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Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released
19 11 2009
UPDATE: Response from CRU in interview with another website, see end of this post.
The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown.
UPDATED: Original image was for Met Office – corrected This image source: www.cru.uea.ac.uk
I’m currently traveling and writing this from an airport, but here is what I know so far:
An unknown person put postings on some climate skeptic websites that advertised an FTP file on a Russian FTP server, here is the message that was placed on the Air Vent today:
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
The file was large, about 61 megabytes, containing hundreds of files.
It contained data, code, and emails from Phil Jones at CRU to and from many people.
I’ve seen the file, it appears to be genuine and from CRU. Others who have seen it concur- it appears genuine. There are so many files it appears unlikely that it is a hoax. The effort would be too great.
Here is some of the emails just posted at Climate Audit on this thread:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7801#comments
I’ve redacted email addresses and direct phone numbers for the moment. The emails all have US public universities in the email addresses, making them public/FOIA actionable I believe.
[Interesting and so are the 900 comments...LOL
granny]
Well, Delaware (despite V.P. Jose Biden - our former Senator - being head of recovery programs - LOL) just had their unemployment rate go up by 1/3 of a percent... The one and only oil refinery in the state which had been in operation for over 50 years first by Getty Oil, then Tidewater and now Valero who announced it is closing all operations there and started laying off and shutting down the plant today - the same day it was announced...
Governor said he only found out last night - and said that they had previously valued the refinery’s impact on the State economy at $828 Million annually... Gee, guess Natural Resources Dept. will have to lay off several - I think they had a whole team there full time - looking for anything they could fine the plant for - (think the last fine was last week when the winds got up to 60 mph and blew our one of their flares, causing some unburnt methane and propane gas to get into the atmosphere for a couple of hours...).
This comes on the heels of one of their greatest and grandest green solar cell manufacturing plants that the State subsidized along with the Federal Gov’t. closing it’s entire operation and started selling all Chinese solar cells.
But WOW - the closed GM auto plant MAY re-open with millions of subsidies to produce (under a European manufacturer) all electric hybrid cars - Hehehe at just $85,000 base price... I have noticed that there are no lines of people waiting to sign up to buy any of them yet...
Then there is the offshore wind farm that was proposed, that they bankrupted by making them jump through 1,001 hoops, with tons of research requirements, surveys, evaluations, impact surveys, etc. - now they are talking about getting another company (with subsidies) up and running to build it - creating hundreds of jobs - uuh uuh oops the Pennsylvania manufacturer of those big blades and towers - uuh they just moved production to China... But the cost of electricity will only be just a bit more than from the nuclear or coal plants over a 30 year period (but the towers only have a 25 year maximum design life in that marine environment)...
With one of the Gov’t induced bank consolidations, Bank of America closed their credit card operation here - 1,200 jobs gone...
Hey, from what I understand, we are in better shape than most other states... Man, they must be hurtin’.
But they keep saying the recession is over... Hmmmmmm.