Hadley Hack Update – Authenticity Gets Some Confirmation Posted on November 20th, 2009
As I posted earlier this morning, the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre was hacked and over a thousand emails and 70+ files were copied. Those were stuffed into an archive, put up on a Russian file server, and then links to download it were spread around various skeptics’ websites by a still unknown person.
Now, commentary is flying around the Internet, but some of the more level-headed are getting into the fray.
TBR.cc, which publishes the TGIF Edition, a weekly Web-magazine, called Phil Jones, Director of the CRU at Hadley, and verified that the files were legitimate.
“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”
It turns out, Jones and the staff at CRU didn’t even know about it until their friends are RealClimate.org alerted them. In their usual way (according to some of the leaked emails, RealClimate makes it a policy to filter commentary and remove anything that doesn’t help their “cause,” RealClimate deleted the hacker’s comment and link.
TGIF promises more of this interview in their weekly, publishing later today.
Meanwhile, the files continue to spread around the ‘Net. One nice guy took the emails, broke them up into tens, and put them on his site (otherwise unedited) for all to access. The emails are raw and the site is just a Web-based file server–no index, just a directory listing. You can read those at this link.
It’s beginning to hit some media outlets now. Australia’s Herald Sun published a wrapup of the events thus far along with some selected emails. A couple of links to the files are available in that article as well.
The story continues to unfold. As I said in my earlier post, this will take some time to really break. It’s a real humdinger, though, and promises to shatter a lot of careers, questionable science, and more. This is more than just some “rogue scientists,” so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Those implicated here are the biggest names in AGW theory and if they go, the theory falls with them. Every piece of data they’ve ever published will need to be scrutinized and re-thought. Many of these emails show how they massaged that data or outright lied about it to get the results they wanted.
Be ready for one of those hurricanes Al Gore is always talking about…
Related posts:
- Update on the Hack In at Hadley Climate Centre
- Breaking: University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre Hacked
- Read the Emails From Hadley Scientists Yourself – Now Searchable
