Oh Now THIS is Interesting

Oh Now THIS is Interesting

I don't follow the global warming debate as a rule - what I do follow takes up so much of my time already. However, I do try to hit the highlights (like the earlier post today.) This, however, showed up at AR15.com, so I followed it around a bit. The blog Watt's Up With That (winner of the 2008 Best Science Blog award BTW) was apparently the one of the first to break the news:

The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that Hadley Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown

I’m currently traveling and writing this from an aiprort, but here is what I know so far:

An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertsied 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.

"Hadley" is the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. Multiple sources are reporting this. UPDATE, 11/20: Actually the site hacked was the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) email server, not the Hadley Centre.

And the 61mB of information is not favorable to "climate science" in general nor the Centre and its scientists in particular.

Another climate blog, The Blackboard reports:

Steve Mosher alerted us to an interesting development: Some one dropped a link to a zipped directory of files that contain what appear to be emails between various bloggers and climate science illuminati Of course this may be some sort of scam. If so, someone spent a lot of time putting together fake email/code etc.

Here’s what SteveM wrote:

Lucia,

Found this on JeffIds site.

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/open-letter/

It contains over 1000 mails. IF TRUE …

1 mail from you and the correspondence that follows.

And, you get to see somebody with the name of phil jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre.

And lots lots more. including how to obstruct or evade FOIA requests. and guess who funded the collection of cores at Yamal.. and transferred money into a personal account in Russia

And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain..
you get to see how they “shape” the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy.

you get to see what they say about Idso and pat micheals, you
get to read how they want to take us out into a dark alley, it’s stunning all very stunning. You get to watch somebody named phil jones say that John daly’s death is good news.. or words to that effect.

I don’t know that its real..

But the CRU code looks real

Tomorrow should be an interesting day on the blogs.

Don't expect to hear anything in the legacy media about it. At least not for two or three weeks after Glenn Beck gets done with it.

As one commenter at The Blackboard put it:

Maybe they are Real Files. Then they would be Real AND fake,

UPDATE 11/20: Ed Morrisey of Hot Air now has the story.

UPDATE II: Reason is on it now.