News: CRU is getting hacked to pieces

[Zardoch]

CRU, or otherwise known as the Climate Research Unit was recently hacked a couple days ago with the hacker downloading and copying 61 MBs of files, many of which were emails by known pro-global warming scientists. What was found in these emails were scientists trying to hide data that didn't support their global warming hypothesis. It has also been confirmed that these emails are, in fact, quite real. Here's a link to the story.

Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released Watts Up With That?

Commentary on these emails

Confirmation of these emails

EDIT: Hot Air's reporting on the issue

By the way, Here's a few quotes from the emails shown within the linked stories.

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,[email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: [email protected],[email protected]

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 [email protected]
NR4 7TJ
UK

More info on 'Mikes' Nature Trick'

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.”

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

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.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

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.

Suppression of evidence:

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.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……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….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“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?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it’s a blow to the AGW lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.

I think it would appropriate to say that for global warming alarmist, the sky is really falling and when it lands, it's going to really hurt.

In other news, I just wet myself from laughing. Who knew that something I and other people have always known to be true would finally find its way into the public?

[Victoria]

...I don't get it. Does this mean there is or isn't global warming? There's too much technobabble to make sense of anything in the topic whatsoever.

[Zardoch]

Well, what it reveals is that these prominent G.W. researchers have deliberately hidden the facts from the public in their doubt and fear that it will prove their hypothesis wrong. They're quite justified in such fear too because it indeed degrades their credibility in being go-to-people for G.W. science. Their dishonesty is a great shame upon the scientific community. So in a way, the simple answer is yes, it does disprove global warming in that with these dishonest scientists altered the evidence to support their view that's based on lies. I mean, of course, some will deny that it does, but when you have such a major contributor to the global warming agenda saying such things and also showing their true worry about their own beliefs, it's a very damning thing.

[Victoria]

Oh, okay. I get it. So what you're saying is, there's actually no global warming. Although.. tbh for the longest time I thought there was, because logically with all of our aerosol and smog and crap that eventually there would be global warming. Probably not in our life time, but eventually there would be.

[Che]

There never was global warming. The Earth goes in cycles over spans of millions of years. We're coming out of an ice age and still are.

Pretty awesome that hackers did something good for once.

[OceanEyes28]

Yeah, we're in a cycle so let's continue to be the most wastful country in the world. **** using resources responsibly!

(These scientists being douchebags does not change the fact that we need to take better care of our planet)

[Che]

Yeah, we're in a cycle so let's continue to be the most wastful country in the world. **** using resources responsibly!

(These scientists being douchebags does not change the fact that we need to take better care of our planet)

You're right. We should take better care of our planet. But if that was their goal they could have just told us...

...wait, you might be on to something, actually. It's all a cover up to get people to think they need to take action, because if it wasn't endangering us RIGHT NOW, then nobody would give a shit.

Hmm...way to go scientists. Carry on.

[SOLDIER #819]

This sort of reminds me of Independence Day when Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum bring an invincible alien army to their knees with only a PowerBook. It'd be nice if the world was that simple.

[Che]

This sort of reminds me of Independence Day when Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum bring an invincible alien army to their knees with only a PowerBook. It'd be nice if the world was that simple.

That's it! We'll just give global warming a cold!

YouTube - Jeff Goldblum explains how PageRank works.

[Rocky]

Where can I buy a giant one of these to help alleviate the planet's runny nose and sore throat? And more importantly, where do I put it in at?

[Govinda]

****wits. Who actually writes that in an email? The middle classes need to be told that their children are going to be drowned etc or they will actually continue to do **** all as we blithely, unknowingly, swim into the wars that will be the worst of all: resource wars. A human is never more violent than in a battle for scarce resources. That, to me, is far more frightening than global warming, and that's what scientists are trying to help stave off. But they then prove their utter lack of common sense and WRITE IT DOWN. Christ on a crutch.

[Alpha]

I thought these emails were leaked from a few scientists arranging a response to an article by Dr Chris de Freitas of the American Geophysical Union's Journal of Geophysical Research (which argued that, over the last 50 years, the average global temperature in the lower layer of the atmosphere had risen and fallen in rough agreement with El Nino and La Nina conditions, not rising greenhouse gas emissions).

The funny thing is that these scientists have been accused of selecting evidence. Firstly, it is quite clear that these leaked emails have also been selected. The majority of scientists, global leaders, and ordinary people know that climate change is real, and that it is anthropogenic. Do you really think this would be the case if it were all a big lie?

Thousands upon thousands of scientists write about global warming. Do you really think that they are all involved in some big conspiracy?

What is made apparent in these emails is that some scientists have dubious practices based on bias and attempts to defeat challenging evidence (evidence which runs against the majority of pro-change evidence). This does not mean that the whole thing is a cover-up.

EDIT: And if anyone should be accused of bias, it is climate change deniers. When do they discuss evidence that shows that global warming is both occurring and anthropogenic? If you want to look someplace where both sides of the story are discussed, check out the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Strangely enough, both sides are debated, and the consensus arrives at anthropogenic global warming. I'm still waiting for someone to explain why this isn't the case.

EDIT 2: Here's some opinion from sources that aren't so blatantly biased, if anyone's interested.

"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."

The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."

"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."

The above is from The Guardian

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “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) and from 1961 for Keith’s 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 [http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...onstructions/]) 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, as is further research to understand why this happens.

The above is from http://www.realclimate.org/index.php.../the-cru-hack/

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. "The word 'trick' was used colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward," he said in a statement on Saturday.

This one most clearly reflects my own view:

The University of East Anglia said that information published on the internet had been selected deliberately to undermine "the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world's climate in ways that are potentially dangerous."

"The selective publication of some stolen emails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way," the university said in a statement.

The above is from Western Australia Today

[Sean]

This all sounds like a shit ton of speculation, quote cutting, and bullshit with no serious fact behind it. All of those articles report different things and all of the writers are just speculating. One article says it's been confirmed to be genuine, another says the guy says they cannot confirm what is and is not genuine yet due to the massive amounts of emails that were posted on the internet.


I think I just read 5 websites that emulate Fox News.

Wether or not global warming is real isn't something to get fired up over. Fact of the matter is certain parts of the planet are warming, and if we're affecting it or not doesn't have any affect on the fact that we should be less wasteful of our finite supply of resources.


I read an article a few years back about how the winters in some remote area became too short, and as a result some oil company that was drilling there had to pull out. They were only allowed to drill when the ground was permafrost, and when it was thawed they had to get out. Due to the shortened winters they couldn't spend enough time in the area anymore to make a profit, so they just left (under heavy pressure, I'm sure.)

Granted I read this article some 8 years ago when I was in high school and taking environmental science, so I don't really remember the specifics, but yeah...