There’s a major breaking story over at Bishop Hill, The Air Vent, and other AGW-sceptical sites. Apparently, the email archives of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have been stolen and published on a Russian server. There is some question over whether false emails could have been inserted, but if they’re genuine, some of this stuff looks like dynamite.
The CRU are the publishers of one of the main global temperature series, and are big players in the IPCC and the climate consensus. Phil Jones, who works there, was the one who famously answered a request for data by replying “why should I give it to you when you’ll only try to find something wrong with it?” They’ve been resisting a series of Freedom of Information Act requests trying to prise the raw data out of them so it can be checked. So there’s huge interest in what’s going on behind the scenes.
I don’t know if any of this stuff is genuine – or even if it is, whether they couldn’t simply deny all knowledge and get away with it – but this is bound to be immensely controversial either way. And just before Copenhagen, too. If some of the emails are faked, it could equally be disastrous for the sceptics.
Interesting times, we live in. Interesting times.
According to The Register the UEA has admitted the hacking of a server and now taken that server off line.
I have been watching this all day, and I have no way of evaluating this stuff personally.
The Devil’s Kitchen is hot on the case as is Watts up with that.
The CRU are admitting to being hacked into, and the MSN are reporting just that fact, not what, if even I can see, could be a dynamite piece of duplicous dishonesty with their figures, this could sink big Als pea green boat (remember the Owl and the Pussycat?)
once and for all.
Here’s hoping this is true and not a very elaborate spoof.
Bishop Hill is hot on it as well.
But still, the whole thing should have been sunk when they refused to release their data in case there was something wrong with it.
Well say what you like about the mail, but they are currently the only paper running with the real story here.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229740/Hackers-expose-global-warming-Claims-leaked-emails-reveal-research-centre-massaged-temperature-data.html
Spokesman Dave Britton said the two organisations had to turn down numerous Freedom of Information requests because they did not hold the copyright to the data.
‘There is a feeling we are hiding something,’ he said. ‘But we are not, we just can’t
release the data.’
He said that is was unclear whether some of the documents had been tampered
with, adding: ‘We are not concerned about the robustness of the science we are pushing but we are worried about it being interpreted out of context.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229740/Hackers-expose-global-warming-Claims-leaked-emails-reveal-research-centre-massaged-temperature-data.html#ixzz0XSeIA2W2
Isn’t the word “Pushing” very revealing here?
The political damage will probably be most telling in the long run, but there are some other bits that could have dramatic consequences in the shorter term.
“Nothing much else to say except:
1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA
requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.
2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. He said
they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are
threads on it about Australian sites.
3. CA is in dispute with IPCC (Susan Solomon and Martin Manning)
about the availability of the responses to reviewer’s at the various
stages of the AR4 drafts. They are most interested here re Ch 6 on
paleo.
Cheers
Phil”
FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act, of course. If this is saying they deliberately acted illegally to block Climate Audit’s FOIA requests, it’s a scandal they’re not going to be able to dodge. That said, they could probably get round that by saying they were ignoring them because they were invalid, or something. Unfortunately, it’s not up to a jury, but to various government functionaries to interpret. And bureaucrats often support their own. Their excuse for this one will be interesting, though…
“Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil”
The e-mails detailing the frigging with the FOIA process are certainly pretty damning and Steve McIntyre and Jeff ID and the like will have lots of fun with the data and those mails which discuss ‘tricks’ in frigging the data, but in the end, even if they can wriggle out of any consequences for this, those e-mails where they casually discuss how they planned to - and succeeded in - biasing the peer-review and journal publication process in their favour may do their cause the most lasting damage. Every scientist, in every field of science, who has ever had a paper rejected can turn round and say: “See! I told you the whole process was rigged!” And Jones and his pals will be the archetypal bad guys who epitomise the whole rotten edifice.
And anywhere, from a blog comment to the floor of Congress, when a warmist starts wittering on about ‘consensus’ and ’settled science’ and ‘peer-review’ and IPCC experts, we can immediatly point out that the reason there is less peer-reviewed sceptic science, and why the IPCC panel agree on everything is that any contrary view was purged by the party. We’ve known this all along of course, but now we have documentary proof.
Whether this will do any good in the long run I’m less sure.
Probably have to be cautious - the data could be largely genuine but salted with fake e-mail traffic.
Also, we sceptics must be careful that stuff that looks just what we wanted, may be too good to be true.
Also - sticking up for the CRU - they could be right about copyright, even if we (taxp[ayers) paid for the work. Copyright still belongs to the person who did the work. The government that paid for it, should have the right to copy and use the work for other purposes - that’s a standard government contract clause.
That said - why not publish the whole data-set? Why should the copyright owner not want the publicity? Why should the governments not want to rub the sceptics noses in the data - look, see, here it is! Exactly what we told you! Evidence!.
But they don’t. And that stinks of cover-up to support a public stance.
Yes, Pa, to me the most clearly damning part of these emails is the deliberate frustration of FOI requests: the rest is difficult for the layman to understand, or can probably be spun somehow. And it’s notable that the MSM has played it down - if it’s mentioned it at all. It’s all about dastardly hackers stealing innocent scientists’ private emails, or sceptics “claiming” that they show manipulation of data. Again. Those nutty sceptics.
Kevin’s probably right that other aspects may be more damaging in the long term, but the refusal to comply with FOI requests is right there in black and white, and couldn’t be clearer. It should be the headline.
Always assuming they’re all real, of course.
As far as the FOI is concerned, are they, as a university and supposedly a private body, open to FOI requests?
ED,
Yeah, they tried that. So McIntyre and crew FOIA’ed the details of the copyright agreements - who they were with, who signed them off, that sort of thing. It was a massive cooperative effort with about 50 people FOIA’ing five countries each. Result? A couple of emails with vaguely worded legal boilerplate that could be interpreted as confidentiality conditions and stuff all else. I think one was Spain, and they had subsequently published some of that same data themselves, and I think one might have been Iran. (I’d check, but ClimateAudit is heavily loaded at the moment.) They think there were more, but they had lost the records. No indication that they had gone back to either (or any of their other contributors) and asked if the data could be published. They had passed the data on to colleagues without asking permission, and indeed had published an early version of the entire dataset quite a few years previously, as part of a US collaborative open access programme.
They were clearly seizing on any excuse to avoid having to publish. In fact, they were seizing on a sequence of excuses one after the other, and moving on as each was knocked down.
You are right that they could have been salted with fake stuff, but if so, I would expect it to be more unambiguous. If you know the background, it’s obvious what they mean, but often they don’t exactly say it. And hence will be able to weasel out of it - in the eyes of believers, anyway. However, for the time being, and until the people who know have had time and opportunity to point to any insertions if there are any (and if they choose to), then it’s right to treat them with caution.
And in a sense, there isn’t much radically new here. We already pretty much knew they were doing this from the technical arguments; this may persuade some people who can’t follow the technical stuff.
Incidentally, the revelations seem to indicate that with the exception of Mann (who seems a bit of a barm-pot), the unwillingness to publish isn’t intended as fraud or a cover-up, but because they don’t want to provide the material for sceptics to “abuse” as they see it. They see the little tricks and manipulations they do as normal scientific practice necessary to get a genuine signal out of difficult data, but know that the sceptics won’t present it that way. Perhaps the way that butchers don’t want sausage-eaters to see the inside of real slaughterhouses. Ordinary people will misunderstand, and enemies will use it as ammunition. They have a hard enough time already with sceptics, why give them free help?
They genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing, and that their methods are justified, but know that the reality could be used against them. In science, the easiest person to fool is yourself. These people are fooling themselves, and are throwing away large parts of the scientific method that were developed to stop us doing precisely that. They know the rules, but they don’t understand the ‘why’ of them. And so they hide what they’re doing with clear consciences.
My current guess actually is that it wasn’t hackers. I think that as part of the FOIA process, while they were still arguing over whether they had to comply, they had some people go through the email archive pulling out the relevant data just in case they did have to give it up. I suspect that the people who did that may have collected up anything that they thought looked juicy. And when the appeal results came down that they didn’t, on spurious grounds, somebody decided to take the law into their own hands.
Unfortunately, if that is so, there are probably only a very few suspects to question. But I expect it also means that the emails are 100% genuine.
There has been much said on the need to prosecute the hackers for having broken the law, often from people who nevertheless welcome the information. This is largely from a consistency point of view - you can’t object if people hack the emails of people we like if we then go on and support hacking against people we don’t.
To some degree, I go along with that. But in applying such an argument, I also consider the morality of things like dissidents publishing ‘illegal’ material about oppressive regimes. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago could be said to be of dubious legality, if you want to look at it that way. The Soviet Authorities did. I would tend to say that there needs to be a mechanism to fix serious problems, and that if the system is corrupted to the point that there are no legal fixes to the intolerable, then illegal ones have to be considered. The MPs’ expense claims in the UK is a fine example.
Since I don’t know exactly what happened here, I am not going to leap to judgement, but if what I suspect is true then there were probably more legal alternatives through official channels. On the other hand, it sounds like the entire bureaucracy was behind the scientists, and whoever it was may have known the realities of the situation better than I ever could. We shall have to wait and see.
Cats,
Yes, because this work was government-funded. Government contractors are subject to FOI. And also because there are specific laws on environmental information - we’re signatories to the Aarhus convention, IIRC.
Here’s some more information on FOIA applied to government contractors.
Further to the above - Climate Audit is a bit busy at the moment, but much of the history on this topic can be obtained from Google cache: by typing in post titles and then clicking on ‘cached’ brings them up.
Some to start with:
“No Working Papers”, “No Correspondence”
“Fortress Met Office”
“Fortress CRU”
“Fortress CRU #2: Confidential Agent Ammann”
“Fortress Met Office continued”
“Another Try on the Wall”
“UK Met Office: Refuse and Delete”
“The UK Met Office Deepens The Moat”
“UK Met Office Refuses to Disclose Station Data Once Again”
“CRU Refuses Data Once Again”
“Dr Phil, Confidential Agent”
“CRU Responds”
“The CRU Gong Show: Refusing Ross McKitrick”
The last few are more relevant to the current situation.
There’s little doubt climate change is occurring but that still doesn’t excuse the world collusion at the elite level over cooking the stats, inserting hockey sticks and so on, all with a view to command and control of us, along with using the water commodity to also exert that c&c.
james, there is no doubt that climate change is occuring. The big questions are;
Is mankind contributing to climate change?
If so how and how much?
In which direction? Up or down?
Is any action man takes likely to alter the rate or direction of climate change?
If so are any actions man takes likely to improve things or make things worse?
This leak clearly demonstrates that we have not even begun to answer even the first two of these questions, let alone the next two. Until we can honestly answer these questions with a fair degree of certainty then applying massive changes to our way of life will likely cause disasterous consequences without any concomitant gain for anyone.
Cats,
You wrote: <>
Quite.
How far do you think Einstein would have got with his new Relativity Theory if, when challenged by the other scientists to publish his equations, he replied, “I won’t. They’re propietary.”
Cats, you wrote: “But still, the whole thing should have been sunk when they refused to release their data in case there was something wrong with it.”
Quite.
How far do you think Einstein would have got with his new Relativity Theory if, when challenged by the other scientists to publish his equations, he replied, “I won’t. They’re propietary.”
(The cut-and-paste didn’t work properly first time. Sorry.)
This event is getting very little coverage (at the moment) in MSM, which would seem to indicate it is for real and a severe embarrassment to the powers-that-be. So it does seem that something is being covered up.
I have wondered about the climate change scenario. Decades ago it really severely concerned me that the amount of energy the human race was using must have some reaction on the planet.
But when I saw the professional con men (politicians) getting in on the act heavy warning signals went off. Especially as that great consumer of energy (luxury) seemed to be of no consequence to them in their personal lives. Oh yes. Been here before. And yes, the green taxes, and all this rubbish that UK citizens have to do with their rubbish, and the whole PC scene.
I am certain they will try and spin this exposure into a faintly obscene and “beyond the pale”, unintelligent diversion from the true issues facing mankind.
Congratulations for your efforts in exposing deceptions!
Well so far, only the mail article and Delingpole in the Telegraph are talking about this in a Pentagon papers type way.
But the Washington Post is also on the case and has a very good article.
It also has a bunch of AGW propaganda ads from around the world all Govt sposored of course. So if we Brits thought the Bedtime Story one was over the top, try this one.
I hope the link works…
http://www.quercustv.org/spip.php?article181
Yep it does, click on the bottom one. You get that nice working class hero, and Eco Warrior, Sting singing as well! You know the one who is such a man of the people, he got ripped off by his accountant for 50 million and didn’t even notice!
Bugger! that should be Peter Gabriel.
Different twat but same headspace…
That the informant was able to upload the file to Real Climate without the owners knowledge or consent shows that he is a hacker, and a reasonably good one. That is not supposed to be possible, and scammers and spammers always try to do it, usually without success.
That he did not bother to seek consent, even though consent would readily have been given, shows the hacker mentality. If you cannot stop me, you have consented. If you really opposed me doing stuff, you should have tried harder. If you did not nail it down, it belongs to me, and if I can pry it up, it was not nailed down.
That the upload came from Turkey shows the typical paranoid hacker mentality. It is unlikely the hacker is Turkish (wrong language, and warmist alarmism is not an issue there). More likely he took over a Turkish computer. Routing stuff through Turkey is a good way to cover one’s tracks, for Turkey has recently re-aligned with jihadism, allying with Iran and Syria against the west, thus attempts by the west (crusaders) to obtain the logs of that Turkish computer have little chance. Routing through a hostile power is standard hacker behavior, and shows the standard paranoid hacker mentality. If the enemy can detect me, they will come and get me, and the state is the enemy.
Well I very much doubt consent would have been given, considering RC is part of the group the emails embarrass. And I don’t know how hard it is to hack into their blogging software. Assuming Gavin’s version is true it does indicate a hacker was involved, but that doesn’t necessarily contradict the insider hypothesis. Hacking skills are not that rare, especially amongst IT staff. It may even be that the insider passed it to hackers to distribute untraceably. We can’t tell.
But I don’t think any computers in Turkey were taken over. It was almost certainly a proxy network, which is the standard way to move around the internet without being easily traced. The last link happened to be in Turkey, but it could have been anywhere.