Phil Jones: Victim

I don't really know if that's the best headline. I just want to get this article up.

Interviewed by police... to find the real killers.

he scientist at the heart of the climate change email scandal was today interviewed by police about the scandal.

Two plain clothes officers arrived in an unmarked car in the afternoon and took Professor Phil Jones to Norfolk Police's headquarters in nearby Wymondham to give a statement.

Sources said the interview concerned the theft of emails from the university and alleged death threats since the contents of the emails were released, adding he was being treated as a 'victim of crime' rather than a suspect in any criminal investigation.

Detective Superintendent Julian Gregory added: 'He is one of the people assisting police with their enquiries.'

I'll bet he's assisting. I also bet he'd stop assisting if anyone official asked him about his emails asking others to delete emails legally-discoverable through FOIA. (I think the British analogue is called "FOI" for short, but I'll keep saying "FOIA" because everyone gets what I'm talking about.)

And no one will ask him about that. Because the "real crime" here is apparently blowing the whistle on a criminal conspiracy.

As Treacher said, ClimateGate is about the illegality of leaking emails in much the same way that Watergate was about parking garages.

More:

Eduardo Zorita, an expert in European climate trends, said that future reports from the UN's International Panel of Climate Change would lack credibility if Professor Jones was involved in their compilation.

As director of the University of East Anglia's prestigious Climatic Research Unit, the professor has provided temperature data key to previous reports used by governments around the world when setting climate change policy.

Dr Zorita also said that the content of thousands of emails and documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's computer system and published on the internet confirmed that some global warming research was riddled with 'machination, conspiracies and collusion'.

...

He said that he was aware that his call for Professor Jones and others who wrote controversial emails to be banned from contributing to future reports could harm his career, but 'the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible any more'.

He said: 'I can confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU files.

'The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.'

The researcher added although he does not believe that manmade climate is a hoax, he and other researchers have been ‘bullied and subtly blackmailed’ to fit in the scientific mainstream.

'In this atmosphere, PhD students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the "politically correct picture",' he said.

There's an old thing we all know: A cop -- even a good cop -- will be tempted to frame a man he knows for a fact to be guilty... if there's not enough evidence otherwise to convict that plainly guilty man.

What stops cops from doing so? Well, most of the time: The fact that their evidence will be examined in an adversarial proceeding where a defense attorney might catch wind of the framing. Which could lead to the cop being suspended, fired, or... even winding up in prison.

And sometimes, despite all that, a cop will still resort to planting evidence to frame a guilty man.

In this case, we have 1, a large number of liked-minded zealots all convinced beyond convincing that their is a villain afoot, 2, a lack of really strong direct evidence to convict this horrible scoundrel, and, crucially, 3, no adversarial process at all, no examination by the "defense attorneys," if you will, and so therefore no check on the impulse to frame the guilty.

No sunlight, no chance of being detected. No consequences.

Is it any wonder this happened?

We are looking at "science" conducted with less rigor and skepticism than we see in the a corrupt station house in New Orleans.

Thanks to JackStraw.

posted by Ace at 04:43 PM

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