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

Rush Limbaugh on CRU and ClimateDepot:
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_112009/content/01125108.guest.html

My head is just spinning now. I am following the Moshpit around so many sites, almost got teary eyed when I saw his posts at RC. The floodgates are open for a limited time apparently.
In summary:
ALL the Emails and files are 100% legit.
Steve Mosher asserts that the files are/were part of the compiled emails and data folders scraped from the CRU and prepared for the FOI report.
The zip file of that data scrape obviously was not well protected.
The big question is if the CRU had granted all of the FOI requests, would all of this information have been released?

ANTHONY!!!!!!
read…
MB (13:12:10) :
I think the best thing you can do right now is get another FOI campaign started. In the emails you will find that jones and company met with the FOI people and talked to CA about them.
FOI the meeting notes and all emails related to this meeting.
The behavior around the FOI is the story.

J. Peden … Please try to rise to the occasion. Read the WUWT post on the “trick”, Mike’s Nature Trick, or check my post just above this post of yours, which I think probably gives some indication of what the “tricks” are, although I will certainly stand to be corrected. One thing I didn’t mention is that the real temp. “pad” added to the proxy tree ring-width data is probably also known as a “graft”, which even Michael Mann – who Phil Jones essentially said is one of the tricksters [~”Mike’s Nature trick”] – has himself said that no one should ever do when dealing with proxy data vs real data.
Once you get the idea that you are probably being merely/solely propagandized by the AGW material, it’s really not that hard to see what’s going on.
Well, I went over to Bishop Hill, who has put up a list of allegations collated from the mails and read through the text that is meant to support the first dozen or so. I am afraid I found it is BH who is propagandising…
1.Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation
…is half the story. S B-C was circulating allegations of fraud at CRU signing herself as affiliated to the University (she’s emeritus). Dr Jones found this ‘malicious’ and wrote to a Professor at Hull saying so. The context: Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen sent a mail with the title ‘RE: Please take note of potetially serious allegations of scientific ‘fraud’ by CRU and Met Office’
The evidence for the ‘fraud’ was McIntyre’s Yamal findings, which not even McIntyre asserts are evidence of fraud, and a long piece by Pat Michaels on the data transparency issue, published on a blog and the National Review. Sonja concedes It is beyond my expertise to assess the claims made [!]
But hey, I am going to circulate them anyway and sign myself ‘Reader Emeritus, Department of Geography, Hull University’ So we have an academic passing on claims of fraud she has not the expertise to assess under the imprimateur of the University. Seems to me at least as bad as the allegations made against some of the climate scientists. Dr Jones brought this to the attention of Sonja’s ex Professor
‘I realize Dr Boehmer-Christensen no longer works for you, but she is still using your affiliation.’ Hardly a demand that he prevent her doing so. Nothing improper here.
2 Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.
Overstated. The journal in question was ‘Climate Research’ in the wake of publication of a sceptic paper [Sally Baliunas and Willie Soon] so poor it provoked the resignation of half the board.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Baliunas#Controversy_over_the_2003_Climate_Research_paper
http://www.sgr.org.uk/climate/StormyTimes_NL28.htm
and Mann’s opinions were: There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that couldn’t get published in a reputable journal. 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?
‘Perhaps encourage’, ‘request of our colleagues’ Hardly the language of someone hellbent on destruction. Mann’s statements are consistent with ensuring the academic literature effectively screens out substandard papers, a proper concern for a senior scientist.
3. Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results
That is called ascribing a motive. In the case the wrong one, the data are truncated, but because of the well-known ‘Divergence problem’ post 1960. This is utterly standard: Bishop Hill reveals his ignorance. The data are attached to this e-mail. They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use.
4.Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.
Actually its not at all clear that it is the death that Jones describes this way, the rest of the mail is about a completely different topic. THIS IS WHY SINGLE EMAILS WITHOUT CONTEXT ARE USELESS! Whatever the intent, this is ad hominem.
5.Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request
This is the issue that gives me the most pause. But again we don’t have the full context, what we have is a request to delete mails, with no mention of the FOI. Its strong circumstantial evidence, but you’d need more to convict. Ah, but this is ‘trial by blog’
6. Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”
‘The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate’ -Gavin Schmidt.
Surely if your aim is to ‘hide’ something then publishing it in Nature is probably not a great move …
7. Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.
So what?
8. Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article
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?
Scientist speculates he might speak to journalist shock! (It seems he never did in the end). Is it me or is this the thinnest of thin stuff from the Planet thin?
9. Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t
This requires a little knowledge of climate science, apparently this rules out Bishop Hill ‘Trenberth is talking about our inability to be able to measure the net radiation balance at the top of the atmosphere to the requisite precision to be able to say on short time scales what the energy budget is doing. The observations are inadequate for that – not sure who is saying otherwise’ – Gavin Schmidt.
10 Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap
So do I. More relevantly, so does Dr Roy Spencer (he’s a bit more polite, but then he knew his words were for publication.) I have yet to hear any demands from the sceptics for Spencer’s resignation.
12 Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too.
This is really the same discussion as (2) – What to do about a journal letting substandard papers into the literature? The quote is ‘Hans von Storch is partly to blame — he encourages the
publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation
under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about — it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
A personal opinion, in a mail the writer thought was private. Big ‘So what?’ And Tom is saying that the journal publishers, not he, are unconcerned about the veracity of what is published. Naughty Bishop Hill.
13 Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels
And if we all followed through on jokey threats made in personal emails, the prisons would be full.
14 Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’
This is utterly bizarre. Mann is suggesting moving the start date of a reconstruction backwards, as it will then contain (as in ‘include’) the MWP, pretty much the opposite of the accusation. Somebody needs to improve their reading comprehension.
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…
15 Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.
Here is the mail in its entirety: ‘We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.
Well, yes they might, given the average level of scientific comprehension demonstrated by the sceptic who assembled this list.
So that’s an hour of my life I won’t get back ;-). The Jones/FOI stuff is concerning on the face of it, and I look forward to hearing the other side of the story, if we do. But that is a basically a sideshow. I feel sure that when the death knell/final nail in the coffin/smoking gun emerges from this fluff it’ll be headline news. Until then …

Robert van der Veeke said
“So who is the Thomas Andrews (the designer of the Titanic who died with the ship) of the good ship AGW? Who is going to break the news to the rest of the passengers and crew aboard the AGW? Do the officers realise that the ship is lost and that it is all a matter of time now?”
Thomas Andrews (the designer of the Titanic) = Maurice Strong (the designer of the good ship AGW)
Who is going to break the news to the rest of the passengers and crew aboard the AGW? Why that would be Stan Greenberg. “He was strategic consultant… on its multi-year campaign on global warming….. pollster Frank Luntz says “Stan Greenberg scares the hell out of me. He doesn’t just have a finger on the people’s pulse; he’s got an IV injected into it.” http://ilf.ndi.org/panelists#StanleyGreenberg
Do not worry the “officers” [bankers] have an alternate plan up their sleeve. I think they will ram Cap and Trade down our throats on either AGW or if that fails using the environment or sustainablity.

Dwight Eisenhower never was never particularly credited as being a prophet, but the words from his farewell speech of 50 years ago are eerily dead on in this current case:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
The liberal portion of the political spectrum certainly jumped on his one paragraph description “military/industrial complex” as frightening, but never paid any attention to these next three paragraphs. Gee, I wonder why?

AP story:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ikaqlFpp9jCRHWN0zNuamKXfyeMgD9C441LG0

“Do not worry the “officers” [bankers] have an alternate plan up their sleeve. I think they will ram Cap and Trade down our throats on either AGW or if that fails using the environment or sustainablity.” Gail Combs
Hey bankers,
What part of the boom/bust cycle caused by government backed fractional reserve banking sounds “sustainable?” Your banking model is the root of much of the misery in the world today. Repent!
[Repent for going off topic. ~dbs, mod.]

Paul Brassey said:
“I don’t think this has been posted yet on this thread. It’s an admission that tree ring temperature reconstructions are useless and reliance on them undermines climate models and the entire IPCC process.”
WOW what a great find. This e-mail should be forwarded to every Congressman, Senator, Member of Parliament… and other politician in the entire world. This paragraph says it all:
” The IPCC peer review process is fundamentally flawed if a lead author is able to both disregard and ignore criticisms of his own work, where that work is the critical core of the chapter. It not only destroys the credibility of the core assumptions and data, it destroys the credibility of the larger work – in this case, the IPCC summary report and the underlying technical reports. It also destroys the utility and credibility of the modeling efforts that use assumptions on the relationship of CO2 to temperature that are based on Britta’s work, which is, of course, the majority of such analyses.”
In other words the Scientists KNOW the IPCC summary report has less value than bull poop because the core assumption “Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with so much uncertainty, they have no value whatever”

OT: I have mentioned in the past how tricky politicians can be. Western politicians will have been told by their scientists and economists that their country’s future (10 to 30 years) energy demands cannot currently be economically met by wind, solar and wave alone/mostly while at the same time sticking to Copenhagen agreements.
Politicians might now begin to state that the only way to meet their Co2 limits are to use more nuclear power (which I believe was their intent all along). The UK government has said something along this line recently. Obama is also being lukewarm about Copenhagen (no pun intended). Finally other governments are now playing Copenhagen down.
Sorry for lack of references but reading comments on WUWT had burned me out!!! I am tired and goodnight.

Ron de Haan (11:59:33) :
“Hacked files of the Climatic Research Unit, Global Warming a deliberate fraud
By Dr. Tim Ball Saturday, November 21, 2009”
Thanks for posting this one Ron. It sums up my feelings about the shoddy science being used to support CAGW and how politics and science do not mix.
The powers that be will now have to find a new threat to coerce the peoples of the world into accepting world government.

I don’t think this has been posted yet on this thread. It’s an admission that tree ring temperature reconstructions are useless and reliance on them undermines climate models and the entire IPCC process
Explosive stuff. Its contained in a mail from David Schnare.
Could you explain why you find an ‘admission’ about tree-ring proxies from a lawyer to be significant? Schnare seems to believe that GW is real but the causes irrelevant:
“On global warming, is it man-made? Is it a natural cycle?” asks Mr. Schnare, senior environmental fellow at the Thomas Jefferson Institute of Public Policy, “I don’t care and nobody else should either in large measure, because the temperature is going up. As long as the temperature is going up, who cares what causes it? The question becomes, ‘Can we fix the problem?’ ”
Mr. Schnare says that geo-engineering can fix the problem much cheaper than efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
I am unable to locate his contribution to the literature on tree rings, can you help?
thanks.

strip gore and give the prize to mcintire!!!!!!!!!