Private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England have been released to the Internet which may change the terms of the global warming debate.
The hullaballoo started when somebody calling themselves FOIA posted a message to the Air Vent blog which offered a tantalizing ZIP file about climate science internals:
FOIA said:
November 17, 2009 at 9:57 pm 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. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it. This is a limited time offer, download now: http://ftp.tomcity.ru/incoming/free/FOI2009.zip
The fact that the files were hosted on a Russian server seems to have given credence to the theory that it was Russian hackers who hacked into the UEA e-mail system. But some people feel the precise collection of e-mails points to an inside source, a whistleblower.
Once people started to realize what they were dealing with, the news spread quickly to climate blogs, and then the rest of the blogosphere.
What the e-mails say
The reason the scandal concerns Digitivity is 1) the electronic nature of the hack/whistleblowing and 2) the theme of open vs. closed arena research.
Below are some brief excerpts. The full corpus is available at http://www.eastangliaemails.com/ .
The e-mails at first glance seem to reflect:
Manipulating data
“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.”
Is the world really warming?
“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.”
Deletion of documents
“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4 [IPCC]?”
Ire about critics
“Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”
Fixing the peer-review process
“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.
“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”
Desire to fix the results
“As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political; it is being selfish.” CRU Director Phil Jones
Resources
Sites covering the controversy include
- Slashdot
- Real Climate (a blog run by many of those in the e-mails)
- Climate Audit (run by Steve McIntyre, a prominent global warming critic mentioned in the emails)
- Bishop Hill blog
- The New York Times
- Some has registered the ClimateGate domain and is running a what might become a ClimateGate clearinghouse there.
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Explore related content: climate, climate change, Climate Research Unit, ClimateGate, CRU, e-mails, freedom of information, global warming, hack, politics, science, UEA, University of East Anglia, whistleblower
[...] I mentioned the East Anglia E-mails site (http://eastangliaemails.com/) in a previous post on Climategate, that site apparently doesn’t include the non-email [...]
Great Blog I love the lay out and the color scheme is it possible to get a copy of your theme?
Well, the theme isn’t quite packaged for general use at this point. I may do that at some point later.
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Great information.
Thanks. Welcome to Digitivity, and be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.