As readers know, both myself and various Climate Audit readers have requested CRU station data from both the Met Office and CRU. While my initial request to CRU was refused, I asked for a reconsideration and the matter is still outstanding, as are all the other CRU requests. Under
U.K. Freedom of Information Act,
once FOI requests have been made for information,
public authorities are not permitted to "
alter, deface, block, erase, destroy or conceal any record held by the public authority, with the intention of preventing the disclosure by that authority of all, or any part, of the information to the communication of which the applicant would have been entitled." As fordprefect observed the other day, the Computer Misuse Act also prescribes various offences, one of which is the unauthorized modification of the contents of a computer with the intent "
to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer".
I was therefore more than a little surprised that on July 27, at about 2:42 p.m. (UK), CRU deleted three files from their data directory
ftp.cru.uea.ac.uk/data/ entitled
newcrustnsall.dat.Z,
newcruextusall.dat.Z and
newcrustnsall.hdr. I have before and after screenshots of the contents of this directory showing the deletion, screenshots that I will show below. I also have a screenshot showing the most recent change of the directory and that no other files were changed. [As readers observed, it is possible and perhaps even likely that the files were moved to a concealed location, rather than totally erased, which would present similar sorts of issues for FOI compliance.]
Comment: This amazing story provides us once again with an every day real live example of the psychological deviance that pervades all of our reality. Those who run the programs and have foisted the global warming meme into the public consciousness over the last two decades now decide the raw data for which the last two decades' policies and political agendas have been based on are too dangerous for the public of which it serves to examine.
Absolutely amazing!
If the AGW'ers didn't have enough problems already with their failed models, tweaked data, falsified statistical methodologies, their missing tropospheric hot spots, missing ocean heat, extended winters, missing and flooded summers, low solar irradiance, low API, and on and on. Now, heading into the December 2009 Copenhagen Conference the propagandists will have to deal with the lowest of lows so far perpetrated by those in control and in positions of leadership and power in the climate science world. The actual removal and hiding of data and the refusal to allow data to be examined by anyone not in the special, elite, privileged group that is telling the rest of the world what to do.
It is unbelievable that a scientific public service institution would use the draconian state secrets laws and claim that temperature data it has used to beat the public consciousness over the head for the last couple of decades is all the sudden privileged information that the public is not allowed to see.
The Global Warming Political Terrorists strike another blow into the public psyche!
This incredible saga has been followed here on SOTT with the following stories:
British Climatic Research Unit Refuses To Release Data Once Again
"Deep Cool" - the Mole within Hadley CRU
Met Office / Hadley CRU discovers the mole
British Climatic Research Unit Erases Global Temperature Data
"Unprecedented" Data Purge At British Climatic Research Unit