(Update – the Examiner article linked to below stated that this was the UEA Hadley Climate Research Centre. Hadley is not in the title. The leaked documents are from the UEA’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). Hadley is a separate Met Office organisation. Thanks to a very agitated Pete Pisspoor in the comments for pointing that out.
Further update – CRU has provided a lot of the “climate simulations data” for Hadley’s LINK project. It has also ” developed datasets in conjunction with Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office”. Search HadCRU and HadCRUT on Google.)
And now, back to our original programming…
This could get very interesting:
The University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
CRU has confirmed that it has been hacked and it has cancelled all existing passwords. If you see or hear any mention of this on the BBC please point it out in the comments so we can monitor how this story is spun, both by CRU and the BBC.
Update 13.45. Andrew Bolt has been picking through the emails and documents and, if they are all genuine, the information in them is simply astonishing.
There’s a document by CRU’s Professor Phil Jones which shows that he was so concerned by Freedom Of Information requests for raw data that he was contemplating ways to remove key information and reconstruct the data to make it fit the preferred conclusions.
There’s an email from American climate scientist Tom Wigley advising Professor Jones how to manipulate some data to emphasise warming trends.
There’s an email from Jones telling his colleagues to delete incriminatory emails.
There’s another from Jones in which he tells a colleague that he’s used the same “trick” as Michael Mann (Mr Hockey Stick) “to hide the decline”, and in yet another he calls the reported death of a climate sceptic “cheering news”.
There’s an email from Mann himself promising senior CRU staff that they can use the RealClimate website to post articles and he will ensure the censorship of any comments from sceptics challenging what they’ve written.
There’s an email from senior IPCC scientist Kevin Trenberth in which he asks, “Where the heck is global warming?…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.”
There’s an email in which CRU staff promise to blackball scientists from the IPCC report whose work doesn’t conform to their alarmist predictions: “keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !”
If the BBC’s environment correspondents are too upset to touch the story, perhaps the BBC’s Open Secrets blogger Martin Rosenbaum will do something about it. Deleting data and emails demanded by FOI requests is, after all, illegal.
Update 17.00. The BBC has reported it here. Hat tip to 1327 in the comments who points out, as does Mr Eugenides, that the potentially explosive contents of the emails and documents are not mentioned.
Update 17.30. The Guardian’s report does mention the email contents. There’s also a quote from a very angry sounding Michael Mann: “I’m hoping that the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows.”
Update 17.40. Our old friend Jo Abbess responds: “I’ve read a number of them, and there’s nothing untoward in anything. It’s all a hoax to make you think that the Science is unravelling or that the Scientists are misbehaving (aka “lying”).” She adds: “I await put-downs from the Climate Science community after the weekend.” I’m not sure they’ll wait that long to start the “put-downs”, Jo.
Update 18.30. (With a reminder of the health warning until it’s all proved to be kosher) One of the leaked emails from Michael Mann addressing the recent “What happened to global warming? article by the BBC’s Paul Hudson which caused such outrage among the econuts (emphasis added) :
From: Michael Mann
To: Stephen H Schneider
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:00:44 -0400
Cc: Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , trenbert , Michael Oppenheimer
extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.
We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what’s up here?
mike
Looks like Richard Black is considered a reliable sort by this bunch. I wonder if they’re in contact with him now, coordinating their response. (Hat tip to a guest in the comments.)
Update 19.00. The email from the IPCC’s Kevin Trenberth (mentioned above @13.45 update – follow link to Andrew Bolt to view) in which he says, “where the heck is global warming?… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we cant” comes from the same email exchange relating to Paul Hudson’s article. Trenberth seems to be backing Hudson.
Update 19.30. Reminder: “Climate ‘hockey stick’ is revived” by Richard Black.
Update 20.00. Richard Black has a round-up of Copenhagen-related news on his blog, time stamped 18.16 UK time today. No mention of the CRU documents. (Last update this evening from me.)
