Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

“James F. Evans (18:21:34) :
“The scientific establishment is likely to support the CRU.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8371597.stm
Why?
Because there is a natural tendency to “circle the wagons”.
Sadly, this circling of the wagons in scientific circles probably goes on far more than most people know about.”
As a general principle, the above statement would apply. But this is CYA time, big time, and that will work around the globe to achieve exposure and some retribution.
In official circles, there are de facto rules to CYA. If subordinates have done something that is an embarrassment, you try to “sweep it under the carpet” if you can. But there is an exception, if there is a strong possibility that such an effort will fail, then you don’t do it (otherwise you go down too because of your cover up). Instead, in those cases, you hang the miscreants out to dry and say how shocked you are that they could ever have behaved in such a dastardly manner.
In this instance the powerful parties at risk are the top executives of the universities involved. They might like the problem to go away. Unfortunately the information is now so widely disseminated and there are so many competent and credible jurisdictions with a reason for getting involved and pursuing the matter that you can neither block them all nor predict the outcome. In such a situation, CYA for those top uni execs, who were not directly involved in these actions, says don’t risk yourself by getting involved in blocking. Show that you are good guys by letting openness prevail.
As an example of the jurisdictions outside the UK, the US Senate has yet to consider cap and tax legislation, but it is on the agenda. On the Republican side there are a number of staunch opponents. Once they have a chance to go through the details of this treasure trove, they are going to be using it in their opposition to cap and tax. But that does not mean they are limited to the material now in the public domain. Some of it may well provide a basis for obtaining all the related correspondence from the US institutions involved, all of which depend on federal funds. Who knows what else that will reveal, not just about the academics at those US unis but about the UK ones also.
In Australia, the government is trying to get its own version of cap and tax approved. The leader of the opposition wants to work out a deal but a large and vocal section of the opposition has gone public saying no deal. It is quite possible they will now say “A huge amount of information has been produced that suggests academic fraud may underlie the whole basis for the government’s proposed legislation. There is no way that legislation should be approved until this has all been thoroughly and impartially investigated.” Not sure the leader of the opposition has much of a rejoinder to such an obviously reasonable position. But equally, rather than acknowledge a loss, it gives him a stick to beat the government with if they try to push through the legislation.
And there are lots of other jurisdictions where some official may take it into his head to pursue an issue on tax or some other potential offence suggested by the material so far released.
I have no idea where any of that might end up. But that is equally true of the heads of the unis involved. For them, CYA says, now the genie is out of the bottle, make sure it doesn’t bite me — everyone else had best look after themselves.

My first thought was that some of the more outlandish documents contained in the archive simply happened to present on their servers, but had no real association with CRU. However, Adobe indicates the document “ADAM second-order draft.pdf” is authored by “f037”. The following e-mail in the archive is from “f037”:
1084017554.txt
From: f037 To: Aiguo Dai Subject: denial or delusion? … Aiguo’s response Date: Sat, 8 May 2004 07:59:14 +0100 Cc: , , , ,
Dear Aiguo,
You’ve done a great job in putting this together so quickly and clearly. I have a couple of additional comments to make on it, but can’t do so until Tuesday. You (we?) might also like to think of the reply being multi-authored, including Phil, Pete, Kevin, Joe and myself.
I must say that when I first read this paper a couple of weeks ago I wrote it off as so bad (so, so bad) that it didn’t even deserve a response. To pretend that the Sahel drought didn’t happen (i.e., a pure artifact of wrongful use of rainfall data) is the most astounding assertion, almost on a par with holocaust denial. Try putting that proposition to the millions of inhabitants of the Sahel in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, many of whom died as a direct consequence and whose livelihoods were devastated. Adrian Chappell may never have visited the region, but I know Clive Agnew has (many times) – and he should know better. I did my PhD research in the region in the early 1980s and I know exactly what the rainfall conditions were like and how much oridinary people suffered as a consequence. My PhD was on rainfall variability and local water supplies in Sudan and I visited and talked to many villagers in the region.
Anyway, Phil first suggested that a corrective reply was needed and I can see the value of doing so, especially with IPCC AR4 approaching. It just seems to me such a shame that such poor science is being done by some people – in this case I don’t think there is a deeper motive on the part of Chappell and Agnew than pure delusion and incompetence – and, worse, that a journal like IJC will publish it.
Thanks again for your efforts,
Mike
This is apparently Mike Kelly at CRU. Also, here is an interesting term that arises: “CRU5”

Scratch that. That is Mick Kelly. Mike Hulme?

truth has never had anything to do with the church of climate change co2 is plant food and at such small amounts 300/million compared with water vapor and methane it’s always been about stealing and control of free people slice a green and it’s red inside the fascists can’t stand the idea that state control always fails so rewrap the crap and try again al gore tear down that fake chart

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?page=39&pp=25
Phil Jones to Ben Santer on March 19, 2009:
“In my 2 slides worth at Bethesda I will be showing London’s UHI and the effect that it hasn’t got any bigger since 1900. It’s easy to do with 3 long time series. It is only one urban site (St James Park), but that is where the measurements are from. Heathrow has a bit of a UHI and it has go bigger. I’m having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I’ve complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don’t get him to back down, I won’t be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I’ll be resigning from the RMS.”
Whiner. With one urban site! But on January 1 2009, he had two:
“I’ve just submitted a paper on the UHI for London – it is 1.6 deg C for the LWC. It comes out to 2.6 deg C for night-time minimums. The BBC forecasts has the countryside 5-6 deg C cooler than city centres on recent nights. The paper shows the UHI hasn’t got any worse since 1901 (based on St James Park and Rothamsted).”
I haven’t found any paper that Phil might have got published specifically on London UHI in the last century. But there doesn’t seem to be anything in the news about the disappearance of Rothamsted.
Seriously, in this series of emails (url above) a timeline of Jones attempts to show and publish no London UHI change through the past century. I don’t believe this is a motivation separate from any other, but a plan to use it against his more global claim of global warming, likely tied to his claims about China. Seems similar to his idea of changing data on ocean temp “blips” ( see Ric Werme (19:43:43)).

” The proper way to address this sort of “data secrecy” issue, is to convince the owners/possessors of the information, that it is in the best interest of science for them to make the data available; and that to not do so without a very good reason, simply brands their published “output” as “suspect”.”
This assumes that the data-possesors are interested in ‘the best interest of science’.
Anyway, in these postmodern times, we know that there is no absolute truth. Truth is what brings the grant money in.

No reply yet to my previous comment at RealClimate.org still awaiting moderation a few hours later. So here’ another.
Dan Basica says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
21 November 2009 at 1:03 AM
Gavin,
You imply the emails released are a just a few and out of context. Ok, I’ll buy that. Then release the rest of the correspondence so we can make up our own minds on how they fit into the context of things.
Let me know when you’ve posted these so we can have a look and see that we jumped the gun on these “out of context” emails.

From the Daily MaIl article
“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.’ ”
“The science we are pushing….” Like heroin?

Will University of East Anglia’s CRU try to catch and prosecute the hackers?
The discovery phase will be very interesting. Data that has been denied to skeptics for years may finally be available.

For those of you who want a fast download, many alternate links are provided at this site:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_emails%2C_data%2C_models%2C_1996-2009

If it has only been days since the file servers were found to be compromised, how could anybody generate the huge volume of material in such a short time? Nobody can. It only goes to support the undeniable fact that all that material is real.
And for a copy of the letter I sent to Bob Ward through the editorial board (check out his denial in the guardian.co.uk which is a real joke):
Please forward this to Bob Ward re: “This climate email-hacking episode is generating more heat than light”
Dear Bob…
I hate to tell you, old boy, but your Anthropogenic Global Warming Ivory Tower has just collapsed.
And on top of that, I’d issue a retraction to your story referenced in my subject line.
Why?
Heads will roll on this one, dear chap.
Your blokes at University of East Anglia, particularly Phil Jones, and Michael Mann at our own Pennsylvania State University will be charged as felons and kicked out of science.
They have become the laughing stock of climate science.
And you know what?
You are in bed with them.
Your professional integrity is in the toilet with theirs.
Pretty funny. And pretty sad, too.
Apparently you aren’t a scientist.
And apparently you aren’t a thinking man.
Thanks for listening!
Galen Haugh

THIS ONE GOES DIRECTLY TO TUNING THE IPCC:
Neil
There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC
AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change
of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than
before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global
warming will be muted. Also we may wish to wait till there are 30 years
of satellite data, i.e until we can compute 1981-2010 normals, which
will then be globally complete for some parameters like sea surface
temperature.
Regards
David

Are the politicians turning on the scientists? The pro-global warming politicians have been hiding behind the scientists, feeding the scientists money to keep up the charade. When all is lost politically, the scraps are fed to the dogs. We are the dogs.