Breaking!: Hadley Climate Research Unit Hacked; Hundreds Of Compromising Files Found? UPDATED: Confirmation-Website Was Hacked

First, about CRU, according to its website:

School of Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Science
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

The aim of CRU is to improve scientific understanding in:

» past climate history and its impact on humanity

» the course and causes of climate change during the present century

» prospects for the future

(*Corrected-previous info was of the Met Office Hadley Centre)

Watt’s Up With That is reporting that the Hadley Climate Research Unit has been hacked and “many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown”.

Here’s just one such email:

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

The full name of this miscreant can be found at the other websites I linked to.

A lot of discussion of this at Climate Audit.(Server slow).

More at the Essex county Conservative Examiner:

The University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The FTP link first appeared on a blog called The Air Vent. The blog’s owner, identified as “Jeff Id”, downloaded the file, examined it, and posted a brief summary on his blog. Another commenter, identified as “Steven Mosher,” passed the information on to Steven McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog and to another blog, The Blackboard, run by a blogger identified as “Lucia.” Most recently, blogger Anthony Watts, who runs a blog titled “Watts Up With That?” mentioned the FTP archive in his own blog.

Commentary on all the blogs involved has been brisk, except, oddly enough, at The Air Vent, where only seven comments have been received.

The FTP server is in a Russian domain and uses the anonymous FTP protocol, which does not require a pre-registered user account or password for downloading. The file is named FOI2009.zip, an apparent reference to US Public Law 89-554, 80 Stat. 383, the Freedom of Information Act.

This could turn out to be horribly inconvenient to a lot of people….if true.

Developing!

Hat tip: Jackstraw

Related:

Earlier today, Senator James Inhofe, gloating over the collapse of the Copenhagen conference told Barbra Boxer, We won, you lost, get over it:

“I proudly declare 2009 as the ‘Year of the Skeptic,’ the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard,’’ the Oklahoma Republican said.

“Until this year, any scientist, reporter or politician who dared raise even the slightest suspicion about the science behind global warming was dismissed and repeatedly mocked.’’

Inhofe recalled his own 2003 remarks in which he said much of the debate over global warming was predicated on fear rather than science.

Alarmists warned of a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, economic dislocations, droughts and mosquito-borne diseases, he said.

Inhofe also recalled his most famous comment in which he suggested that man-made global warming would turn out to be “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

“Today, I have been vindicated,’’ he said.

It’s been a long struggle to combat this hoax. If these emails are for real…this could be the end of the road for anthropogenic climate change hysteria..

Stay tuned.

Chris Horner over at NRO’s Planet Gore has picked up on this:

The Blue-Dress Moment May Have Arrived

…after a few days of scrutiny appears (to the kind of people who would know) to be legitimate.

***

If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignore. I didn’t say impossible — they’re fully vested partners in the global warming industry, because catastrophism sells. But so does scandal, and this appears to be the makings of a very big one. Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research. Then reflect that the taxpayer spends more on climate-related research than on the entire suite of AIDS programs, far beyond drug research.

UPDATE

http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/hadleycru-says-leaked-data-is-real.html

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.

Direct link to Investigate article, here. Note: Jones can not explain what he meant by “hide the decline”.

MORE at WUWT

Also MORE at Hot Air

See American Power for a complete round-up of posts.

ALSO:

We can all relax…

via Memorandum I have discovered that this is much ado about nothing.

The Lizard king has weighed in: