Breaking: University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre Hacked
Filed Under: Environmental News on November 20, 2009
This broke and I had to pre-empt the planned posts for today to talk about this. It’s flying around the Web like a firestorm and igniting a lot of interest on some of the sites I visit fairly regularly. At least one of them is so bogged down with people that it’s giving regular 500 errors.
The servers at University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre were apparently hacked and the perpetrator made off with over 1,000 emails and 72 documents in various formats. These were subsequently published in an archived (ZIP) file on an anonymous Russian FTP server. Currently, a directly link through a browser gives an error and I can’t log in through an FTP client anonymously. So I’m guessing it’s been overloaded with requests and closed down the link. It was this, if it happens to start working again: http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip
I’m not sure where this broke, but the first I saw of it was on Watts Up With That, who linked to Climate Audit (which is suffering some overload). A few tried got me through to Climate Audit, where I saw another link back to The Air Vent (a site I’ve never heard of). That site, as far as I can tell, appears to be the one that broke this.
The guy on the Air Vent appears to be the one who originally broke this story, saying in his post that he received the file via a “link left on his blog.”
In any case, the information is certainly making the rounds. The emails and documents contain some pretty explosive information that, if true, would put a whole pile of damnation and career-ending embarrassment on some of the biggest names in the global warming/climate change science world.
The emails that have been published on blogs (with names, emails, and other identifiers removed for legal reasons) are showing data manipulation, celebration at the death of skeptical climate scientists and commentators, and a fair amount of skulduggery.
The people implicated would be some of the driving names behind the science that promotes anthropogenic global warming (AGW), including Keith Briffa (one of the famous tree-ring data hockey stick graphers), Benjamin Santer (not of HCRC) who was fundamental in starting the IPCC, Michael E. Mann (another tree-ring, hockey sticker), Tim Osborn, Eugene R. Wahl (also with NOAA)… They talk almost openly about obstructing science, blocking publication of skeptical analysis, and more. Most of the emails and files date from 1999 so far, but there may be some that are newer, as someone pointed in commentary to one as late as this month.
Over the next few days, it’s likely that this will take off and by this time next week, we’ll have some serious inquiry going from major press and other outlets. Since the U. of East Anglia is a publicly-funded school, Britain’s law allows freedom of information requests, so these emails could be verified via public scrutiny of the email servers.
The emails of those in the U.S. would be required by Homeland Security laws to be stored for 5-10 years, securely, but may or may not be accessible through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. Some of the emails may have gone through his Penn State University account, which is a publicly-funded school. Mann is also a contributor to the popular climate website RealClimate.org.
If these emails and those behind them are brought forward for their apparent nefarious acts, they will likely destroy what’s left of the global warming as science-based religion once and for all. This is that big. Nearly every major scientific player in the IPCC’s European membership is implicated here. That’s a lot of the “consensus.”
This breaking news surely has a lot of legs and has implications that could change the game for Al Gore and his minions forever. Hopefully, it will finally shatter the AGW myth once and for all so we can concentrate on some real problems that need tackling. Like the Sustainability Factor.
There is an update to this post. Click here to read it.
