Friday, November 20, 2009

 

This Could Be Big or Nothing

There is no doubt that someone hacked a computer server at East Anglia University which is associated with Hadley Climate Research Unit (HadCRU), and released thousands of old e-mails to and from the HadCRU scientists. If the e-mails are accurate (that is, not created or enhanced by the hackers, and it's beginning to look like they're real) the Warmie true believers have been conspiring to perpetrate a fraud, one of the biggest and most pernicious scientific frauds in history. Here, via Climate Depot, are a bunch of the e-mails with appropriate highlighting and comments in a constantly updated newspaper report. Here is what Anthony Watt has to say. And here is what Warmie Central, Real Climate, admits (as its contributors attempt to start damage control). Notice that there are no comments on the Real Climate site regarding the hacking. That means they haven't allowed any there on this issue, as they usually have at least a few hundred or so. What's up with the no comment decision?

To paraphrase George C. Scott in Strangelove: Mr. President, I'm beginning to smell a big, fat Warmie rat.

UPDATE: Here is a summary of 33 issues the author has identified in the Warmie e-mails. Very well organized.

UPDATE 2: Dr. Spencer says that this is not the death knell of AGW. Hard to argue with his logic. I will note that from now on we Deniers can write that the Warmie scientists use tricks to hide the decline in global temperatures and we will be using the Warmie scientists' own words. That can't help them. If the future indeed holds the decline in temperatures the Warmies are trying to hide, they will have ever greater trouble telling us the sky is actually falling.

As a final word, the key to the extent of the damage is whether the e-mails are genuine or not. Look at the Real Climate response (which now has comments) here again, they don't say the 'trick to hide the decline' e-mail is not a real e-mail, they try to spin it into an innocuous trifle, unsuccessfully, I might add. Failing to claim something is not real is an admission that it is real. These guys should be in trouble via RICO but with our current corrupt administration the overwhelmingly likely response from the justice department will be yawns. What the individual universities do may be something else entirely. Ward Churchill type investigations seem, at the minimum, to be in order.

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Comments:
Over at Ace of Spades HQ, Ace thinks this story "has legs". At LGF, Charles says it's a "nontroversy".

Hmmm...who to believe...

All kidding aside, I think this is going to be seriously damaging to the warmies. I don't know if there's an actual smoking gun here, but some of the e-mails strongly suggest at least some measure of charlatanism and will drive at least some fence-sitters into the skeptic camp.
 
Check out PowerLine re: Uk scientists deleting emails rather than have them produced under UK's FOIA.

Haven't they learned yet that it's the COVER UP that does one in?
 
If we think Fabian like chipping away, this is a help, but not a coup. Look at the responses to the comments on Real Climate--the Warmies are clearly on defense, doing damage control. That's good. Thanks, Eric, for all your comments.

Anon, I do not have enough of my finger on the pulse of the English legal system to hazard even a guess about its reaction to what appears to be violation of law regarding what we call 'freedom of information'. Let's knock on wood (to wake Odin) and hope for the best.

In one e-mail, the Warmie says he'll delete data rather than produce it and now they claim that data is missing. You make the call.
 
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