[Vision2020] "Two Year Old Turkey" More Climatic Research Unit Stolen E-mails

[Ted Moffett]

Release of climate emails - November 2011

http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/statements/CRUnov11

Tue, 22 Nov 2011

While we have had only a limited opportunity to look at this latest
post of 5,000 emails, we have no evidence of a recent breach of our
systems.

If genuine, (the sheer volume of material makes it impossible to
confirm at present that they are all genuine) these emails have the
appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails
in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption
to the imminent international climate talks.

This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy
over the science behind climate change when that science has been
vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and number of
studies – including, most recently, the Berkeley Earth Surface
Temperature group.

As in 2009, extracts from emails have been taken completely out of
context. Following the previous release of emails scientists
highlighted by the controversy have been vindicated by independent
review, and claims that their science cannot or should not be trusted
are entirely unsupported. They, the University and the wider research
community have stood by the science throughout, and continue to do so.

See this link for responses from Prof Phil Jones regarding a selection
of the stolen emails.

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Two-year old turkey

Filed under: Climate Science Reporting on climate Scientific practice skeptics—
Gavin A. Schmidt
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/gavin-schmidt/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/11/two-year-old-turkey/

The blogosphere is abuzz with the appearance of a second tranche of
the emails stolen from CRU just before thanksgiving in 2009. Our
original commentary is still available of course (CRU Hack, CRU Hack:
Context, etc.), and very little appears to be new in this batch.
Indeed, even the out-of-context quotes aren’t that exciting, and are
even less so in-context.

A couple of differences in this go around are worth noting: the hacker
was much more careful to cover their tracks in the zip file they
produced – all the file dates are artificially set to Jan 1 2011 for
instance, and they didn’t bother to hack into the RealClimate server
this time either. Hopefully they have left some trails that the police
can trace a little more successfully than they’ve been able to thus
far from the previous release.

But the timing of this release is strange. Presumably it is related to
the upcoming Durban talks, but it really doesn’t look like there is
anything worth derailing there at all. Indeed, this might even
increase interest! A second release would have been far more effective
a few weeks after the first – before the inquiries and while people
still had genuine questions. Now, it just seems a little forced, and
perhaps a symptom of the hacker’s frustration that nothing much has
come of it all and that the media and conversation has moved on.

If anyone has any questions about anything they see that seems
interesting, let us know in the comments and we’ll see if we can
provide some context. We anticipate normal service will be resumed
shortly.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett