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y Fiona Macrae
Last updated at 1:45 PM on 21st November 2009
One of the world’s leading climate change research centres has been accused of manipulating data on global warming after thousands of private emails and documents were leaked.
Hackers targeted the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and published the files, including some personal messages, on the internet.
Among the most damaging is one which appears to suggest using a ‘trick’ to massage years of temperature data to ‘hide the decline’.
he CRU, which plays a leading role in compiling UN reports and tracks long-term
changes in temperature, has repeatedly refused to provide detailed information about the data underlying the temperature records.
It is thought that this could have triggered the theft. Climate change sceptics claim that some of the leaked messages discuss ways of manipulating data that fails to comply
with the establishment view that climate change is real and is being driven by man.
The email suggesting ‘hiding the decline’ is purported to be from Phil Jones, the unit’s
director.
He denied trying to mislead, telling the TGIF digital newspaper he had no idea what he
meant by the phrase.
‘That was an email from ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Can you remember the exact context of an email you wrote ten years ago?’
Another message has been interpreted as an attempt to control the publication of
research carried out by sceptical scientists.
One way of doing this would be by loading the panel of researchers who review papers ahead of publication with experts who are ‘on-message’.
Talk of a figure being ‘shoehorned’ into a report from the UN’s International Panel of
Climate Change appears in another of the documents.
Although the data was stored on the university’s computer system, the email exchanges also involve experts from other institutions around the world.
A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: ‘We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites.
Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center
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But Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said this and other exchanges show researchers have colluded to establish the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change.
"It is clear that some of the 'world's leading climate scientists,' as they are always described, are more dedicated to promoting the alarmist political agenda than in scientific research," said Ebell, whose group is funded in part by energy companies. "Some of the e-mails that I have read are blatant displays of personal pettiness, unethical conniving, and twisting the science to support their political position."
In one e-mail, Ben Santer, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, offered to beat up skeptic Pat Michaels, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, out of sympathy for Jones.
Neither Jones nor Santer could be reached for comment.