Watch THIS space...

...from the UK Guardian comes news that the University of East Anglia
has been forced to release up to 4million individual thermometer readings taken from 4,000 weather stations over the past 160 years, data that is the life's work of the head of the UEA's Climatic Research Unit, Phil (Hide the Decline) Jones. The same Phil who wrote ... "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so.

...An Oxford academic has won the right to read previously secret data on climate change held by the University of East Anglia (UEA). The decision, by the government'sinformation commisioner, Christopher Graham, is being hailed as a landmark ruling that will mean that thousands of British researchers are required to share their data with the public. The ruling also marks a victory for critics of the UEA and itsClimatic Research Unit in the "climategate" affair. It comes at the end of a two-year rearguard action by UEA climate scientists to prevent publication of their "crown jewels", an archive of world temperature records collected jointly with the Met Office. Jonathan Jones, physics professor at Oxford University and self-confessed "climate change agnostic", used freedom of information law to demand the data that is the life's work of the head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones. UEA resisted the requests to disclose the data, but this week it was compelled to do so...Under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, public bodies such as universities have to share their data unless there are good reasons not to. But when Jonathan Jones and others asked for the data in the summer of 2009, the UEA said legal exemptions applied. It said variously that the temperature data were the property of foreign meteorological offices; were intellectual property that might be valuable if sold to other researchers; and were in any case often publicly available. But in a damning verdict, Graham said suggestions that international relations could be upset by disclosure were "highly speculative", and "it is not clear how UEA might have planned to commercially exploit the information requested...more here...

Something is very, very rotten in the state of Denmark...

...so says our brave but endangered columnist Jim Hopkins (aka Jam Hipkins) in his fortnightly offering (see also my posting 27.11.09) in this morning's NZ Herald...

...the heart's not singing 'cos there's sod all to sing about, sunshine! We can't even sing about that anymore without some sobbing celeb sanctimoaniously banging on about our bloody carbon footprint. It's hard to get a tingle in our Jingle Bells when there's a colossally wasteful, doom-on-steroids loath-in happening in Denmark. And tough to get the goodwill going with 30,000 and four hoarse men of the apocalypse screaming "Repent! Repent! The End is Nigh! Last chance to save the planet" at their taxpayer-funded religious rally in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. That's why we're not shopping,...because we're numb with despair. Because we feel hopeless, bludgeoned by shonky science and dodgy data into a state of abject grovelment - ashamed of our sinful selves and terrified our delicate little planet is going to hell in a (very hot) handcart.
It isn't and it won't. She's a tough old Mother, Earth...more here...

...and on the 10th day of Christmas, my true love sent to me...ten computer programmes, nine researchers dancing,eight grants for milking, seven bears a swimming,six doctors lying, five declines a hiding, four suspect graphs,three hockey sticks, two tricks to play and a cross section of a pine tree...

...I didn't intend to enlarge today's posting, but MUST ADD THIS remarkable and incredible exchange of emails between Tom Wigley of Climategate fame, and (the temporarily stood down) Phil Jones of the CRU. Read this, and judge the truth and integrity of these men for yourself...from Andrew Bolt...

...the person he was rebuking in this email, Michael Mann, was an
author of this same IPCC who had his now discredited “hockey stick” included
prominently in the third IPCC report to “prove” what now seems almost certainly
false - the today’s temperatures are the hottest for more than a 1000 years. The
Keith Briffa he attacked in the first email is also an IPCC author, whose
similar attempt to “prove” there was no medieval warming is now also regarded as
completely discredited. The Phil Jones that Wigley sent the first email to is
another IPCC author, who vowed to keep out sceptical papers from the IPCC, urged
the destruction of evidence and boasted he had used a “trick” to “hide the
decline” in temperatures in another graph used by the IPCC...more here...

"Their shoulders held the sky suspended...

...they stood and earth's foundations stay..." A.E.Houseman wrote about an army of forgotten mercenaries. Although his sentiments are a little melodramatic, they are applicable and could also apply to 2 individuals who are changing our world as we watch. One is the anonymous northern hemisphere whistleblower who leaked the CRU information and data to us, the second is Australian Opposition leader Tony Abbott, whose ascendancy to political leadership over the climate change issue is being watched and debated worldwide. As Andrew Bolt observes in the Melbourne Herald Sun, Tony Abbott has...

... bought the Liberals time - the only thing left that could heal their bloody division over global warming.The Liberals can be healed if they see global warming not as a moral question, but a scientific and economic problem. And events will prove decisive in settling a difference of opinion on those. FIRST, if the world keeps failing to warm, the warming theory itself will crumble. Indeed, it's crumbling already. Rudd's belief that man is heating the world is based almost entirely on the reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But thousands of emails uncovered in this month's Climategate scandal show that the scientists most responsible for those reports did not just doctor data, destroy awkward evidence, and censor sceptical scientists. They also show some of them privately admitting that the world seems not to be heating as they (and Rudd) predicted.
"Where the heck is global warming?" raged Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, to another Climategate scientist: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
But time won't just settle this argument about whether the world is actually warming.
By next year the UN's Copenhagen summit will be well over and we'll also know then how serious other countries really are about cutting their emissions, too.
If the world's biggest emitters - such as China, the United States and India - keep refusing to agree to their own legally enforceable cuts in emissions, then tiny Australia going it alone will seem even more suicidally mad.
Of course, it cuts both ways. If the world resumes warming with a vengeance, and if the world's big emitters do indeed set real targets, then many sceptics will be forced to shut up.
So time will tell, and time will heal. Time is thus what the Liberals need most, along with a leader who would meanwhile rather die fighting than live crawling. With Abbott, the Liberals finally have both a cause to fight, and time to heal...more here...

...I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Mick Jagger was right. Time really is on our side...meanwhile Phil Jones has his collar felt...

...and, H/T Theo... Anyone need a new watch ? Buy a Rolex...