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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I find it hard to believe that someone would have had the spare time to forge those messages. There are too many names, titles, addresses and phone numbers presented in too many formats. Yeah, you could write a script to get some of it done but you would have to have carefully studied their correspondence to get it right. That part of the script would take quite a while to complete, and then one would have to spend a good bit of composing the actual content (mimicking each author’s style/voice), which would also be a tough task.
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
Deliberate manipulation to get the desired result????
Be VERY wary of hacks.
TIFF, JPEG, PDF, ZIP, MS Word and several other formats have been
cracked and are very good infection vectors.
If I had to pick through this stuff, I would run XP VMware, on a Mac.
On the Mac I would log in as a non-admin user. Then log into XP
under VMware as a non-admin. Run the whole thing on a removable
disk.
Open all PDFs on a non-Adobe PDF reader. Change all the TIFFs to JPEG
and JPEG to TIFF using something like GIMP. Open all Word files with
OpenOffice and save to .odt form.
Tomcity is an ISP company located in the city of Tomsk, Siberia, Russia. Here is the result of my lookup:
mnt-routes – TOMLINE-MNT
source – RIPE # Filtered
status – ASSIGNED PA
% Note – This output has been filtered.
nic-hdl – SK3784-RIPE
tech-c – ZMOD-RIPE
person – Sergey Kazakov
address – Tomsk, Russia
country – RU
mnt-by – TOMLINE-MNT
netname – TOMCITY-NET
origin – AS25446
route – 88.204.24.0/22
inetnum – 88.204.24.0 – 88.204.31.255
phone – +7 3822 228666
descr – TOMCITY-NET route object
fax-no – +7 3822 452121
e-mail – neiks@iao.ru
admin-c – ZMOD-RIPE
role – Tomline ISP Tech role
remarks: trouble – 12/5 phone number +7 3822 228666
Is this the watergate of climate science
“…..My guess is that it is most likely genuine……”
Maybe. Is it ALL genuine though? Or is it 99% genuine with a little salt added here and there?
Almost too good to be true.. but delicious reading. I wonder if the mainstream media will run with any of it. They have run headlines on a lot less than this in the past.
If this is real, this part looks particularly damning:
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.
For those who think the defence may be: “Fake!”. Who has the time to fake 60 MBytes of probably mind-numbing daily boring stuff – and tables of data that can be verified?
No, this is huge 🙂
We may find out whether the dog really did eat the data, or whether this whole global warming scam is a dog’s breakfast 🙂
I scanned the zip file with AVG and it reported no problems. It recursively scans the contents of the archive, including contained archives.
The emails are just plain text and would not be a risk.
Hmmm how long before this is dubbed ClimateGate?
Does the person who posted that file at the Russian FTP site have the courage to come forward and identify himself? You can identify yourself to Steve, Anthony, Jeff or Lucia simply by posting a comment with your real e-mail address and asking them to contact you. The rest of us will never know who you are and they will never reveal your identity. But the provenance of this material needs to be proved.
1255496484.txt
> 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. The CERES data published in the
> August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more
> warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
>
> That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are
> tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO.
> Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO. It
> surely isn’t decadal. The PDO is already reversing with the switch to
> El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time
> since Sept 2007. see
> http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_current.ppt
>
> Kevin
>
> Michael Mann wrote:
>> 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?
>>
Hi rich, It’s mann, can you spin some BS for me, Sure no problem…
If it smells this bad it is worse than we ever imagined. I think this may be the tipping point right here, right now in this one .zip file.
Roger Knights (14:15:11) :
PS: This is a plot-twist so fantastic it couldn’t have been used in Michael Crichton’s Fear. The truth is stranger than fiction.
Roger, I have it on questionable authority that this is Michael working “en phantasmagora” to add what Sir Alfred Hitchcock describes as “a juicy piece of plot.” This might be worth hanging around for.
**********************************
From: Ben Santer
To: P.Jones
Subject: Re: CEI formal petition to derail EPA GHG endangerment finding with charge that destruction of CRU raw data undermines integrity of global temperature record
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:07:56 -0700
Dear Phil,
I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.
**********************************
Oh dear. There was not a bigger leak since Britons and Polish cracked Enigma and Americans did the same with the Japanese Purple code.
Indeed, it is funny this comes out as Steve’s work is getting serious exposure.
Regardless of the content, damning or not, hacking is illegal.
It smells a bit fishy but if true, we should see some very interesting times ahead indeed.
Ray
‘On another note, they do have a very nice building but it must be very expensive to heat in winter, and produce lots of CO2.’
Why should it be expensive to heat? It’s a greenhouse, isn’t it?!!!!!
Well I’m not too sure this is something to be overjoyed about.
Somebody who has the capability to break in and get this stuff, also has the ability to surreptitiously change things too, including corrupting data.
It may sound like a lark to some; but it is potentially extremely destructive.
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”.
Hackers are not heroes in my book; more like juvenile delinquents or worse; common vandals.
One of these days; somebody is going to get smart, and just shoot some of these computer vandals; well after reading them their Miranda rights anyway.
I would say you did the right thing here Anthony in expunging the e-mails etc. OK to be reporting what IS a news item; but no point in becoming an accessory after the fact.
Having had several years of computer design work erased irretrievably by an IT nincompoop who’se aproach to installing an unwanted upgrade to M$ Internet Explorer, was to simply reformat my entire C: hard drive; and then for good measure to also reformat my entire D: backup drive; while blowing up the motherboard in the process; I’m not at all amused by people who get their kicks crashing into someone else’s system with malice aforethought.
In my case, a single sheet of paper accidently printed out, and filed under some non-descript heading; enabled me to retrieve the important details of the final result of that three years of lost work; the result of which has so far resulted in the worldwide sales of now more than one billion of the product resulting from that research.
Concur re zip file, no virus. Also the grouping looks plausible.
I’d only just said over at CA a few hours ago, “It would be nice to use the Team objection as a reason to press for disclosure of CRU data, as Juraj V suggests.” oh heck… what a disclosure…
From: “Michael E. Mann”
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
1054757526.txt
I don’t inderstand all of it, but I do know what putative is:
–adjective
commonly regarded as such; reputed; supposed
I hope this helps.
What an Inconvenient Truth. Nothing that was unsuspected, though… This is going to be an atomic bomb that the Russians launched against Global Warming…
Ecotretas
Someone who has the file, please post it to http://wikileaks.org/
Let us see if this leak evolves legs.
I hope some of our skeptic friends will carefully read this. If any of this shows items of interest, it needs to get to Breitbart or other still-independent media so that it can foced into the public square. The data needs to be carefully preserved.
And for our AGW true believer friends: do not bother with the argument that this should not be reviewed since it came from possibly disreputable means. Lefties have never hesitated to use information gotten from gray sources in their attempts to put info in the public square.
Let us stay focused on the information, and let the chips fall where they may.
AGW promoters have for years gotten away with secrecy, self-dealing, inflammatory hyperbole, personal attacks, and non-reproducible claims. If someone in Hadley finally got a belly full and has released a large amount of data that stinks up AGW dogma, too bad.
I don’t know, this seems very convenient. I actually believe that most of the content is real, but like other posters I wonder if there might be unflattering salted entries throughout. We musn’t forget that these archives, regardless whether they appear to have been bundled as part of some FOI request or not, were hacked. Hackers prove by their hacking that they are not honest, so what guarantee do we have that they did not salt a few juicy phrases here and there?
Whoever looks deeply into this should be very, very careful about any conclusions.