Climate change hoax: hackers obtain embarrassing emails from Hadley Centre

The Examiner reports a hacking job which should prove to be pretty embarrassing to the climate change scammers:

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.

Several commentators have expressed skepticism as to the authenticity of the archive, pointing to its lack of clear provenance and suggesting that someone was attempting to embarrass, either directly or indirectly, the dignitaries attending the upcoming climate-change conference in Copenhagen. Other commentators who have examined the e-mails in the archive conclude that the header and other information that they contain is too detailed to be a hoax. Thus far, no commentator has found anything in the e-mail headers that appears to be mistaken.

Some of the most embarrassing e-mails are attributed to Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU; Keith Briffa, his assistant; Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia; Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona; and others. One such e-mail makes references to the famous "hockey-stick" graph published by Mann in the journal Nature:

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.

The emphasis in the above quote was added.
Mr. Mosher offered this summary of the rest of the e-mails that he had found:

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. [Y]ou 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

John Daly (not to be confused with the professional golfer of the same name) is identified in one of the e-mails as a global-warming skeptic who died in January of 2004.

As embarrassing as the e-mails are, some of the documents are more embarrassing. They include a five-page PDF document titled The Rules of the Game, that appears to be a primer for propagating the AGW message to the average subject/resident of the United Kingdom. The document suggests that it is a precis of a longer document housed at the Web site of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Developing...

Update: The Russian FTP server administrator appears to have deleted the archive. The text of the link was: [This link doesn't work for me]


Activity on The Air Vent has picked up considerably since this story broke.
Further Update: Two other possessors of the file have uploaded it to two other file-sharing services: MegaUpload and FileDropper.

Further Update: A Pirate Bay torrent link is now available. [This link works!]

Also: The "72 documents" refers to 72 files and folders at the top level of a directory called "documents." In fact, reliable counts indicate at least 3485 documents present, not counting the e-mails.

Update:

The Hadley CRU director admits the emails seem to be genuine:

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight ..."It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails."…

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

More information from the Herald Sun.

Update: At 19:00, RealClimate, the now infamous site mentioned in the leaked emails, has now issued a rebuttal, indicating that the hacked emails might have been "edited"! Nice try, but the cat's out of the bag!

They've asked the police to investigate the leaks, nonetheless.

Update 21/11/2009:

Michael Mann, who was featured in many of the climategate emails, said "I'm simply not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping that the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."

Mann is famous for the "hockey stick" graph that represents human made carbon-dioxide emissions versus global average temperature. The leaked emails which instructed his correspondants to delete emails could incriminate Mann for deleting government-owned information.

He might also be guilty of thwarting FOI requests - directly or indirectly.