UPDATE: Response from CRU in interview with another website, see end of this post.
The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown.
UPDATED: Original image was for Met Office – corrected This image source: www.cru.uea.ac.uk
I’m currently traveling and writing this from an airport, but here is what I know so far:
An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today:
We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to
be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents
The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files.
It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people.
I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur- it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.
Here is some of the emails just posted at Climate Audit on this thread:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7801#comments
I’ve redacted email addresses and direct phone numbers for the moment. The emails all have US public universities in the email addresses, making them public/FOIA actionable I believe.
From: Phil Jones
To: mann@vxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Fwd: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu Jan 29 14:17:01 2004
From: Timo H‰meranta
To:
Subject: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:04:28 +0200
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal
Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found
another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.
Cheers
Phil
“It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John
Daly.Condolences may be sent to John’s email account (daly@john-daly.com)
“
Reported with great sadness
Timo H‰meranta
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Timo H‰meranta, LL.M.
Moderator, Climatesceptics
Martinlaaksontie 42 B 9
01620 Vantaa
Finland, Member State of the European Union
Moderator: timohame@yxxxxx.xxx
Private: timo.hameranta@xxxxx.xx
Home page: [1]personal.inet.fi/koti/hameranta/climate.htm
Moderator of the discussion group “Sceptical Climate Science”
[2]groups.yahoo.com/group/climatesceptics
“To dwell only on horror scenarios of the future
shows only a lack of imagination”. (Kari Enqvist)
“If the facts change, I’ll change my opinion.
What do you do, Sir” (John Maynard Keynes)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0)xxxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxx.xx.xx
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-
References
1. http://personal.inet.fi/koti/hameranta/climate.htm
2. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/climatesceptics
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-
From: Jonathan Overpeck
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: letter to Senate
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 16:49:31 -0700
Cc: Caspar M Ammann , Raymond Bradley , Keith Briffa , Tom Crowley , Malcolm Hughes , Phil Jones , mann@xxxxx.xxx, jto@xxxxx.xx.xxx, omichael@xxxxx.xxx, Tim Osborn , Kevin Trenberth , Tom Wigley
Hi all – I’m not too comfortable with this, and would rather not sign – at least not
without some real time to think it through and debate the issue. It is unprecedented and
political, and that worries me.
My vote would be that we don’t do this without a careful discussion first.
I think it would be more appropriate for the AGU or some other scientific org to do this –
e.g., in reaffirmation of the AGU statement (or whatever it’s called) on global climate
change.
Think about the next step – someone sends another letter to the Senators, then we respond,
then…
I’m not sure we want to go down this path. It would be much better for the AGU etc to do
it.
What are the precedents and outcomes of similar actions? I can imagine a special-interest
org or group doing this like all sorts of other political actions, but is it something for
scientists to do as individuals?
Just seems strange, and for that reason I’d advise against doing anything with out real
thought, and certainly a strong majority of co-authors in support.
Cheers, Peck
Dear fellow Eos co-authors,
Given the continued assault on the science of climate change by some on Capitol Hill,
Michael and I thought it would be worthwhile to send this letter to various members of
the U.S. Senate, accompanied by a copy of our Eos article.
Can we ask you to consider signing on with Michael and me (providing your preferred
title and affiliation). We would like to get this out ASAP.
Thanks in advance,
Michael M and Michael O
______________________________________________________________
Professor Michael E. Mann
Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann@xxxxxx.xxx Phone: (434) 924-7770 FAX: (434) xxx-xxxxx
http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml
Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:EOS.senate letter-final.doc (WDBN/MSWD) (00055FCF)
–
Jonathan T. Overpeck
Director, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
Professor, Department of Geosciences
Mail and Fedex Address:
Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
715 N. Park Ave. 2nd Floor
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
direct tel: +xxxx
fax: +1 520 792-8795
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/Faculty_Pages/Overpeck.J.html http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/
It appears that the proverbial Climate Science Cat is out of the bag.
Developing story – more later
UPDATE1: Steve McIntyre posted this on Climate Audit, I used a screen cap rtaher than direct link becuase CA is overloaded and slow at the moment.
UPDATE2: Response from CRU h/t to WUWT reader “Nev”
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/hadleycru-says-leaked-data-is-real.html
The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.
In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, “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.”
“Have you alerted police”
“Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken.”
Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.
“Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn’t do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.”
TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….
UPDATE3: McIntyre has posted an article by Jean S at climateaudit.org which is terribly overloaded. We have mirrored it.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/20/mikes-nature-trick/
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This file may be either highly significant, or a deliberate ruse to throw off the climate realists. There is no way of telling which it is, but the one thing we should do is to not go overboard in analyzing the material in the file. There are a lot of bright people that frequent this site and I’m sure a good fraction of them have downloaded the zip file either through the Russian server or bittorrent. Lets say that we want to allocate 1/8 of the brainpower that reads WUWT on a daily basis to a detailed analysis of this file. To determine whether any one particular person should do this, throw a coin 3 times. If 3 heads come up then dive into the file and spend most of your time on it. It you don’t get 3 heads then by all means download the file but leave it sitting on hour hard drive in case you need it. As my coin toss resulted in 3 tails I won’t be spending much time on the file aside from the 15 minutes or so already spent perusing the contents.
For those who suspect that there is too much data in this file for it to be artificially created, remember that the AGW proponents have budgets in the Billions. The file is large enough, though, to waste serious amounts of wetware time if everybody decides they have to do an in depth analysis of it. So I’m sitting this one out and I’ll leave it up to Anthony to decide how much time we should spend on this file. Whatever fraction it turns out to be it should be a power of 2 so people can determine if they’re going to be working on it or not with a simple series of coin tosses.
One concern I have is about file dates as has already been mentioned by David Thompson in that all the files in the mail folder have date 1/1/2009 00:00. This appears to be have been artificially set. Also, in the documents folder only 2 files have dates later than 1/1/2009 and a number of files have no date associated with them. Perhaps the file date on email files would potentially identify someone who leaked the data or, depending on the system the file date comes from, the hexadecimal representation of file date may be of significance.
Hi,
The zipfile contains a trojan named Win32.Agent.wsg
read about it here and what to do about it if your computer
have been infected.
Link!? Come on people, let this spead, chuck up a torrent or something
I’ve just managed to download from the originally posted site (from NZ) and get the same md5sum value as what been previously posted here.
It’s all pretty exciting, hopefully its not just some elaborate ruse where all the team members are sitting back and chuckling over their beers watching the ’skeptics’ fall over themselves with it…
In the emails there are a number of appalling comments in the emails regarding the Soon and Baliunas paper published in Climate Research in 2003. The crux of the comments seems to be the formulation of a plan or informal conspiracy to keep skeptics from publishing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Just appalling. In the future, this will be a classic study for psychologists as to what happens when people only talk to people they agree with.
#1047388489
“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
#1047390562
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”
#1051156418
“This second case gets to the crux of the matter. I suspect that deFreitas deliberately chose other referees who are members of the skeptics camp. I also suspect that he has done this on other occasions. How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that ‘anti-greenhouse’ science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on)…. deFreitas is such a poor scientist that he may simply disappear. I saw some work from his PhD, and it was awful (Pat Michaels’ PhD is at the same level).”
#1051190249
“Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work — must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.”
#1051230500
“Since the IPCC makes it quite clear that there are substantial grounds for concern about climate change, is it not partially the responsibility of climate science to make sure only satisfactorily peer-reviewed science appears in scientific publications? – and to refute any inadequately reviewed and wrong articles that do make their way through the peer review process?”
“I’m not providing the filename or sender’s name because I do not know if the documents are real or not. As others are saying, we need to be careful because these documents may be manufactured plants. However, if the one I quoted from is real, it provides possible evidence of felony tax evasion by ‘someone.’ ”
That’s from Mike Abbott, who doesn’t know what he is talking about.
It sounds very much like a felony (in the US), but the crime would not be tax evasion but conspiracy to evade the money-laundering reporting statute.
None of Abbott’s other posts have any better claim to anybody’s attention than that one, either.
Everyone else has had a go at this, so, me too, I guess. I’m in the ‘the emails are in the main genuine, but may have been altered’ camp at the moment. If they’re fake, any one of the original unaltered emails will suffice as proof. If these weren’t for some reason forthcoming, other validations might be along the lines of copying the text into Word and then changing the dictionary language to see what it gets excited about. E.g. changing it from US to Australian English will show if a native of one has edited the text of another as there are lots of specific differences. The spelling of Gaol and Jail (where the hockey team are headed) just one example.
“This is absolutely real. There is no way to fake it.”
Indeed. No one hides a lamp under a basket.
I’ve put it up on RapidShare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/309496568/FOI2009.zip.html
10 downloads only, MD5 is correct.
I have it and have started wading through docs.
This spreadsheet appears legit pdj_grant_since1990.
Created 15/5/06.
Mr Jones has certainly been on a good thing.
Nisse,
What file is infected? NIS2010 (latest pulse updates etc) finds nothing.
Neil
~ctm: Understood! Reverting to the vernacular does have its drawbacks.
However, I would imagine that, at this very moment, a number of fair-minded MSM enviro-journalists around the globe are drafting some serious copy for their publications’ upcoming production schedules.
“Behavior: Backdoor Trojan
Backdoor Trojans provide the author or hacker with remote-administration of victim machines. Backdoor Trojans can be instructed to send, receive, execute and delete files, harvest confidential data from the computer, log activity on the computer and more.
Platform: This malware is a Windows PE EXE file.
Systems Affected: Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP
”
http://www.nictasoft.com/viruslib/virus_description.php?virus_id=Backdoor.Win32.Agent.wsg
John Anderson- I too, was outraged by this John L. Daly was an E-mail Friend.
I’d E-mail Weather Tidbits from Coos Bay,Oregon,when I lived there.We remarked how similar the Climate of Hobart and Coos Bay were.Talked about boating and maritime issues,too great man but these ‘men’ aren’t
May this whole thing bring coals of fire on their heads…..
From: Timo H‰meranta
To:
Subject: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:04:28 +0200
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal
Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found
another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.
Cheers
Phi
There is no doubt about it being real.
And hey they seem to be peering into other peoples email too. Here:
From: Tim Osborn
To: “Phil Jones” ,”Keith Briffa”
Subject: Fwd: Re: McIntyre-McKitrick and Mann-Bradley-Hughes
Date: Fri, 07 Nov 2003 16:12:53 +0000
and a whole lot of emails from “Sonja.B-C”
>Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 15:58:06 +0000 >To: Steve McIntyre
and back and forth
I strongly disagree with dumping other people’s emails on the web, regardless of the topic. Anything illegal, tip off the authorities, but email should be respected as much as regular mail.
If you believe a file to be infected submit it online at VirusTotal for analysis by all major AV software at the same time.
it would be interesting to break these down and read them in chronological order. that might provide some insight as events unfold over time. also need to weed out “fluff” from actual discussion of techniques, data, etc, which could be used to invalidate any studies.
shouldn’t be too difficult to substantiate authenticity, as many of these emails involved multiple recipients, and verification is straightforward once access is obtained. Not that this will be easy…
one would think that when faced with, at best embarrassing, or at worst damning accusations, the culprits would be forced to either produce documents or be cast out.
at least “they” will be in defensive mode for a while. although the general tendency will be to simply close ranks, declare it all fiction, and attempt to wait it out, it will be difficult for them to just ignore it, especially if a major media outlet or politicians run with it.
overall, I think this is a positive development for skeptics and will be a difficult time for alarmists.
“The zipfile contains a trojan named Win32.Agent.wsg”
I detected none. What file within the zip is it?
Did you use Spybot? It is known to cause false positives of this sometimes.
I’d be careful posting these Anthony. You might be getting punked or some of the files and emails may have been tampered with.
Be cautious. I like this site. Whenever I visit it, I get a dose of common sense and reality.
Does anyone remember a WUWT item posted on 26 07 09?
“Deep Cool” – the Mole within Hadley CRU”
“As some WUWT readers may have learned from reading Climate Audit, an anonymous source deep within Hadley CRU has provided Steve McIntyre a copy of a data file he has been seeking but has had his FOI requests to Hadley seeking the same file, rebuked.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/26/deep-cool-the-mole-within-hadley-cru/
If the leaked information is genuine then might this person not be your culprit?
Just wondering.
Jimbo
Reply: The mole in that case was Phil Jones himself who left the information on an anonymous ftp server. ~ ctm
I have not read all of the posts. Maybe someone said already ….
A linguistics expert with the right software could take these emails and compare them with known emails from the main players and determine if these “hacked” emails are real or faked. Every author has a unique linguistics style that experts can detect and compare.
My heart wants this story to be true. My brain says that it is an epic hoax.
Drum roll.
ChrisinMB (20:17:09) :
“The zipfile contains a trojan named Win32.Agent.wsg”
Thats wrong. There is no trojan
Nisse
Win32.Agent.wsg is a common false positive fir virus scanners. What file is reporting it?
See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=100&newwindow=1&q=Win32.Agent.wsg+false+positive&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
We are NOT being punked. This is the real deal. Nobody would go to this effort to replicate 13 years of emails from a server.
This is part of an FOIA response that someone who is part of the FOIA process has leaked or purposely put in the public domain to ensure it is it is thoroughly aired.
Sure is a lot of stuff.