s involved.

As you’re no longer an employee I would use this argument if anything comes along. I think it is supposed to mainly apply to issues of personal information – references for jobs etc.

..
Cheers
Phil

So the coverup starts immediately, even before the first request. “I wouldn’t tell anyone about the FOI act in Britain”.

Tom to Phil

Phil,

Thanks for the quick reply. The leaflet appeared so general, but it was prepared by UEA so they may have simplified things. From their wording, computer code would be covered by the FOIA. My concern was if Sarah is/was still employed by UEA. I guess she could claim that she had only written one tenth of the code and release every tenth line.
…
Tom

You can see how they plan to observe the spirit of the FOI Act. Claim a temporary employee isn’t really and employee so they are not covered.

Phil to Tom

Tom,
…
As for FOIA Sarah isn’t technically employed by UEA and she will likely be paid by Manchester Metropolitan University. I wouldn’t worry about the code. If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them. I’ll be passing any requests onto the person at UEA who has been given a post to deal with them.
Cheers
Phil

Phil Jones has just gotten the news that FOI will apply, and immediately he starts to plan how he is going to hide from an FOI request. Cite technicalities, claim IPR rights, those are good hiding places.

The next email (1109021312) is later in 2005:

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote to Michael Mann :

Mike,
…
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 !

….

Phil

So now we have two more ways for Phil to hide from the FOI Act … along with a threat to delete the data rather than release it. Astounding. And this is before they’ve even received a single FOI request.

Mann replies to Jones:

Thanks Phil,

Yes, we’ve learned out lesson about FTP. We’re going to be very careful in the future what gets put there. Scott really screwed up big time when he established that directory so that Tim could access the data.

Yeah, there is a freedom of information act in the U.S., and the contrarians are going to try to use it for all its worth. But there are also intellectual property rights issues, so it isn’t clear how these sorts of things will play out ultimately in the U.S….
mike

Next, from February 05. Jones to Mann, cc to Hughes and Bradley (co-authors of the “hockeystick” study)

From: Phil Jones:

To: mann
Subject: Fwd: CCNet: PRESSURE GROWING ON CONTROVERSIAL RESEARCHER TO DISCLOSE SECRET DATA
Date: Mon Feb 21 16:28:32 2005
Cc: “raymond s. bradley”, “Malcolm Hughes”

Mike, Ray and Malcolm,

…

Leave it to you to delete as appropriate !
Cheers
Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !

The first rule of the Freedom of Information act … nobody talks about the Freedom of Information Act.

With that as a prologue, let me return to my FOI request. On February 10, 2007, I received my reply from Mr. Dave Palmer of CRU:

Dear Mr. Eschenbach

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 – INFORMATION REQUEST (FOI_07-04)

Your request for information received on 28 September now been considered and I can report that the information requested is available on non-UEA websites as detailed below.

The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN-Monthly) page within US National Climate Data Centre website provides one of the two US versions of the global dataset and includes raw station data. This site is at: http://www.ncdc. noaa.gov/ oa/climate/ ghcn-monthly/ index.php

This page is where you can get one of the two US versions of the global dataset, and it appears that the raw station data can be obtained from this site.

Datasets named ds564.0 and ds570.0 can be found at The Climate & Global Dynamics Division (CGD) page of the Earth and Sun Systems Laboratory (ESSL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) site at: http://www.cgd. ucar.edu/ cas/tn404/

Between them, these two datasets have the data which the UEA Climate Research Unit (CRU) uses to derive the HadCRUT3 analysis. The latter, NCAR site holds the raw station data (including temperature, but other variables as well). The GHCN would give their set of station data (with adjustments for all the numerous problems).

They both have a lot more data than the CRU have (in simple station number counts), but the extra are almost entirely within the USA. We have sent all our data to GHCN, so they do, in fact, possess all our data.

In accordance with S. 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 this letter acts as a Refusal Notice, and the reasons for exemption are as stated below

Exemption Reason
s. 21, Information accessible to applicant via other means Some information is publicly available on external websites

I was outraged. So the next day, I made a second request:

Dear Mr. Palmer:

Thank you for your reply (attached below). However, I fear that it is totally unresponsive. I had asked for a list of the sites actually used. While it may (or may not) be true that “it appears that the raw station data can be obtained from [GHCN]“, this is meaningless without an actual list of the sites that Dr. Jones and his team used.

The debate about changes in the climate is quite important. Dr. Jones’ work is one of the most frequently cited statistics in the field. Dr. Jones has refused to provide a list of the sites used for his work, and as such, it cannot be replicated. Replication is central to science. I find Dr. Jones attitude quite difficult to understand, and I find your refusal to provide the data requested quite baffling.

You are making the rather curious claim that because the data “appears” to be out on the web somewhere, there is no need for Dr. Jones to reveal which stations were actually used. The claim is even more baffling since you say that the original data used by CRU is available at the GHCN web site, and then follow that with the statement that some of the GHCN data originally came from CRU. Which is the case? Did CRU get the data from GHCN, or did GHCN get the data from CRU?

Rather than immediately appealing this ruling (with the consequent negative publicity that would inevitably accrue to CRU from such an action), I am again requesting that you provide:

1) A list of the actual sites used by Dr. Jones in the preparation of the HadCRUT3 dataset, and

2) A clear indication of where the data for each site is available. This is quite important, as there are significant differences between the versions of each site’s data at e.g. GHCN and NCAR.

I find it somewhat disquieting that an FOI request is necessary to force a scientist to reveal the data used in his publicly funded research … is this truly the standard that the CRU is promulgating?

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

Willis Eschenbach

Hey, I was trying to be a nice guy, not make a public scene. On April 12, 2007, I got my second reply:

In regards the “gridded network” stations, I have been informed that the Climate Research Unit’s (CRU) monthly mean surface temperature dataset has been constructed principally from data available on the two websites identified in my letter of 12 March 2007. Our estimate is that more than 98% of the CRU data are on these sites.

The remaining 2% of data that is not in the websites consists of data CRU has collected from National Met Services (NMSs) in many countries of the world. In gaining access to these NMS data, we have signed agreements with many NMSs not to pass on the raw station data, but the NMSs concerned are happy for us to use the data in our gridding, and these station data are included in our gridded products, which are available from the CRU web site. These NMS-supplied data may only form a very small percentage of the database, but we have to respect their wishes and therefore this information would be exempt from disclosure under FOIA pursuant to s.41. The World Meteorological Organization has a list of all NMSs.

That didn’t help one bit. Without knowing which data was used, it was meaningless. They’ve tried s.21, they’ve tried s.41, neither exemption applies. So the next day, I replied:

While it is good to know that the data is available at those two web sites, that information is useless without a list of stations used by Jones et al. to prepare the HadCRUT3 dataset. As I said in my request, I am asking for:

1) A list of the actual sites used by Dr. Jones in the preparation of the HadCRUT3 dataset, and

2) A clear indication of where the data for each site is available. This is quite important, as there are significant differences between the versions of each site’s data at e.g. GHCN and NCAR.

Without knowing the name and WMO number of each site and the location of the source data (NCAR, GHCN, or National Met Service), it is not possible to access the information. Thus, Exemption 21 does not apply – I still cannot access the data.

I don’t understand why this is so hard. All I am asking for is a simple list of the sites and where each site’s data is located. Pointing at two huge piles of data and saying, in effect, “The data is in there somewhere” does not help at all.

To clarify what I am requesting, I am only asking for a list of the stations used in HadCRUT3, a list that would look like this:

WMO# Name Source
58457 HangZhou NCAR
58659 WenZhou NCAR
59316 ShanTou GHCN
57516 ChongQing NMS

etc. for all of the stations used to prepare the HadCRUT3 temperature data.

That is the information requested, and it is not available “on non-UEA websites”, or anywhere else that I have been able to find.

I appreciate all of your assistance in this matter, and I trust we can get it resolved satisfactorily.

Best regards,

I received another letter, saying that they could not identify the locations of the requested information. I wrote back again, saying:

Dear Mr. Palmer:

It appears we have gone full circle here, and ended up back where we started.

I had originally asked for the raw station data used to produce the HadCRUT3 dataset to be posted up on the UEA website, or made available in some other form.

You refused, saying that the information was available elsewhere on non-UEA websites, which is a valid reason for FOI refusals.

I can report that the information requested is not available on non-UEA websites as detailed below.

Your most recent letter (Further _information_ letter_final_ 070418_rev01. doc), however, says that you are unable to identify the locations of the requested information. Thus, the original reason for refusing to provide station data for HadCRUT3 was invalid.

Therefore, since the information requested is not available on non-UEA websites, I wish to re-instate my original request, that the information itself be made available on your website or in some other form. I understand that a small amount of this data (about 2%, according to your letter) is not available due to privacy requests from the countries involved. In that case, a listing of which stations this applies to will suffice.

The HadCRUT3 dataset is one of the fundamental datasets in the current climate discussion. As such, it is vitally important that it can be peer reviewed and examined to verify its accuracy. The only way this can be done is for the data to be made available to other researchers in the field.

Once again, thank you for your assistance in all of this. It is truly not a difficult request, and is fully in line with both standard scientific practice and your “CODE OF PRACTICE FOR RESPONDING TO REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION UNDER THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000″. I am sure that we can bring this to a satisfactory resolution without involving appeals or unfavorable publicity.

My best regards to you,

w.

Here is the response from 27 April:

Dear Mr. Eschenbach FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 – INFORMATION REQUEST (FOI_07-04)

Further to your email of 14 April 2007 in which you re-stated your request to see

“a list of stations used by Jones et al. to prepare the HadCRUT3 dataset” I am asking for: 1) A list of the actual sites used by Dr. Jones in the preparation of the HadCRUT3 dataset, and 2) A clear indication of where the data for each site is available. This is quite important, as there are significant differences between the versions of each site’s data at e.g. GHCN and NCAR.”

In your note you also requested “the name and WMO number of each site and the location of the source data (NCAR, GHCN, or National Met Service)”,

I have contacted Dr. Jones and can update you on our efforts to resolve this matter.

We cannot produce a simple list with this format and with the information you described in your note of 14 April. Firstly, we do not have a list consisting solely of the sites we currently use. Our list is larger, as it includes data not used due to incomplete reference periods, for example. Additionally, even if we were able to create such a list we would not be able to link the sites with sources of data. The station database has evolved over time and the Climate Research Unit was not able to keep multiple versions of it as stations were added, amended and deleted. This was a consequence of a lack of data storage in the 1980s and early 1990s compared to what we have at our disposal currently. It is also likely that quite a few stations consist of a mixture of sources.

I have also been informed that, as the GHCN and NCAR are merely databases, the ultimate source of all data is the respective NMS in the country where the station is located. Even GHCN and NCAR can’t say with precision where they got their data from as the data comes not only from each NMS, but also comes from scientists in each reporting country.

In short, we simply don’t have what you are requesting. The only true source would be the NMS for each reporting country. We can, however, send a list of all stations used, but without sources. This would include locations, names and lengths of record, although the latter are no guide as to the completeness of the series.

This is, in effect, our final attempt to resolve this matter informally. If this response is not to your satisfaction, I will initiate the second stage of our internal complaint process and will advise you of progress and outcome as appropriate. For your information, the complaint process is within our Code of Practice and can be found at: http://www1. uea.ac.uk/ polopoly_ fs/1.2750! uea_manual_ draft_04b. pdf

Yours sincerely David Palmer Information Policy Officer University of East Anglia

I loved the story line in this one “we do not have a list consisting solely of the sites we currently use”. Say what? How do they produce updates that change the temperature all the way back to 1870 if they don’t have the data or a list of the sites? But I digress …

So I advised him that I was appealing. His letter was passed to a Ms. Kitty Inglis, who replied

May 21, 2007, Decision of Information Commissoners’ Office
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 2000 – INFORMATION REQUEST (FOI_07-04)

Dear Mr Eschenbach

Following David Palmer’s letter of 27th April 2007 to you regarding your dissatisfaction with our response to your FOI request of 25th January 2007, I have undertaken a thorough review of the contents of our file and have spoken with both Mr. Palmer and Professor Jones.

As a result of this investigation, I am satisfied that we have done all we can to fulfil [sic] your request and to provide you with the information you require where it is possible for us to do so.

I confirm that we are able to make available on the Climatic Research Unit website a list of stations, including name, latitude, longitude, elevation and WMO number (where available).

We are unable to provide a simple list of sources for these stations as we do not hold this information. Nor do we hold the raw (i.e. unadjusted) station data, as you describe it, at UEA. As stated in prior letters to you, raw station data are available on the NCAR and GHCN websites and gridded data are available on the Climatic Research Unit website. If these data are insufficient for your requirements, you will need to contact the NMS for the country in which the station is located to obtain the information you require.

I hope you are able to accept this response. We have contacted the Information Commissioner’s Office in relation to this matter and their advice is that if you are still dissatisfied with this response, you can, at this time, exercise your right of appeal to the
Information Commissioner by contacting them at:
Information Commissioner’ s Office
Wycliffe House

At that point, I let it go. I had a small victory, we got a list of the stations. Of course, it took me a couple more letters to actually get them to post the list. But I got nothing else of what I had requested, and the list was full of all kinds of errors.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes at CRU, I now find out that they were circling the wagons … what follows are their internal discussions about a series of FOI requests from myself, Steve McIntyre, Doug Keenan and others to CRU for various data. Phil Jones to Tom Keenan and Wei-Chyung Wang, 6/19/2007:

Wei-Chyung and Tom,
…
1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.
2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. [EMAIL NOT FOUND IN CRU EMAILS – Willis] He said they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are threads on it about Australian sites.
3. CA is in dispute with IPCC (Susan Solomon and Martin Manning) about the availability of the responses to reviewer’s at the various stages of the AR4 drafts. They are most interested here re Ch 6 on paleo.
Cheers
Phil

Well, that explains a few things … they’ve managed to “persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.” I hadn’t noticed that exemption in the FOI documentation I’d seen. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s in FOI Exemptions, I doubt if it’s legal, and it definitely isn’t ethical. I note that they are circling the wagons in Australia as well … this is followed by:

Phil Jones to Thomas Peterson of NOAA, 6/20/2007 AM (1182342470) :

Tom P.

Just for interest. Don’t pass on.

Might be a precedent for your paper to J. Climate when it comes out. There are a few interesting comments on the CA web site. One says it is up to me to prove the paper from 1990 was correct, not for Keenan to prove we’re wrong. Interesting logic.
Cheers
Phil

Wei-Chyung, Tom,
I won’t be replying to either of the emails below [FROM STEVE MCINTYRE AND DOUG KEENAN], nor to any
of the accusations on the Climate Audit website. I’ve sent them on to someone here at UEA to see if we
should be discussing anything with our legal staff. The second letter seems an attempt to be nice to me,
and somehow split up the original author team. I do now wish I’d never sent them the data after their FOIA
request!

Cheers
Phil

He obviously views sending data in response to an FOIA request as optional.

Thomas Peterson to Jones, same email:

Fascinating. Thanks for keeping me in the loop, Phil. I won’t pass it on but I will keep it in the back of my mind when/if Russ asks about appropriate responses to CA requests. Russ’ view is that you can never satisfy them so why bother to try?

Again, responding to an FOIA request is viewed as optional.

Phil Jones :

…

PS to Gavin – been following (sporadically) the CA stuff about the GISS data and release of the code etc by Jim. May take some of the pressure off you soon, by releasing a list of the stations we use – just a list, no code and no data. Have agreed to under the FOIA here in the UK.

Oh Happy days!

So I see … that’s why I only got the station list and not the data, just to ” take some of the pressure off “. Thanks, Phil.

Jones to Bradley and Amman, 5/9/08 (1210341221):

Mike, Ray, Caspar,

A couple of things – don’t pass on either.
…
2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person [DAVID HOLLAND – Willis] who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we’ve found a way around this.

Finding ways around FOI requests seems to be a popular sport at CRU. This is in reference to Steve trying to get the review comments to Chapter 6 of the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

Next, here’s the brilliant way that they had found around the FOIA, a bombshell of an idea,  Jones to Michael Mann, 29 May 2008 (1212063122):

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

…

Cheers
Phil

Again, call me crazy, but deleting evidence in the face of an FOI request must be illegal. Gene is Eugene Wahl. Of course, what these guys don’t realize is that there are multiple copies of most emails floating around. In some ways, I hope they deleted them, so that it can be proven. The story continues …

Tim Osborne to Jones, Briffa, and Mann, 23 Jun 2008 (1214229243) :

Subject: Re: CA

Hi Phil, Keith and “Confidential Agent Ammann”,
At 17:00 21/06/2008, P.Jones wrote:

This is a confidential email

So is this.

Have a look at Climate Audit. Holland has put all the responses and letters up. There are three threads – two beginning with Fortress and a third later one. Worth saving the comments on a Jim Edwards – can you do this Tim?

I’ve saved all three threads as they now stand. No time to read all the comments, but I did note in “Fortress Met Office” that someone has provided a link to a website that helps you to submit FOI requests to UK public institutions, and subsequently someone has made a further FOI request to Met Office and someone else made one to DEFRA. If it turns into an organised campaign designed more to inconvenience us than to obtain useful information, then we may be able to decline all related requests without spending ages on considering
them. Worth looking out for evidence of such an organised campaign.

Tim

Another thing to hide behind, a false claim of an “organised campaign”. I loved the “Confidential Agent Amman” …

Phil Jones:

To: Gavin Schmidt
Subject: Re: Revised version the Wengen paper
Date: Wed Aug 20 09:32:52 2008
Cc: Michael Mann

Gavin,
…
Keith/Tim still getting FOI requests as well as MOHC and Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions not to respond – advice they got from the Information Commissioner. As an aside and just between us, it seems that Brian Hoskins has withdrawn himself from the WG1 Lead nominations. It seems he doesn’t want to have to deal with this hassle.

The FOI line we’re all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI – the skeptics have been told this. Even though we (MOHC, CRU/UEA) possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don’t have an obligation to pass it on.

Cheers
Phil

So now the Information Commissioner is in on the deal, s/he’s advising them to use the same exceptions not to respond. No need to think about it, all of the wheels have been greased.

Next, Ben Santer chimes in:

Ben Santer to Thomas Karl, Karen Owen, Sharon Leduc , “Thorne, Peter”, Leopold Haimberger , Karl Taylor, Tom Wigley, John Lanzante, Susan Solomon, Melissa Free, peter gleckler , “‘Philip D. Jones’”, Thomas R Karl, Steve Klein, carl mears, Doug Nychka, Gavin Schmidt, Steven Sherwood, Frank Wentz, “David C. Bader”, Professor Glenn McGregor, “Bamzai, Anjuli”

Dear Tom,
…

My personal opinion is that both FOI requests (1) and (2) are intrusive and unreasonable. Steven McIntyre provides absolutely no scientific justification or explanation for such requests. I believe that McIntyre is pursuing a calculated strategy to divert my attention and focus away from research. As the recent experiences of Mike Mann and Phil Jones have shown, this request is the thin edge of wedge. It will be followed by further requests for computer programs, additional material and explanations, etc., etc.

Quite frankly, Tom, having spent nearly 10 months of my life addressing the serious scientific flaws in the Douglass et al. IJoC paper, I am unwilling to waste more of my time fulfilling the intrusive and frivolous requests of Steven McIntyre. The supreme irony is that Mr. McIntyre has focused his attention on our IJoC paper rather than the Douglass et al. IJoC paper which we criticized. As you know, Douglass et al. relied on a seriously flawed statistical test, and reached incorrect conclusions on the basis of that flawed test.

I believe that our community should no longer tolerate the behavior of Mr. McIntyre and his cronies. McIntyre has no interest in improving our scientific understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. He has no interest in rational scientific discourse. He deals in the currency of threats and intimidation. We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an “audit” by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues.

In my opinion, Steven McIntyre is the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science. I am unwilling to submit to this McCarthy-style investigation of my scientific research. As you know, I have refused to send McIntyre the “derived” model data he requests, since all of the primary model data necessary to replicate our results are freely available to him. I will continue to refuse such data requests in the future. Nor will I provide McIntyre with computer programs, email correspondence, etc. I feel very strongly about these issues. We should not be coerced by the scientific equivalent of a playground bully.

I will be consulting LLNL’s Legal Affairs Office in order to determine how the DOE and LLNL should respond to any FOI requests that we receive from McIntyre. I assume that such requests will be forthcoming.

I am copying this email to all co-authors of our 2008 IJoC paper, to my immediate superior at PCMDI (Dave Bader), to Anjuli Bamzai at DOE headquarters, and to Professor Glenn McGregor (the editor who was in
charge of our paper at IJoC).

I’d be very happy to discuss these issues with you tomorrow. I’m sorry that the tone of this letter is so formal, Tom. Unfortunately, after today’s events, I must assume that any email I write to you may be subject to FOI requests, and could ultimately appear on McIntyre’s “ClimateAudit” website.

With best personal wishes,

Ben

Well, he got the last paragraph right, at least. He also thinks that an FOIA request must serve some “scientific justification”, with the justification determined by … well … by the person receiving the request, of course. Another previously unknown part of the FOI Exemptions comes to light.

Ben Santer to Tom Wigly, 12 Dec 07 (1228330629):

At 01:17 03/12/2008, Ben Santer wrote:

Dear Tom,
…
One of the problems is that I’m caught in a real Catch-22 situation. At present, I’m damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre’s initial request for climate model data, I’m convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations, additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: “You see – he’s guilty as charged!” on his website.

You and I have spent over a decade of our scientific careers on the MSU issue, Tom. During much of that time, we’ve had to do science in “reactive mode”, responding to the latest outrageous claims and inept science by John Christy, David Douglass, or S. Fred Singer. For the remainder of my scientific career, I’d like to dictate my own research agenda. I don’t want that agenda driven by the constant need to respond to Christy, Douglass, and Singer. And I certainly don’t want to spend years of my life interacting
with the likes of Steven McIntyre.

I hope LLNL management will provide me with their full support. If they do not, I’m fully prepared to seek employment elsewhere.

With best regards,
Ben

Dr. Santer, here’s a novel idea. Put enough information out when you publish the work so that your work can be replicated. Put on the web whatever is necessary in the way of code, data, and methods to allow your work to be checked by someone else. If you do that, not only will you not be bothered, but you will be following the scientific method. None of us at ClimateAudit are doing this to harass anyone, as you claim. We’re doing this because we cannot replicate your work, and thus your work is purely anecdotal rather than scientific.

Phil responds (same email):

Cc: mann , Gavin Schmidt, Karl Taylor, peter gleckler

Ben,
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals. The VC is also aware of what is going on – at least for one of the requests, but probably doesn’t know the number we’re dealing with. We are in double figures.

One issue is that these requests aren’t that widely known within the School. So I don’t know who else at UEA may be getting them. CRU is moving up the ladder of requests at UEA though – we’re way behind computing though. We’re away [aware?]of requests going to others in the UK – MOHC, Reading, DEFRA and Imperial College.

So spelling out all the detail to the LLNL management should be the first thing you do. I hope that Dave is being supportive at PCMDI. The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data Protection Act request sent by a certain Canadian, saying that the email maligned his scientific credibility with his peers!

If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn’t yet) I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I’ve written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all. This legislation is different from the FOI – it is supposed to be used to find put why you might have a poor credit rating !

In response to FOI and EIR requests, we’ve put up some data – mainly paleo data. Each request generally leads to more – to explain what we’ve put up. Every time, so far, that hasn’t led to anything being added – instead just statements saying read what is in the papers and what is on the web site! Tim Osborn sent one such response (via the FOI person) earlier this week. We’ve never sent programs, any codes and manuals.

In the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise results will be out in 2 weeks time. These are expensive to produce and take too much time, so from next year we’ll be moving onto a metric based system. The metrics will be # and amounts of grants, papers and citations etc. I did flippantly suggest that the # of FOI requests you get should be another.

When you look at CA, they only look papers from a handful of people. They will start on another coming out in The Holocene early next year. Gavin and Mike are on this with loads of others. I’ve told both exactly what will appear on CA once they get access to it!

Cheers
Phil

Well, that explains why David Palmer and Ms. Kitty Inglis, the Chief Librarian, were so unsupportive. Took a couple of half hour sessions, but at the end of that, rather than being a representative of the FOI process, they were functioning as the personal representatives of Phil Jones. We have a new reason I hadn’t noticed in the FOI law for refusing a request, because the requester posts at CA.

And since they have the FOI person, and the FOI Appeals person, and the Information Commissioner in there pockets, and they have the standard terms of refusal figured out … just how difficult can it be to deny an FOI Request?

Jones to Ben Santer again, 10 Dec 2008:

Ben,

Haven’t got a reply from the FOI person here at UEA. So I’m not entirely confident the numbers are correct. One way of checking would be to look on CA, but I’m not doing that. I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails – unless this was ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! McIntyre hasn’t paid his £10, so nothing looks likely to happen re his Data Protection Act email.

Anyway requests have been of three types – observational data, paleo data and who made IPCC changes and why. Keith has got all the latter – and there have been at least 4. We made Susan aware of these – all came from David Holland. According to the FOI Commissioner’ s Office, IPCC is an international organization, so is above any national FOI. Even if UEA holds anything about IPCC, we are not obliged to pass it on, unless it has anything to do with our core business – and it doesn’t! I’m sounding like Sir Humphrey here! McIntyre often gets others to do the requesting, but requests and responses all get posted up on CA regardless of who sends them.

On observational data, there have been at least 5 including a couple from McIntyre. Others here came from Eschenbach and also Douglas Keenan. The latter relate to Wei-Chyung Wang, and despite his being exonerated by SUNY, Keenan has not changed his web site since being told the result by SUNY!

The paleo data requests have all been to Keith, and here Tim and Keith reply. The recent couple have come from McIntyre but there have been at least two others from Holland. So since Feb 2007, CRU is in double figures. We never get any thanks for putting things up – only abuse and threats. The latest lot is up in the last 3-4 threads on CA.

I got this email over the weekend – see end of this email. This relates to what Tim sent back late last week. There was another one as well – a chatty one saying why didn’t I respond to keep these people on CA quiet. I’ve ignored both. Finally, I know that DEFRA receive Parliamentary Questions from MPs to answer. One of these 2 months ago was from a Tory MP asking how much money DEFRA has given to CRU over the last 5 years. DEFRA replied that they don’t give money – they award grants based on open competition. DEFRA’s system also told them there were no awards to CRU, as when we do get something it is down as UEA!

I’ve occasionally checked DEFRA responses to FOI requests – all from Holland.

Cheers
Phil

Since he and Mann and the others have already deleted their emails, looks like David Palmer (the “FOI person”) was a bit too late with his excellent advice … however, I did get a “Mentioned In Dispatches” from Phil, at least …

I also like the sly way he tells Ben how to illegally delete emails, just do it as part of ‘normal’ deleting to keep emails manageable! Yeah, right, that’s the ticket.

Phil Jones to Raymond Pierrehumbert, 16 Jan 09 (1200493432):

Cc: Michael Mann , Gavin Schmidt

Ray,
…

I have had a couple of exchanges with Courtillot. This is the last of them from March 26, 2007. I sent him a number of papers to read. He seems incapable of grasping the concept of spatial degrees of freedom, and how this number can change according to timescale. I also told him where he can get station data at NCDC and GISS (as I took a decision ages ago not to release our station data, mainly because of McIntyre). I told him all this as well when we met at a meeting of the French Academy in early March.
…
Cheers, Phil

This is a very clear statement of what he has done. He has refused to release the data, not because there is any logical reason to do so, but “because of McIntyre”. This is shameful, and the fact that the FOI people, Dave Peters and Kitty Inglis and the Information Commissioner, went along with this is dereliction of duty.

Finally, Steven Schneider chimes in to write Ben from Stanford University, 6 Jan 09 (1231257056):

Cc: “David C. Bader”, Bill Goldstein, Pat Berge, Cherry Murray, George Miller, Anjuli Bamzai, Tomas Diaz De La Rubia, Doug Rotman, Peter Thorne, Leopold Haimberger, Karl Taylor, Tom Wigley John Lanzante, Susan Solomon, Melissa Free, peter gleckler, “Philip D. Jones”, Thomas R Karl, Steve Klein, carl mears, Doug Nychka, Gavin Schmidt, Steven Sherwood, Frank Wentz

“Thanks” Ben for this, hi all and happy new year. I had a similar experience– but not FOIA since we at Climatic Change are a private institution- -with Stephen McIntyre demanding that I have the Mann et al cohort publish all their computer codes for papers published in Climatic Change I put the question to the editorial board who debated it for weeks. The vast majority opinion was that scientists should give enough information on their data sources and methods so others who are scientifically capable can do their own brand of replication work, but that this does not extend to personal computer codes with all their undocumented sub routines etc. It would be odious requirement to have scientists document every line of code so outsiders could then just apply them instantly. Not only is this an intellectual property issue, but it would dramatically reduce our productivity since we are not in the business of producing software products for general consumption and have no resources to do so. The NSF, which funded the studies I published, concurred–so that ended that issue with Climatic Change at the time a few years ago.

This continuing pattern of harassment, as Ben rightly puts it in my opinion, in the name of due diligence is in my view an attempt to create a fishing expedition to find minor glitches or unexplained bits of code–which exist in nearly all our kinds of complex work–and then assert that the entire result is thus suspect. Our best way to deal with this issue of replication is to have multiple independent author teams, with their own codes and data sets, publishing independent work on the same topics–like has been done on the “hockey stick”. That is how credible scientific replication should proceed.

Let the lawyers figure this out, but be sure that, like Ben is doing now, you disclose the maximum reasonable amount of information so competent scientists can do replication work, but short of publishing undocumented personalized codes etc. The end of the email Ben attached shows their intent–to discredit papers so they have no “evidentiary value in public policy”–what you resort to when you can’t win the intellectual battle scientifically at IPCC or NAS.

Good luck with this, and expect more of it as we get closer to international climate policy actions, We are witnessing the “contrarian battle of the bulge” now, and expect that all weapons will be used.

Cheers, Steve

PS Please do not copy or forward this email.

Now, why would Dr. Schneider not want his email copied or forwarded … perhaps because he is saying don’t follow the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act, don’t release the code that shows the math and reveals how you got your results? He foolishly thinks that studies can be “replicated” by using different data and different codes … but that says absolutely nothing about the original study and whether it contains any mistakes. The only way to determine whether a study like a historical temperature reconstruction contains errors is to examine the scientists actual work You can’t just pick another different bunch of proxies, analyze them, and say “I’ve found mathematical errors in your reconstruction”. You can only find those errors if you examine the actual math the researcher used, and to do that you need access to “their” codes.

I put “their” codes, in quotes because, under the policies of the University of East Anglia (and many other Universities), the codes do not belong to Phil Jones. They were developed as a part of his employment, and as such they belong to the University, and not to Phil.

The researchers complain in various places that they do not want to reveal their “primary data” because it is available on the web. While this is often true, as I saw in my FOIA requests to CRU, it is not sufficient Just saying “I got the information from Website X” as CRU did is often totally inadequate to locate the data in question. Santer makes this charge, that anyone could go the CMIP website and get the data themselves … but unless he says exactly which data from which run of which model, the website address is meaningless.

The main impression that I get from the emails is that the various scientists think that I and other requesters are simply doing this to harass them. Nothing could be further from the truth. I respect actual scientists, I’m short of time myself so I understand time pressures, so I have no desire to put any scientist to any extra effort beyond providing what science requires – a full accounting of the data, the methods, and in some cases the computer code used to do the research. Anything more is harassment … but anything less is scientific obstruction. And if they would provide those things when they publish their results, they’d never hear from me. And if Nature Magazine and Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation and all of the journals and funders would just enforce their own existing rules on archiving and transparency, the problem would be solved. But noooo, for the select friends of Phil these bothersome transparency regulations are ignored and overlooked.

As I said, the issue is not Trenberth or the Nature “trick” or scientists talking smack about each other. It is the illegal evasion of legitimate scientific requests for data needed to replicate a scientific study. Without replication, science cannot move forwards. And when you only give data to friends of yours, and not to people who actually might take a critical look at it, care to guess what you might end up with?

A “consensus” …

My best to everyone,

w.

A Collation of CRU Correspondence, Stephen McIntyre, May 30, 2008, <http://www.climateaudit.org/correspondence/cru.correspondence.pdf>

CRU Intellectual Property Regulations, <http://www.uea.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.130501!FWF31%20INTELLEC%20PROP%20REGS.pdf>

Exemptions under the UK FOI, <http://www.foi.gov.uk/guidance/exguide/index.htm>. There is no exemption for “intellectual property”, only for “trade secrets” used in business.

UPDATED: related FOIA documents are now posted at the end of this story.

Posted on the American Spectator:

“Climate Gate” Development: CEI Files Notice of Intent to Sue NASA

By Chris Horner on 11.24.09 @ 9:46AM

Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “ClimateGate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material and that sought for years by CEI go to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

CEI sought the following documents, among others, NASA’s failure to provide which within thirty days will prompt CEI to file suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:

- internal discussions about NASA’s quiet correction of its false historical U.S. temperature records after two Canadian researchers discovered a key statistical error, specifically discussion about whether and why to correct certain records, how to do so, the impact or wisdom or potential (or real) fallout therefrom or reaction to doing so (requested August 2007);

- internal discussions relating to the emails sent to James Hansen and/or Reto A. Ruedy from Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre calling their attention to the errors in NASA/GISS online temperature data (August 2007);

- those relating to the content, importance or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files, expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.

This and the related political activism engaged in are inappropriate behavior for a taxpayer-funded employee, particularly on taxpayer time. These documents were requested in January 2007 and NASA/GISS have refused to date to comply with their legal obligation to produce responsive documents.

RELATED DOCUMENTS (PDF)

Hansen GISS Correction FOI Request

GISS Blogging FOI Request

Hansen McIntyre FOI Request

Paul Chesser of the American Spectator writes about Andy Revkin’s lack of coverage at the NYT blog “Dot Earth”, in Andy Did Something Good Last Night, and gives him some points for posting a rebuttal.

That’s all well and good, but consider this:

Mr. Revkin stated in an earlier blog post that:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

Having worked in TV and radio newsrooms myself for 25 years, I can understand and relate to Andy’s position, to a point, but I think that point is long past now.

1. Like it or not, the files are now in the public domain, they aren’t ever going back to private. They can’t be put back in the bottle now.
2. It appears, due to the content, that the people’s right to know outweighs the need for privacy.
3. The FOIA process appears to have been purposely circumvented in this case.
4. NYT has in the past had no compunction about publishing private, or even classified government information. For example NYT published information contained in classified documents related to surveillance in the now famous story Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.
5. In that NYT story it was said that:
   

   Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

6. In the US surviellance issue, appears that NYT thought the public’s right to know outweighed the need for secrecy, but that action isn’t consistent with previous reporting at NYT with far more volatile information.
7. In the Case of ClimateGate, the files are not classified, the players are known and public, and due to what seems to be public  “concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight” of CRU it would seem to me that the public’s right to know outweighs the FOIA limited privacy concerns, especially since it appears there may have been FOIA laws broken.
8. Revkin himself appears in those CRU emails, suggesting the need for NYT reporting of the issue would be even greater to avoid the appearance of “running cover” for the scientists with whom he collaborated. Yesterday’s piece from Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert gives the appearance of “running cover”.
9. Other media outlets are kicking your butt.

Here’s Paul Chesser’s piece, saying many of the same things:

Andy Did Something Good Last Night

By Paul Chesser on 11.24.09 @ 9:47AM

The Amazing Revkin of the New York Times, that is, who at about 5:00 yesterday posted a reader response to the whining of University of Chicago climatologist Raymond Pierrehumbert, who also contributes to the alarmist RealClimate blog. The responder is Geoff Smith, who is mentioned a few times in the Climategate emails. Smith challenges Pierrehumbert to overlook the “cyberterrorism” (Waaah!) and instead question: the deletion of emails to avoid Freedom of Information requests; the exclusion of research that CRU scientists and their colleagues disagree with; the “tricks” of playing with data to fit the scientists’ assumptions; and the desire to oust scientific journal editor who published the works of their enemies.

So, good for Andy for posting those succinct thoughts by Mr. Smith. But here are points deducted for Mr. Amazing:

1. He provides “balance” in his blog post by repeating verbatim the latest defense attempt on the scandal by the University of East Anglia. The spin includes, besides “out of context,” blah, blah:

CRU’s published research is, and has always been, fully peer-reviewed by the relevant journals, and is one strand of research underpinning the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world’s climate in ways that are potentially dangerous. CRU is one of a number of independent centers working in this important area and reaching similar conclusions. It will continue to engage fully in reasoned debate on its findings with individuals and groups that are willing to have their research and theories subjected to scrutiny by the international scientific community.

“Peer-review” and “reasoned debate” were two issues that were proven to be disregarded by Phil Jones and his henchmen. Why does CRU want to surge even deeper into laughingstock territory?

2. Still waiting for Andy to do some of his own original reporting, for actual stories in the newspaper rather than blog posts, after he said on Friday that repercussions “continue to unfold” and “there’s much more to explore.” Does his curiosity extend only to reader comments on his own blog posts?

3. He also posted yesterday a regurgitation of the Times’ position on global warming, which is the same as the old position (“consensus!”). Perfect timing Andy!

Article de Henri Viaud-Murat.

Paul écrit aux Corinthiens: “Soyez mes imitateurs, comme je le suis moi–même de Christ” ( 1 Cor. 11: 1). Comment faut-il interpréter cet ordre? De quelle manière pouvons-nous “imiter” Christ?

Nous pouvons tout d’abord remarquer et admirer la hardiesse de l’apôtre Paul, qui n’hésitait pas à demander aux Chrétiens d’être ses imitateurs! Il le dit à plusieurs reprises dans ses épîtres:

“Je vous en conjure donc, soyez mes imitateurs” (1 Cor. 4: 16).

“Soyez tous mes imitateurs, frères, et portez les regards sur ceux qui marchent selon le modèle que vous avez en nous” (Philippiens 3: 17).

“Et vous–mêmes, vous avez été mes imitateurs et ceux du Seigneur, en recevant la parole au milieu de beaucoup de tribulations, avec la joie du Saint Esprit, en sorte que vous êtes devenus un modèle pour tous les croyants de la Macédoine et de l’Achaïe” ‘1 Thes. 1: 6-7).

“Vous savez vous–mêmes comment il faut nous imiter, car nous n’avons pas vécu parmi vous dans le désordre” 2 Thes. 3: 7).

Paul était un homme humble, mais il n’avait aucune fausse modestie. Bien souvent la fausse modestie est l’habit dont se parent les orgueilleux! Paul était vrai. Il savait que le témoignage qu’il donnait était digne d’être imité, car le seul désir de son cœur était d’imiter lui-même Christ, c’est-à-dire de manifester la nature et le caractère de Christ dans sa propre vie.

Dans l’Ancien Testament, quand il est parlé “d’imiter”, c’est plutôt de manière négative, pour exhorter les Israélites à ne pas imiter les abominations de toutes ces nations qui les entouraient. Mais il n’y a pratiquement aucune exhortation à imiter Dieu. En effet, pour les Israélites sous la Loi, il était absolument impossible de marcher par l’esprit, dans une complète victoire sur la chair et sur le péché. C’était même quelque chose d’impensable, de totalement impossible à imaginer!

Tandis qu’actuellement, sous la nouvelle alliance de l’esprit, il est possible aux Chrétiens nés de nouveau de marcher pleinement par l’esprit. Marcher par l’esprit, c’est marcher comme le Seigneur Jésus!

Il y a donc une mauvaise façon d’imiter Christ, et une bonne façon de le faire. La mauvaise façon consiste à s’efforcer d’appliquer des règles de bonne morale chrétienne, mais de manière légaliste. Cela implique un effort constant à la fois pour se contrôler, et aussi pour produire les “bonnes réactions.” Une telle attitude ne peut qu’aboutir à la frustration et à un échec complet.

La bonne façon d’imiter Christ consiste, une fois que l’on est passé par la nouvelle naissance, à apprendre à marcher par l’esprit, afin de permettre au Saint-Esprit de manifester la nature et le caractère de Christ au-travers de nous, sans effort et par la foi.

Imiter Christ de cette manière implique un amour ardent pour le Seigneur. Nous devons être remplis du désir de parler comme Jésus, d’agir comme Jésus, d’aimer comme Jésus, de guérir les malades comme Jésus, de chasser les démons comme Jésus, de penser comme Jésus, d’être comme Jésus! En fait, ce désir nous est communiqué par le Seigneur Lui-même, qui nous a recréés à Son image, et qui est venu demeurer en nous par Son Esprit. Il nous a rendus participants de Sa nature divine. Nous sommes un seul esprit avec Lui, “chair de Sa chair et os de Ses os”! Il a bien voulu faire de nous Son habitation dans l’Esprit, afin que nous puissions être remplis jusqu’à toute la plénitude de Dieu.

Quel plan merveilleux, quelle grâce magnifique! Dieu, qui a voulu faire de nous des aigles spirituels, a du mal à supporter le fait de nous voir continuer à nous comporter comme des canetons de basse-cour! La majesté des plans du Seigneur pour nous se heurte à l’étroitesse de nos conceptions humaines! Pourtant, la Parole du Seigneur est riche en révélations propres à nous ouvrir l’intelligence, et à faire exploser et voler en éclats toutes nos constructions charnelles!

“Béni soit Dieu, le Père de notre Seigneur Jésus–Christ, qui nous a bénis de toutes sortes de bénédictions spirituelles dans les lieux célestes en Christ ! En lui Dieu nous a élus avant la fondation du monde, pour que nous soyons saints et irrépréhensibles devant lui, nous ayant prédestinés dans son amour à être ses enfants d’adoption par Jésus–Christ, selon le bon plaisir de sa volonté, à la louange de la gloire de sa grâce qu’il nous a accordée en son bien–aimé” (Ephésiens 1: 3-6).

“Je fléchis les genoux devant le Père, duquel tire son nom toute famille dans les cieux et sur la terre, afin qu’il vous donne, selon la richesse de sa gloire, d’être puissamment fortifiés par son Esprit dans l’homme intérieur, en sorte que Christ habite dans vos cœurs par la foi ; afin qu’étant enracinés et fondés dans l’amour, vous puissiez comprendre avec tous les saints quelle est la largeur, la longueur, la profondeur et la hauteur, et connaître l’amour de Christ, qui surpasse toute connaissance, en sorte que vous soyez remplis jusqu’à toute la plénitude de Dieu. Or, à celui qui peut faire, par la puissance qui agit en nous, infiniment au delà de tout ce que nous demandons ou pensons, à lui soit la gloire dans l’Église et en Jésus–Christ, dans toutes les générations, aux siècles des siècles! Amen!” (Ephésiens 3: 14-21).

Nous sentons bien que l’apôtre manque de mots et de qualificatifs pour traduire parfaitement la splendeur et l’excellence des révélations qu’il a reçues du Seigneur! Il désire ardemment nous faire partager toutes ces “bénédictions célestes” que nous avons déjà reçues en Christ dans les lieux célestes! Nous sommes appelés à être parfaits et irréprochables dans le Bien-Aimé! Nous sommes appelés à être remplis jusqu’à toute la plénitude de Dieu! Et nous le sommes, quand nous avons compris l’immensité de l’amour de Dieu et de Christ pour nous, amour qui surpasse toute connaissance humaine!

Pour comprendre cela, il est clair que nous devons être transportés par le Seigneur Lui-même dans une autre dimension que celle de nos préoccupations humaines ordinaires! L’Esprit de Dieu nous transporte dans un Royaume où tout est sainteté immaculée, beauté parfaite, perfection absolue! Nous sommes incapables de demander, et même d’imaginer, tout ce que le Seigneur a Lui-même conçu dans Son cœur pour Ses enfants! Il faut que ce soit Lui-même qui nous révèle ces choses et qui nous y fasse pénétrer! Il peut faire, par la puissance de Son Esprit qui agit en nous, infiniment au-delà de tout ce que nous demandons ou pensons!

Quelle gloire, bien-aimés, quelle gloire! Nous pénétrons là dans le secret des profondeurs du cœur de Dieu, bien au-delà et bien au-dessus de nos petites préoccupations terrestres qui, pourtant, intéressent aussi le Seigneur au plus haut point!

Pour imiter Christ, nous devons simplement L’aimer de tout notre cœur, de toutes nos pensées, et de toutes nos forces, et nous laisser transporter par Lui, en toute confiance, dans la dimension où Il veut nous entraîner, et qui est déjà la nôtre en Lui!

La voix puissante de Son Esprit nous appelle et nous dit: “Bien-aimé, j’ai pour toi des projets qui dépassent infiniment tout ce que tu peux demander et penser! Veux-tu répondre à Mon appel, et Me laisser travailler dans ta vie, pour que tu puisses recevoir la révélation de ces choses? Veux-tu Me faire confiance pour Me laisser t’y conduire, pour Ma gloire, mais aussi pour Ma joie, parce que Je veux t’introduire dans l’intimité de Ma communion! Je désire Me révéler à toi pour que tu puisses Me contempler tel que Je suis!”

Que pouvons-nous répondre, sinon: “Oui, Père, je le désire ardemment! Fais dans ma vie tout ce que Tu veux y faire! Je veux Te connaître tel que tu es, pour pouvoir Te glorifier et T’aimer tel que Tu le mérites! Je veux connaître Ton Fils Jésus! Je veux être toujours en communion avec Toi et avec Jésus, par Ton Saint-Esprit!”

C’est Christ qui nous conduit au Père, et qui nous révèle que le Père nous aime comme Il aime le Fils. Christ nous appelle à nous identifier complètement à Lui, afin de pouvoir bénéficier de tout ce qu’Il est.

C’est pour cette raison que le Père, dès le départ, a décidé de nous faire “entrer en Christ,” par une nouvelle naissance spirituelle, afin de pouvoir passer, en Lui et avec Lui, par toutes les étapes de Sa mort, de Son ensevelissement, de Sa résurrection et de Son ascension. N’est-ce pas le moyen parfait de pourvoir imiter Christ, que d’avoir été parfaitement identifiés à Lui, afin de bénéficier de tout ce qu’Il est et de tout ce qu’Il a accompli?

“Si donc il y a quelque consolation en Christ, s’il y a quelque soulagement dans la charité, s’il y a quelque union d’esprit, s’il y a quelque compassion et quelque miséricorde, rendez ma joie parfaite, ayant un même sentiment, un même amour, une même âme, une même pensée. Ne faites rien par esprit de parti ou par vaine gloire, mais que l’humilité vous fasse regarder les autres comme étant au–dessus de vous–mêmes. Que chacun de vous, au lieu de considérer ses propres intérêts, considère aussi ceux des autres. Ayez en vous les sentiments qui étaient en Jésus–Christ, lequel, existant en forme de Dieu, n’a point regardé comme une proie à arracher d’être égal avec Dieu, mais s’est dépouillé lui–même, en prenant une forme de serviteur, en devenant semblable aux hommes; et ayant paru comme un simple homme, il s’est humilié lui–même, se rendant obéissant jusqu’à la mort, même jusqu’à la mort de la croix. C’est pourquoi aussi Dieu l’a souverainement élevé, et lui a donné le nom qui est au–dessus de tout nom, afin qu’au nom de Jésus tout genou fléchisse dans les cieux, sur la terre et sous la terre, et que toute langue confesse que Jésus–Christ est Seigneur, à la gloire de Dieu le Père” (Philippiens 2: 1-11).

Si nous réalisons que Christ nous a déjà entraînés dans Sa mort et dans Sa résurrection, il nous sera facile d’avoir en nous les sentiments de Christ, qui nous conduisent aussi à nous dépouiller nous-mêmes, à prendre une forme de serviteur, à nous humilier nous-mêmes, et à nous rendre obéissants jusqu’à la mort, même jusqu’à la mort de la croix! Il nous suffit de croire que ces choses sont déjà accomplies pour nous par Christ, et qu’elles nous sont disponibles par la foi!

Bien-aimés, si Christ a voulu non seulement mourir pour nous à la croix, mais aussi nous faire mourir, en Lui et avec Lui, sur cette même croix, est-ce pour que nous puissions continuer à vivre de la vie de la chair, comme si nous n’étions jamais morts à tout notre passé de péché?

La mort de Christ pour nous sur la croix, et la réalisation de notre propre mort en Lui, et avec Lui, doivent pouvoir nous communiquer une sainte haine de tout ce pour quoi Il est mort! Seule la mort de Christ pouvait mettre un terme absolu, définitif, à la puissance du péché qui nous entraînait, depuis la chute, dans sa spirale descendante et infernale! O mort bénie de Christ, qui a mis à mort tout ce qui nous entraînait vers la mort! O résurrection bénie de Christ, qui nous a introduits, en Lui et avec Lui, dans la splendeur du Royaume de Dieu!

Combien nous avons besoin d’acquérir cette mentalité céleste, qui nous permet d’être de plus en plus en communion avec l’Esprit de notre Père. Combien nous avons besoin de nous installer par la foi dans notre magnifique position spirituelle, en Christ dans les lieux célestes! Là, dans une réelle et douce communion avec notre Sauveur et Seigneur, nous pouvons puiser en Lui tout ce qu’il nous faut pour pouvoir marcher sur cette terre, comme Lui-même a marché! C’est cela, la véritable imitation de Christ!

C’est notre compréhension et notre acceptation de la croix qui permet à Dieu notre Père de nous élever souverainement en Christ, jusqu’à cette position céleste qu’Il nous fait la grâce de nous faire déjà occuper en esprit! Être assis dans les lieux célestes en Christ! Mesurons-nous réellement tout ce que cela signifie? Réalisons-nous que Dieu nous a déjà installés dans cette position? Quand nous le réalisons réellement, pouvons-nous encore nous plaindre de quoi que ce soit? Quand nous savons que nous occupons, par la grâce de Dieu, la position la plus haute qu’une créature quelconque puisse occuper dans l’univers, que pouvons-nous désirer de plus? Ne sommes-nous pas comblés? N’avons-nous pas toutes choses en Christ?

O Père, ouvre notre intelligence, pour que nous puissions comprendre ces choses!

“Que le Dieu de notre Seigneur Jésus–Christ, le Père de gloire, vous donne un esprit de sagesse et de révélation, dans sa connaissance, et qu’il illumine les yeux de votre cœur, pour que vous sachiez quelle est l’espérance qui s’attache à son appel, quelle est la richesse de la gloire de son héritage qu’il réserve aux saints, et quelle est envers nous qui croyons l’infinie grandeur de sa puissance, se manifestant avec efficacité par la vertu de sa force. Il l’a déployée en Christ, en le ressuscitant des morts, et en le faisant asseoir à sa droite dans les lieux célestes, au–dessus de toute domination, de toute autorité, de toute puissance, de toute dignité, et de tout nom qui se peut nommer, non seulement dans le siècle présent, mais encore dans le siècle à venir. Il a tout mis sous ses pieds, et il l’a donné pour chef suprême à l’Église, qui est son corps, la plénitude de celui qui remplit tout en tous” (Ephésiens 1: 17-23).

“Mais Dieu, qui est riche en miséricorde, à cause du grand amour dont il nous a aimés, nous qui étions morts par nos offenses, nous a rendus à la vie avec Christ (c’est par grâce que vous êtes sauvés); il nous a ressuscités ensemble, et nous a fait asseoir ensemble dans les lieux célestes, en Jésus–Christ, afin de montrer dans les siècles à venir l’infinie richesse de sa grâce par sa bonté envers nous en Jésus–Christ. Car c’est par la grâce que vous êtes sauvés, par le moyen de la foi. Et cela ne vient pas de vous, c’est le don de Dieu. Ce n’est point par les œuvres, afin que personne ne se glorifie. Car nous sommes son ouvrage, ayant été créés en Jésus–Christ pour de bonnes œuvres, que Dieu a préparées d’avance, afin que nous les pratiquions” (Ephésiens 2: 4-10).

Relisez-le bien! Nous avons été “créés en Jésus-Christ pour de bonnes œuvres que Dieu a préparées d’avance, afin que nous les pratiquions”! C’est cela, imiter Christ! Dieu nous a créés en Jésus-Christ, absolument à Son image, et nous a donné une nouvelle nature semblable à celle de Christ, nature qui nous permet de pratiquer les mêmes œuvres que celles de Christ! Tout cela, par Sa grâce, par le moyen de la foi!

“O profondeur de la richesse, de la sagesse et de la science de Dieu! Que ses jugements sont insondables, et ses voies incompréhensibles! Car qui a connu la pensée du Seigneur, ou qui a été son conseiller? Qui lui a donné le premier, pour qu’il ait à recevoir en retour? C’est de lui, par lui, et pour lui que sont toutes choses. A lui la gloire dans tous les siècles! Amen!” (Romains 11: 33-36).

Dieu nous a déjà créés en Christ à Son image. Il est déjà venu demeurer en nous par Son Esprit. Il a déjà déversé en nous Son amour. Tout cela est déjà disponible pour nous, si nous croyons! Dieu veut nous remplir de Lui, pour que Christ puisse Se manifester en nous et au travers de nous! C’est cela, imiter Christ!

Bien-aimés, le Seigneur est jaloux de nous! Il est jaloux de Son Épouse Bien-aimée, d’une puissante jalousie de Dieu! Il ne veut pas que Son Épouse se souille et se détourne de Lui! Il veut nous purifier comme l’or! Paul aussi était jaloux de l’Église

“Oh! si vous pouviez supporter de ma part un peu de folie! Mais vous, me supportez! Car je suis jaloux de vous d’une jalousie de Dieu, parce que je vous ai fiancés à un seul époux, pour vous présenter à Christ comme une vierge pure. Toutefois, de même que le serpent séduisit Ève par sa ruse, je crains que vos pensées ne se corrompent et ne se détournent de la simplicité à l’égard de Christ. Car, si quelqu’un vient vous prêcher un autre Jésus que celui que nous avons prêché, ou si vous recevez un autre Esprit que celui que vous avez reçu, ou un autre Évangile que celui que vous avez embrassé, vous le supportez fort bien” (2 Corinthiens 11: 1-4).

Quelle tristesse profonde pouvait ressentir l’apôtre, parce sa tristesse était aussi celle de Dieu. Pouvez-vous imaginer cette abomination de la désolation: voir que cette pure Église de Christ pouvait “fort bien supporter” de recevoir un autre Jésus, un autre Évangile, et un autre Esprit”? N’y avait-il pas là de quoi embraser la jalousie du Seigneur?

“Bien–aimés, ne soyez pas surpris, comme d’une chose étrange qui vous arrive, de la fournaise qui est au milieu de vous pour vous éprouver. Réjouissez–vous, au contraire, de la part que vous avez aux souffrances de Christ, afin que vous soyez aussi dans la joie et dans l’allégresse lorsque sa gloire apparaîtra. Si vous êtes outragés pour le nom de Christ, vous êtes heureux, parce que l’Esprit de gloire, l’Esprit de Dieu, repose sur vous. Que nul de vous, en effet, ne souffre comme meurtrier, ou voleur, ou malfaiteur, ou comme s’ingérant dans les affaires d’autrui. Mais si quelqu’un souffre comme chrétien, qu’il n’en ait point honte, et que plutôt il glorifie Dieu à cause de ce nom. Car c’est le moment où le jugement va commencer par la maison de Dieu. Or, si c’est par nous qu’il commence, quelle sera la fin de ceux qui n’obéissent pas à l’Évangile de Dieu? Et si le juste se sauve avec peine, que deviendront l’impie et le pécheur? Ainsi, que ceux qui souffrent selon la volonté de Dieu remettent leurs âmes au fidèle Créateur, en faisant ce qui est bien” (1 Pierre 4: 12-19).

Il vaut mieux participer aux souffrances de Christ, en faisant ce qui est bien, et souffrir comme Chrétien, plutôt que de souffrir parce que l’on a fait le mal, et que l’on ne s’en est pas repenti. Il existe des fournaises nécessaires, par lesquelles tout Chrétien doit passer, quand il participe aux souffrances de Christ. Mais il existe aussi des fournaises que l’on pourrait, et que l’on devrait éviter. Ce sont les fournaises où nous jette Dieu pour nous purifier des souillures auxquelles nous pouvons encore être attachés!

Dieu est jaloux de l’Esprit qu’Il nous a donné. Si nous aimons le Seigneur, nous ne pouvons que collaborer avec joie à l’œuvre de sanctification et de purification qu’Il veut opérer en nous! Mais si nous traînons les pieds en regardant en arrière, vers les “pots de viande” de l’Égypte, ou les demeures de Sodome, nous risquons de périr dans notre désert comme les Israélites incrédules et rebelles, ou d’être transformés en statue de sel comme la femme de Lot!

Imitons Abraham, qui n’a pas regardé en arrière quand Dieu lui a demandé de quitter sa patrie, et qui avait les yeux fixés sur la cité céleste et sur la rémunération divine!

“Car c’est le moment où le jugement va commencer par la maison de Dieu. Or, si c’est par nous qu’il commence, quelle sera la fin de ceux qui n’obéissent pas à l’Évangile de Dieu?”

Bien-aimés, le jugement de Dieu est à la mesure de la grandeur de la grâce qu’Il nous offre en Christ, si nous la refusons ou si nous la dédaignons!

En revanche, quelle gloire nous attend, si nous imitons ceux qui, par la foi et la persévérance, héritent des promesses!

“Alors Jésus, levant les yeux sur ses disciples, dit: Heureux vous qui êtes pauvres, car le royaume de Dieu est à vous! Heureux vous qui avez faim maintenant, car vous serez rassasiés! Heureux vous qui pleurez maintenant, car vous serez dans la joie! Heureux serez–vous, lorsque les hommes vous haïront, lorsqu’on vous chassera, vous outragera, et qu’on rejettera votre nom comme infâme, à cause du Fils de l’homme! Réjouissez–vous en ce jour–là et tressaillez d’allégresse, parce que votre récompense sera grande dans le ciel; car c’est ainsi que leurs pères traitaient les prophètes” (Luc 6: 20-23).

Notre récompense dans le ciel, ce sera de pouvoir contempler le Seigneur face à face, et jouir de Sa présence pour l’éternité! Oui, cela vaut la peine de supporter nos “légères afflictions du temps présent,” quand on connaît la bonté et la grandeur de notre Dieu et Son plan glorieux d’amour pour nous!

Oui, le moment vient où Il essuiera Lui-même toute larme de nos yeux!

“Puis je vis un nouveau ciel et une nouvelle terre; car le premier ciel et la première terre avaient disparu, et la mer n’était plus. Et je vis descendre du ciel, d’auprès de Dieu, la ville sainte, la nouvelle Jérusalem, préparée comme une épouse qui s’est parée pour son époux. Et j’entendis du trône une forte voix qui disait: Voici le tabernacle de Dieu avec les hommes! Il habitera avec eux, et ils seront son peuple, et Dieu lui–même sera avec eux. Il essuiera toute larme de leurs yeux, et la mort ne sera plus, et il n’y aura plus ni deuil, ni cri, ni douleur, car les premières choses ont disparu. Et celui qui était assis sur le trône dit: Voici, je fais toutes choses nouvelles. Et il dit: Écris; car ces paroles sont certaines et véritables. Et il me dit: C’est fait!” (Apocalypse 21: 1-6).

Ce “c’est fait!” doit résonner en nous comme le “tout est accompli!” de la croix! C’est parce que nous croyons que tout a déjà été accompli par Christ que nous le verrons s’accomplir dans nos vies!

Oui, bien-aimés, ce sont des paroles certaines et véritables! Ne nous décourageons jamais! Reprenons toujours courage en Christ! Ce qu’Il nous a promis s’accomplira, et nous jouirons auprès de Lui d’un bonheur éternel! Puisons en Jésus tout ce dont nous avons besoin pour marcher, avancer et vaincre en Son Nom! Sa grâce est inépuisable! Il est en nous et avec nous jusqu’à la fin du monde! Il a vaincu le monde! Nous sommes plus que vainqueurs par Celui qui nous a tant aimés! Viens, Seigneur Jésus!