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/
Sponsored IT training links:
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It’s been a rough few years.
1. I used to believe in the cant. I started checking it out because a good friend did not, even though he had no data to justify it. I set about finding data to prove the AGW theory to him.
2. I found a lot of conflicting information. I looked further. I wavered. I went back. I wavered again. A month of hard digging led me to the conclusion that it was an unsubstantiated theory at best, a hoax at worst.
3. I grew more and more frustrated an the misleading and erroneous claims of what AGW had done and would do. All the ‘would do’ scenarios were based on ‘has done’. None of the ‘has done’ scenarios was without fault, and many (like sea levels) seem outright fraudulent.
4. Frustration grows, and disbelief grows ever stronger. The more I think and talk about it, the more tenuous it all seems. If even half of what was claimed was true, the AGW theory had no legs, and yet the media were screaming ever more shrilly. Now government were really, really trying to take my money to …. well, I’m not quite sure to do what. ‘Fix’ something (as if taxing anything ever ‘fixed’ anything but treasury coffers). I had no choice, and the money would plainly NOT be used in any effective way.
5. Someone lets the cat out of the bag. All the prominent scientists who have been tirelessly investigating this area and finding ever increasing fault with the ‘science’ have been proved correct. It is true, the evidence is in. The debate is over, and the books were cooked.
6. Hopefully Copenhagen will be a cold and desolate place in December….
Only one thing left to say:
“Game over”
Has hit the Daily Mail in the UK (a tabloid) …
Hackers ‘expose global warming con’: Sceptics claim that leaked emails reveal research centre massaged temperature data.
A little googling in regard to Steven Mosher ‘s cryptic post somewhere above :
Nov. 12 1912 – The bodies of the Scott expedition were found in Antarctica .
Nov. 12 1994 – Al Gore signed the Kyoto Treaty
Also , something happened in Germany in 1933 .
Sorry , but I’m tired ,after having followed this for the last 24 hours . Hopefully , the data will prove to be as juicy as the emails .
Just posted this on RealClimate.org. We’ll see if it goes through.
Dan Basica says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
20 November 2009 at 10:54 PM
Gavin,
I give you credit for moving me firmly to the skeptic side for your ramblings on why scientists should not follow basic software development practices and the scientific method (release data, code, build environment, document procedures, etc.).
See your comment 89.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/on-replication/
How can you and your fellow alarmists now deny what the skeptics have been wailing about all along? You cheerfully claim to McIntyre and others that the code and data has been available all along (but they just couldn’t find it!), but then Phil Jones and others are doing their very best to make sure neither he nor anyone else ever get ahold of it. What am I to believe?
If I had any reason to believe you or anyone else on the alarmist side, I just lost my patience
Ctm and the rest of the crew, How are you holding up to being Slashdotted? But now I fear for the property values that all those Slashdotters have started moving in! 😉
“How did the Crowley and Bauer studies that are shown in the figure (using EB or EMIC models) get the smaller cooling magnitudes indicated there? Only by using a subset of the forcings – Crowley basically threw out the solar changes (and had a lower sensitivity model), Bauer et al. used a large aerosol effect and still needed a large deforestation warming to bring her results in line with the Mann et al. reconstruction (in fact, it was done specifically for that reason). ”
– 1105653626.txt
Eric (skeptic) (19:35:19) :
“At RC, a comment by Scott A. Mandia — 20 November 2009 @ur momisugly 2:39 PM
“I posted a few comments on WUWT but I am sure that they fell on deaf ears….”
I just posted this at RC:
“When you howling wolves realize that the meat you think you have been thrown is made of rubber, are you going to spit it out, or keep telling everybody that it tastes really good?
These files are an embarrassment just as the Briffa scandal was shown to be on CA.”
Wow, has anyone read 080214_SUNYA_draft.pdf?
What do you make of this?
I’ve been following this most of the day (thanks for killing my productivity guys).
Tentative conclusions. If this is not a hoax:
1) Yes, some of these guys were clearly conspiring to evade Freedom Of Information requirements. I don’t know if they stepped over legal lines, but if they didn’t they came close enough they would be wise to hire lawyers, and they had better not have actually destroyed data sought in those requests.
2) Yes, at least some of them were maneuvering to keep opposing views out of peer-reviewed journals and then claiming that the fact that those views were not in peer-reviewed journals made them not worthy of consideration. The obvious intellectual dishonesty of doing that doesn’t seem to have registered.
3) Yes, they (at least some of them) are acting as advocates rather than scientists. The mindset was clearly that a global warming crisis caused by CO2 was a given and that their job was to nail down the details, protect that conclusion against skeptics and convince the public, not ask scientific questions about whether or not the fundamental belief is valid.
4) Clearly, RealClimate will not allow a debate that they could lose. You don’t get an honest debate there because any effective opposing points of view are moderated out of existence, simply because they are effective.
5) The people involved in these e-mails are not a single monolith, and it would be wise for skeptics not to treat them as such.
To me the most damning things so far are (1) and (2).
The “ADAM second-order draft.pdf” document is interesting too. It pretty much lays out how they would use “climage chage” to regulate the global economy and ensure a perpetual source of funding for themselves. Basically, the entire world economy was going to be controlled by climate “scientists” using the fear of us all burning ourselves up to manage practically every aspect of life. If you control energy, you control the entire economy. Generally, the output of an economy is directly proportional to their energy consumption.
” Greg S (14:07:53) [19.11.2009]:
Probably still a crime to have hacked into CRU’s systems…”
A [root source/DRM] hack into any corrupt/corrupted/corrupting system exposing a crime is a laudable and legitimate public service with blanket immunity from prosecution and is always afforded investigative impunity?
Interesting reading about the “ADAM” project. Document: ADAM_Second_order_draft.pdf
I agree with Alec, we need to improve the signal to noise ratio in this argument. The press needs a single items to grab onto. They won’t understand the scientific arguments. The key element that we should focus on is the efforts to obstruct FOI requests. This is a felony. If these guys get indicted for obstruction, then everything else will come under scrutiny.
From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
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
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
Hi Mick,
It was good to see you again yesterday – if briefly. One particular
thing you said – and we agreed – was about the IPCC reports and
the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation
agenda driven by organisations like the WTO. So my first question
is do you have anything written or published, or know of anything
particularly on this subject, which talks about this in more detail?
My second question is that I am invovled in a working group
organising a climate justice summit in the Hague and I wondered if
you had any contacts, ngos or individuals, with whom you have
worked especially from the small island States or similar areas,
who could be invited as a voice either to help on the working group
and/or to invite to speak?
All the best,
Paul
Squidly (20:06:05),
I’ve been following the Wei Chyung Wang climate peer review fraud [alleged, I suppose], for quite a while. Haven’t heard about any resolution though.
The funny thing is that this whole “energy conservation” problem is manufactured. We could build a few dozen nuclear plants in this country and have an electricity surplus. Rates would plummet, there would be no reason to “conserve” when it came to electricity. You run the plants at maximum efficiency and keep dropping the price of the power until demand catches up with supply.
But instead we have a situation where it is impossible to build a power plant of any sort, we can not exploit domestic sources of conventional energy, we can not build nuke power and so we are held hostage to a manufactured energy problem.
Build nukes, recycle fuel.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5171206/Hadley_CRU_Files_%28FOI2009.zip
These are the legit files, I ran a virus scan on it and unarchived and all seems fine.
Glenn (17:52:08) :
…
“P.S. We agreed in Beijing that we should definitely ask Tom to be a CA”
Any thoughts on what a “CA” is? Climate Alarmist?
Co-author.
This whole episode makes me think of the following:
A mile-wide asteroid crashes into the helpless earth. But the media don’t want to believe in asteroid impacts, so they simply don’t report it as news.
The Big Ignore actually beats The Big Lie in the propaganda stakes!
From Mann to Jones,
Now why would SteveM go running to the WSJ if he discovered the problems? Surely he’d try to publish a rebuttal first.
However, if the problem was malfeasance…
DaveE.
On “realize” vs “realise”, in fact British academics will usually write “realize”. This is called “Oxford spelling” which is a legacy of that the English did spell it that way til the 1960s. English peer-reviewed journals require the use of Oxford spelling.
Paul Coppin (20:46:36) :
Glenn (17:52:08) :
…
“P.S. We agreed in Beijing that we should definitely ask Tom to be a CA”
Any thoughts on what a “CA” is? Climate Alarmist?
“Co-author.”
Party pooper. (:
I don’t suppose ANYONE is surprised at the few, and I mean VERY few, MSM news items about this.
For the most part, they are down on the “hacker”, and don’t even bother discussing any of the revelations. I was especially disgusted by the way some are quoting RC, and they’re all describing RC as some innocent “forum where climate scientists gather”, as if it was anything other than a propaganda outlet.
Oh well. As usual, one of the most important things to happen in a long time has just happened, and the few people who even hear about it will get the backward spin.
In A.D. 2009…
Socialism was beginning
What happen?
Somebody set us up the Mann
Main screen turn on
It’s you!!
All your email are belong to us
You have no chance to survive make your time.
For me, the most damning evidence is that the players aren’t arguing minute details among themselves. The communications are about how to agree, how to stay on the same page, how to appear as a solid front. Scientists normally argue over every minute detail, they never agree completely.