Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
SIR – Christopher Booker's article ("Weather records are a state secret", Comment, August 2), reminded me of an incident in the 1970s when I was writing technical manuals for the Services.
If, as occasionally happened, an author was refused some piece of information on security grounds, his colleagues would jocularly suggest that he ask either a defence journalist or the Russian Embassy.
One author, who had been asked to include in his manual a table showing the difference in barometric pressure at one foot intervals from sea level to over 100,000 feet, was apparently told that this was highly classified information which could be released only to someone with the appropriate level of security clearance. He took the usual joke literally and rang the Russian Embassy which, to everyone's amazement, as it was during the Cold War, duly sent him the required details.
Richard Shaw
Dunstable, Bedfordshire
SIR – The Met Office has got it spectacularly and hilariously wrong three summers out of three. Could it be that they are guilty of believing their own propaganda? Have they become so utterly devoted to the model of anthropogenic global warming that they have staked the entire credibility of their forecasting on basing everything on what the model says should happen?
My fear is that the incontrovertible argument that we should be conserving fossil fuels, since they are finite, may be discredited by linking it with the argument for anthropogenic global warming, which may yet be shown to be fallacious.
John Hay-Heddle
Sawley, Derbys
