Climate Research Center Hacked
Posted by VickyC on November 20th, 2009
So there is a lot of big news on the internet today – and this has nothing to do with Twilight… There is a huge conspiracy theory brewing regarding the subject of climate change… The top institute for climate change at a East Anglia University in England had a whole climate-friendly boat load of it’s emails and sensitive documents posted on the web. The news broke last night and apparently the scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) were aware of the security issue 3-4 days ago. Last night the data that was stolen was posted on the internet because apparently “the science is too important to be kept a secret”. A 61MB ZIP file containing the data was uploaded last night onto a Russian server – which is said to contain 1079 emails and 72 documents – quite a lot of stuff! The contents are allegedly supposed to show that climate change is nothing but a bunch of fiddled numbers by world class scientists. I have not attempted to download it.. What if it’s a virus? I don’t need my computer being fried thanks!
However, there are a few ways to look at this situation. Either it’s completely real, completely fake, or a bit of both. I’m going to copy a few bits of the emails that can be found all over the internet, and you can decide for yourself what you think about the situation.
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXXDear 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 JonesClimatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich
“Mike’s Nature trick”??… Do you mean lying about results and spinning the numbers to promote your giant lie about climate change?! Also “hide the decline”. WOW!!! This is some pretty heavy stuff, and super incriminating!!!
And the next email.. If it actually is real, then it just goes to show that these people don’t have much common sense – who leaves such sensitive emails lying around. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008Mike,
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.
I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
More examples of this are ALL over the web. I’ll list a few sites at the bottom if you’re interested in doing some further reading – on a Friday night(!!!) What also is very interesting is the fact that realclimate.org has posted on it’s website that having their emails posted all over the internet is a great way for people to see how “scientists actually interact”… Yeah OK! Telling them to delete their emails is normal? Isn’t that illegal??? And they also went on to mention that this big fuss wouldn’t be made if the documents were about the mating habits of butterflies. Perhaps not, but that’s not the situation right now is it…!!!! If butterfly sex had something to do with climate change then, yes, I think that it would still be a big deal.
It’s being reported on the BBC, but not in great detail, which is a little surprising given the repercussions of this scenario. Also, no one from the CRU is currently confirming the documents’ authenticity, although some individuals have said that they appear to be genuine.
On a side note, I noticed that in the date/time stamp in the second email, the date year and time have been inverted.On all of the copies of this specific email I could find online, the dates are all backwards… Maybe this is evidence that they have been altered or manipulated in some way? Or maybe its just a glitch somewhere… I don’t know.. What do you think?
Scientists, lying, falsified results… It makes me think of Dan Brown’s novel Deception Point! Read it if you haven’t already – it’s a fantastic novel! I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens with this though. There’s nothing saying anywhere that the documents are definitely real or falsified. So it’s a bit premature to actually start properly commenting on it.. But I think it just seems a bit too elaborate to be a hoax… If the CRU was hacked 3-4 days ago, could whoever was behind it have done all this work or was the hack just a smokescreen to get false information all over the web?
The scientist who wrote some of these emails (Prof. Phil Jones) has told the invistigative magazine TGIF that he does not know what he was referring to in the email that says “hide the decline” claiming that it was ten years ago and arguing that people don’t remember the context of what they wrote 10 years ago. Um.. if it was about something as HUGE as faslifying test results to build an argument about climate change then I’m inclined to thik that he would remember that…. But hey, that’s just me.
Check out the links below and let me know what you think!!
nytimes.com – Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics
wattsupwiththat.com – Breaking News Story: Hadley CRU has Apparently Been Hacked
newsbusters.org – Possible Conspiracy Misreport Temperatures Found
examiner.com – ClimateGate: Climate Center Server Hacked
Tags: BBC, Change, Climate, Climate Research Centre, CRU, East Anglia University, england, False, Genuine, Great Britain, Hack, Hoax, Internet, New York Times, News, Professor Phil Jones, Russia, Science, Scientists, TGIF
Hey Vicky, very nice post! In regards to the date time stamp, it could be just as simple an explanation as different e-mail clients on different workstations, or perhaps even local time stamp settings between the compromised servers. You never know who did the hacking and where exactly the e-mails were downloaded from, but it would most likely involve more than one workstation/server.
[...] 1 week ago, the news broke that Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) was hacked and all the data had been posted on the [...]
I really like your writing style, its not generic and extremly long and tedious like a lot of blog posts I read, you get to the point and I really enjoy reading your articles! Oh, and merry Christmas!