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’ve run it through AVG as well and it comes up clean. Total files 9700 and zips within zips.
This is not to say that there isn’t something nasty lurking in there. AVG is good enough for my normal work but if someone really wants to [snip] us all up I’m sure they could find a way.
On the other hand the timing is so serendipitous that has to be suspicious in itself. Anyone with a couple of hours to spare could read Le Carre’s ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ and learn a bit about how to deflect attention from what you don’t actually want your opposite number to see. Conjurors are good at that as well.
And I’ll repeat what’s been said above: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Be warned.
On the other hand, it would be nice ……
RC has gone strangely quiet, just like how the guns stopped as Luke began his attack run on the Death Star…
if real, this seems like it could be the Russians or the Chinese trying to derail Copenhagen. the timing seems too coincidental…
What I find amusing is that if the emails are genuine then the main players in this drama will be sitting in front of their computers unable to email each other to discuss it just in case it gets hacked again.
I guess the phone lines between the UK and USA will be busy tonight.
There is no doubt that at least part of the email corpus is “real”. For just one small example, there is 1182346299.txt which has a McIntyre email in that McIntyre posted online himself http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1741 That same txt file contains a quoted email from Douglas J. Keenan which was matches an excerpt by Keenan in his Energy and Environment article (http://www.informath.org/pubs/EnE07a.pdf)
The issue is whether the rest of that email and all the others are original and have not been altered in some way. When I google for small parts of phrases from the parts allegedly written by Jones, I come up empty. It doesn’t mean much, except that his public correspondence and phrasing seems to be quite different from his private messages.
I thought Shrodinger’s cat was invisible.
A whistleblows perhapos but at the end of the day, these people have not released data as per science process. So the emails of themselves appear credible in the face of previous actions.
But all data should be treated cautiously until checked. Even leaked emails.
I’m reposting the comment I made earlier, offering a possible extenuation of the “trick” e-mail, since several subsequent commenters haven’t taken it into consideration:
==========
“Trick” might not be as damning as it seems. He might have used the word as an informal synonym for “technique,” in the same way that programmers will speak of “a neat hack,” meaning technique, not reprehensible kludge–although that’s what it sounds like to an outsider.
If the word “trick” can be found used as a synonym for technique in other e-mails [please search for that word!], this defense could be made to look credible.
Still, on the surface, it does look like something in the vein of, “We’ve got to get rid of the MWP.”
This looks fake to me. This story should never have been posted here, until it was verified. This story damages the credibility of wattsupwiththat.com.
re: Richard (16:25:45) :
WMO is the World Meteorlogical Organization.
They have a list of their annual statements here:
http://tiny.cc/9Ows9
Whether or not any e-mails have been “modified” by even the addition of a comma can, and most likely will, now be uncovered by a discovery request in a civil suit (using US terminology). All senders and recipients cannot claim to have lost the e-mails now.
By the way, is anyone surprised at this – I mean the content ?? Obviously, its
“publication” is a bombshell of a surprise, but wasn’t it pretty obvious that the hokey stick, Steig and Briffa were just the errrmmm tip of the iceberg ??
I think it’s pretty amusing that anyone here would be taken in by this stuff. In fact it’s comical. Like breathing on an ant nest – someone has you all running around and falling over each other in your eagerness to trumpet evidence of ‘the Great Global Warming Fraud’.
Wise up folks. You’re doing yourselves a disservice. You can do better than this.
Emails 1256735067 through 1256760240 have some interesting comments about Yamel and Climate Audit. Seems to be some searching question being asked here!
—–Original Message—–
From: Keiller, Donald
Sent: 02 October 2009 10:34
To: ‘k.briffa@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ‘p.jones@xxxxxxx
Subject: Yamal and paleoclimatology
Dear Professor Briffa, my apologies for contacting you directly, particularly
since I hear that you are unwell.
However the recent release of tree ring data by CRU has prompted much
discussion and indeed disquiet about the methodology and conclusions of a
number of key papers by you and co-workers.
As an environmental plant physiologist, I have followed the long debate
starting with Mann et al (1998) and through to Kaufman et al (2009).
As time has progressed I have found myself more concerned with the whole
scientific basis of dendroclimatology. In particular;
1) The appropriateness of the statistical analyses employed
2) The reliance on the same small datasets in these multiple studies
3) The concept of “teleconnection” by which certain trees respond to the
“Global Temperature Field”, rather than local climate
4) The assumption that tree ring width and density are related to temperature
in a linear manner.
Whilst I would not describe myself as an expert statistician, I do use
inferential statistics routinely for both research and teaching and find
difficulty in understanding the statistical rationale in these papers.
As a plant physiologist I can say without hesitation that points 3 and 4 do
not agree with the accepted science.
There is a saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”.
Given the scientific, political and economic importance of these papers,
further detailed explanation is urgently required.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Don Keiller.
Source – 1256760240.txt
—————————–
From: Phil Jones
To: “Mitchell, John FB (Director of Climate Science)”
Subject: Yamal response from Keith
Date: Wed Oct 28 12:26:39 2009
John,
[1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
This went up last night about 5pm. There is a lot to read at various levels. If you get
time just the top level is necessary. There is also a bit from Tim Osborn showing that
Yamal was used in 3 of the 12 millennial reconstructions used in Ch 6.
Also McIntyre had the Yamal data in Feb 2004 – although he seems to have forgotten this.
Keith succeeding in being very restrained in his response. McIntyre knew what he was
doing when he replaced some of the trees with those from another site.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jonesxxxxxxxxxxxxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
Source: 1256747199.txt
————————–
Just some highlights…
FYI the IP address from the mail header a couple posts above is legitimate. A reverse lookup says it belongs to the server ueamailgate01.uea.ac.uk, uea being of course the University of East Anglia.
Mike Jonas (16:33:15): “In the end it’s the actual climate and the actual science that matter”.
Agree, but if actual science now is partly based on tricks, then “what people have said” here has some validity. If one can nail this statements like this to the Hadley people the destruction of the climate bandwagon may occur somewhat earlier than otherwise… (If it’s true it’s criminal, isn’t it?)
Rereke Whakaaro (14:37:56) :
The real question is, “Who would gain by putting this in the public arena at this time?”
Exactly. How would Al Gore and Jim Hansen and fellow warmists profit from this?
Is it possible to run a grammar & spelling check to see if the emails are consistent for a particular author? For example, the use of the term “with-holding” supposedly written by Phil, as opposed to “withholding”.
Moderators, I suggest you redact phone numbers and email addys from posts as has been done with the original article. I’d also erase the direct ftp addy as well.
There’s likely to be big trouble with this.
No, no, no… it just cannot be true, our “favourite scientists” are talking about the recent cooling and how to “explain” this? Just take a look at the names involved, it is unbelievable, scarier than anything else in this topic:
From: Michael Mann
To: Kevin Trenberth
Cc: Tom Wigley , Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer
Kevin Trenberth wrote:
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).
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.
or here is Phil Jones about his urbanization paper which were published in 1990:
I have another paper just accepted in JGR coming out on Chinese temps
and urbanization. This will also likely cause a stir. I’ll send you a copy when
I get the proofs from AGU. Some of the paper relates to the 1990 paper
and the fraud allegation against Wei-Chyung Wang. Remind me on this in
a few weeks if you hear nothing.
Cheers
Phil
PPS Our web server has found this piece of garbage – so wrong it is unbelievable that
Tim Ball wrote a decent paper in Climate Since AD 1500. I sometimes wish I’d never
said this about the land stations in an email. Referring to Alex von Storch just
shows how up to date he is.
[2]http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3151
At 20:12 21/05/2008, Michael Mann wrote:
Roger Knights (16:44:30) :
Stop wasting your time. “Trick” has a meaning, and it is widely understaood. You cannot undermine that.
I downloaded the zip file, unpacked it, browsed a bit. I opened a .pdf file entitled “RulesOfTheGame.pdf”. Very interesting document. Most compelling is that I broke open the metadata for this file. The file date stamp is Oct. 3, 2006, the metadata says it was created Oct 14, 2005 using QuarkExpress v.6.1 (released in 2004). All properties and metadata for this file definitely appear genuine to me.
Interesting that this document describes methods of convincing the public of the “crisis”.
Excerpt:
a new way of thinking
Once we’ve eliminated the myths, there is room for some new ideas. These principles relate to some of the key ideas emerging from behaviour change modelling for sustainable development:
5. Climate change must be ‘front of mind’ before persuasion works
Currently, telling the public to take notice of climate change is as successful as selling tampons to men. People don’t realise (or remember) that climate change relates to them.
6. Use both peripheral and central processing Attracting direct attention to an issue can change attitudes, but peripheral messages can be just as effective: a tabloid snapshot of Gwyneth Paltrow at a bus stop can help change attitudes to public transport.
7. Link climate change mitigation to positive desires/aspirations Traditional marketing associates products with the aspirations of their target audience. Linking climate change mitigation to home improvement, self-improvement, green spaces or national pride are all worth investigating.
8. Use transmitters and social learning People learn through social interaction, and some people are better teachers and trendsetters than others. Targeting these people will ensure that messages seem more trustworthy and are transmitted more effectively.
9. Beware the impacts of cognitive dissonance Confronting someone with the difference between their attitude and their actions on climate change will make them more likely to change their attitude than their actions.
Jabba,
No Capn that’s wrong, if you put a cat in a box it it is not invisible. Only unobserved. When you open the box the cat may be dead or alive, but if the latter it is likely to be bloody furious at being put the in box in the first place.
Which is why elf and shufti now require full protective equipment before opening the box.
Kindest Regards
I believe I can finally use the phrase: Fraudsters!
Skeptism comes naturally to this groupl
Get a FOI request in to verify if these are real….. That way, all will be revealed.