In case you haven’t been following the latest climatology goings on, it seems someone hacked into the Temple of Delphi University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which has been home to some of the most notorious respected climatology doomsayers on planet Earth. You can catch the latest here and here.
Basically it appears that a range of these climate doomsayers have been a bit lose with the truth, as the hackers released a range of what appear to be legitimate emails that expose a conspiracy to commit fraud on the public. Words like ‘trick’, ‘beefed up’, ‘hide the decline’ (in temperature) and ‘I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that’, don’t exactly encourage confidence in these shanksters prominent scientific prophets of doom when describing their own data samples that just don’t bloody well fit the climate prophecies! Not too mention conspiring to destroy raw data to avoid third parties being able to check your prophecies seminal scientific conclusions likely to attract significant funding and kudos.
Well anyway, now it is time for some wild speculation. I would not be in the least bit surprised if one Vladimir Putin was behind all of this. Ex-KGB strong man that relies heavily on carbon-rich energy sources could have well approved some type of covert operation to embarrass the doomsayers before the Copenhagen meeting. The hacked data after all was found on a Russian server. Weak I know, but there it is.
UPDATE
Bolt speculates that given the wealth of startling evidence against the global doomsayers, the release of the emails would have to be an inside job. Well maybe partly inside I would say. You would still need access to servers and some one that knew what data to look for. Given the extent of data, someone must have known what to look for and then used someone from the outside to help download and disseminate the information.
UPDATE II
Climate blog ‘Wattsupwiththat’ speculates also on the origins of the data:
CRU was hacked and the data stolen by skilled hackers, perhaps an individual or more insidiously some sophisticated group, such as Russian agents. An insider leaked the information to the NSM (non-mainstream media)
Which is basically what I have already said. This final explanation sounds more plausible:
A few people inside CRU possessed the archive of documents being held in reserve in case the FOI appeal decision was made in favor of Steve McIntyre. They shared it with others by putting it in an FTP directory which was on the same CPU as the external webserver, or even worse, was an on a shared drive somewhere to which the webserver had permissions to access. In other words, if you knew where to look, it was publicly available. Then, along comes our “hackers” who happened to find it, download it, and the rest is history unfolding before our eyes. So much for the cries of sophisticated hacking and victimization noted above.
I certainly though do not believe that the release of the data is some type of trick to catch the AGW opposition out. The data incriminates the CRU for deleting data subject to a FOI request, and if the data did turn out to be fake, then what would that say about the CRU and their potential involvement in a media scam? It would look rather pathetic and would undermine their credibility with the public.