Free Republic

E-mails and documents have been taken from the University of East Anglia. One of Britain's leading climate-research centres has had more than 1,000 files stolen from its computers and republished on the Internet. The cyber-attack is apparently aimed at damaging the reputations of prominent climate scientists. The University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich confirmed today that e-mails and documents dating from 1991 to 2009 were illegally copied and subsequently published on an anonymous Russian server. A link to the Russian server first appeared on 19 November on a relatively obscure climate-sceptic blog. The server was shut...

A folder containing documents, data and emails purportedly "hacked" from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) may be smoking gun proof of a worldwide conspiracy to exaggerate the existence, causation and threat of global warming.  And the list of apparent conspirators includes many of the world's leading climate alarmists -- the very scientists on whose work the entire anthropogenic global warming theory is based. In a Friday interview with Investigative Magazine's TGIF edition, CRU director Phillip Jones confirmed [PDF] that the incriminating documents, which have been widely disseminated online, are in fact genuine. Accordingly, whether indeed the labor of hackers, or...

8.15 PM 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…. So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the...

Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That has a breaking story about unknown hacker or persons breaking into the East Anglia Climate Research Unit's database. The over 61 megs of data "appears to be genuinue" considering the herculean task of creating emails and other sundry data of such magnitude. 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...

Controversy has exploded onto the Internet after a major global-warming advocacy center in the UK had its e-mail system hacked and the data published on line. The director of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit confirmed that the e-mails are genuine — and Australian publication Investigate and the Australian Herald-Sun report that those e-mails expose a conspiracy to hide detrimental information from the public that argues against global warming (via Watt’s Up With That): The internet is on fire this morning with confirmation computers at one of the world’s leading climate research centres were hacked, and the information...

This email may be referring to Michael Mann. He's the guy who invented the "Hocky Stick" Graph. From: Phil Jones To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000 Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. 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...

Climate Change: As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December. It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria. The collapse of the talks coupled with the decision by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put...

While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president. In 2000 and 2001, while Barack Obama served as a board member for a Chicago-based charitable foundation, he helped to fund a pioneering carbon trading exchange that is likely to fill a critical role in the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme that President Obama is now trying to push rapidly through Congress. During those two years, the Joyce Foundation gave nearly...

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

On 20 November 2009, emails and other documents, apparently originating from with the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. If real, these emails contain some quite surprising and even disappointing insights into what has been happening within the climate change scientific establishment. Worryingly this same group of scientists are very influential in terms of economic and social policy formation around the subject of climate change.As these emails are already in the public domain, I think it is important that people are able to look through them and judge for themselves. Until I am told otherwise I...

It's official: the organisers of the Copenhagen climate conference conceded last weekend that it cannot deliver a final, legally binding deal. Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the conference host, is hoping for a "political deal", followed by a legal one in 2010. The question now is how specific the political deal will be. Speaking at a meeting of Asian leaders in Singapore, Rasmussen said the Copenhagen agreement should be "precise on specific commitments and binding on countries committing to reach certain targets. We need the commitments. We need the figures. We need the action." His climate minister, Connie...

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. "People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference. "I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do...

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last...

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. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/annrep93/cru.jpg 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...

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",...

My heroine of the week is Amanda Baillieu, editor of architects’ trade journal Building Design. She noticed that when Environment Secretary Hillary Benn gave a talk at the Royal Institute of British Architects the other day on the looming peril of ManBearPig, hardly anyone bothered to turn up. In an extremely brave editorial entitled “Is Global Warming Hot Air?” she speculated that the reason may have been because even architects are getting tired of listening to hysterical drivel about impending eco-doom and the so-called “consensus” on Anthropogenic Global Warming. In fact, you’d be forgiven for not knowing there is a...

What was once the central political battleground for addressing global warming in the United States may be making a comeback. While President Obama and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill continue to focus on legislation covering greenhouse gas emissions across broad sections of the U.S. economy, a small bipartisan faction of Senate moderates is examining the idea of passing a bill that deals only with the heat-trapping emissions from power plants. "A power plant-only cap and trade could be doable on the Hill," Mark Helmke, a senior aide to Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), said today. Senate Democratic...

Mean and green: the eco campaign against everyday life Wed 18 Nov, 2009 David Attenborough has joined the ranks of the bossy greens who want to save the planet – from humanity. Jason Walsh asks if the environmental movement is winning the battle but losing the war by making ever more extreme demands Television naturalist David Attenborough recently signed-up to front a political cause. He’s not planning on replacing Declan Ganley, though. Instead, by becoming patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), Attenborough has put his sights squarely on the seething mass of humanity. The OPT opposes immigration, seeking a...

Less than half the British population still believes in Anthropogenic Global Warming, says a new survey commissioned by The Times. Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming. Even more interesting than the result, though, is the Thunderer’s appalled reaction. In a leader that might have been easily have been written...

Less than half the population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to an exclusive poll for The Times. The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen. Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8...

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

Warming: After stifling a report questioning the science behind climate change, the EPA is censoring two of its lawyers for saying the proposed solutions are also problematical. The debate isn't over. It's being suppressed. In the proud tradition of EPA whistle-blower Alan Carlin, whose leaked study blew the lid off the EPA's hyped and flawed science behind climate change, two EPA lawyers, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, have produced a Web video titled "A Huge Mistake." In it they say cap-and-trade in general and the Waxman-Markey bill in particular are the wrong answers anyway. Williams and Zabel do not deny...

'Negative feedback' at work off AntarcticaBoffins from the British Antarctic Survey say that melting of ice shelves and glaciers in Antarctica over recent decades has allowed green plants to grow, creating a massive new carbon sink which is removing the equivalent of 12.8 megatonnes of CO2 from the seas and skies each year. The BAS scientists say that during the last 50 years, melting ice has exposed an area of seawater the size of Wales (24,000 km2) which has now - as it now receives sunlight - got phytoplankton in it. According to the boffins' estimates, this new population of...

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now. This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO2 than had been previously expected.The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, letting greenhouse...

Near Mark Oldfield's desk at the California Department of Conservation sits a ream of copy paper that is more than a routine office commodity. Made in part from recycled fiber, it is a symbol of the state's green spirit, one ream among thousands backing the department's claim that it is a champion of the environment – and complies with state law requiring it to buy recycled paper. There is a dark side to those sheets of bright, white paper: the part that isn't recycled comes from trees logged in the biologically rich but endangered forests of Indonesia. Oldfield, a public...

SEA levels on Australia's eastern seaboard are rising at less than a third of the rate that the NSW government is predicting as it overhauls the state's planning laws and bans thousands of landowners from developing coastal sites. The Rees government this week warned that coastal waters would rise 40cm on 1990 levels by 2050, with potentially disastrous effects. Even yesterday Kevin Rudd warned in a speech to the Lowy Institute that 700,000 homes and businesses, valued at up to $150 billion, were at risk from the surging tide. However, if current sea-level rises continue, it would not be until...

When it comes to climate change, just have a little faith!In an unusual case in the United Kingdom, it has been ruled that climate change beliefs should be afforded the same legal protections as religious freedoms. The bizarre ruling sets a landmark legal precedent and could have broad implications both in Britain and abroad. The case began when Tim Nicholson, former head of sustainability at property firm Grainger PLC was laid off in July 2008 for his criticism of management on the basis of climate change beliefs. Mr. Nicholson, who renovated his house to be greener and refuses to fly...

We’ve had it with sexism, racism, religious prejudice – all now considered utterly unacceptable in the workplace. Will employees across UK Plc now have to start watching their tongues in case they are guilty of greenism? After yesterday’s legal landmark ruling, “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief” akin to religion. This judgment means a company must not discriminate against someone because of their deeply-held environmental convictions. So no more jokes about the office hippy at the sustainable water-cooler then. It has all come about because Tim Nicholson, 42, of...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Last year Mr Gore's venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology. The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. (snip) Mr Gore had said that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is. "Do you think there is something wrong...

Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer tried to extend an olive branch to Republicans on climate change Monday evening, extending a deadline for them to offer amendments to her global warming legislation. But even as she made new advances, Boxer (D-Calif.) vowed to continue with her controversial mark-up, with or without GOP support. “Right now it is essential we keep the process moving forward and that’s what we’ll do,” said Boxer. The seven Republicans on the committee plan to boycott a Tuesday legislative hearing about the bill unless Boxer agrees to wait for additional economic analysis of the bill....

It's Barbara Boxer's big moment on Capitol Hill, and Republicans want nothing to do with it. The California Democrat, who heads the Senate's environment committee, wants to begin marking up her long-awaited climate-change legislation on Tuesday. But Republicans are planning to boycott the meeting. Sen. James Inhofe . . . wants the Environmental Protection Agency to do more analysis of the bill, which would place mandatory limits on the emission of greenhouse gases. Boxer today urged Republicans on the committee to "come back to work" and help Democrats pass the legislation.

Former Vice President Al Gore on Saturday stressed he was "certain" the president would attend a climate change conference in Copenhagen later this year. So far, President Barack Obama has signaled he would only attend the U.N.'s summit if other heads of state did too, but Gore this weekend predicted the president would change his mind as Congress progressed further on climate change legislation. "I see the calendar, I see the unfolding of events, and I feel certain he will go," Gore told a German newspaper during an interview, adding that Congress is likely to move on cap-and-trade before the...

Driving around the Denver, Colorado metro area is a mess and giving people major headaches as they try to get around town. The biggest storm to hit Colorado in October in twelve years is leaving roads packed with snow and ice and while crews are being credited with doing a pretty good job of keeping roads cleared, the snow is falling faster than crews can clear it.Traffic for the last two days has been at a crawl and it likely won't get better until Friday when the storm moves out and sun starts to peek out again. Many areas in...

Exaggerated claims undermine drive to cut emissions, scientists warn Mark Henderson, Science Editor Exaggerated and inaccurate claims about the threat from global warming risk undermining efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and contain climate change, senior scientists have told The Times. Environmental lobbyists, politicians, researchers and journalists who distort climate science to support an agenda erode public understanding and play into the hands of sceptics, according to experts including a former government chief scientist. Excessive statements about the decline of Arctic sea ice, severe weather events and the probability of extreme warming in the next century detract from the credibility...

EL PASO, Texas -- Rain and snow fell in parts of the Borderland on Wednesday afternoon as a cold front moved in. Light snow was reported in West, Northeast and far East El Paso about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. Snowfall was also spotted in the Franklin Mountains in El Paso and the Organ Mountains near Las Cruces. The National Weather Service has issued a freeze warning for southern New Mexico and west Texas from 3 to 10 a.m. Thursday. NWS officials said some areas may be just above freezing tonight but low temperatures for Friday will likely affect more areas.

Open Letter October 20, 2009 To: President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives From: Nils-Axel Mörner, Stockholm, Sweden Mr. President, You have recently held an undersea Cabinet meeting to raise awareness of the idea that global sea level is rising and hence threatens to drown the Maldives. This proposition is not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments. Therefore, I am most surprised at your action and must protest its intended message. In 2001, when our research group found overwhelming evidence that sea level was by no means in a rising mode in the Maldives, but had remained quite stable...

Portland Civil Rights Examiner Add to favorites Examiner Bio Mike Fox: Maldives Raising Sea Level Fraud October 28, 9:55 AMPortland Civil Rights ExaminerDianna Cotter Previous Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe Subscribe Get alerts when there is a new article from the Portland Civil Rights Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use. Email Address Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use Dr. Michael Fox has a new report on the fraud that is rampant inside the "Global Climate Change" cabal. Once again he takes apart the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth. With the Copenhagen "Climate Change" meeting coming up in mere...

Ecology: The administration creates the mother of all protected habitats for a species whose numbers have increased since Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." It's our hopes for energy independence that are drowning. When filmmaker Phelim McAleer, whose documentary "Not Evil Just Wrong" takes apart the myths of global warming, got to ask Gore a question at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, McAleer brought up the nine critical errors in Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." A British court two years ago listed them and said they must be righted before the film could be shown in schools...

A controversial provision of climate-change legislation currently moving through Congress will raise the cost of fuel for U.S. businesses and consumers by $3.6 trillion from 2015 to 2050, and raise diesel fuel prices by $1.4 trillion during that span, according to a report issued Oct. 21 by two Senate Republicans. The report, from Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Christopher S. (Kit) Bond (R-Mo.), said the provision, known as "cap and trade," will increase the cost of motor fuels by 24 cents a gallon by 2020 and by 95 cents per gallon by 2050. The estimates were derived by multiplying...

Has climate change been around as long as the pyramids? It is an odd-sounding idea, because the problem is usually assumed to be a modern one, the product of a world created by the Industrial Revolution and powered by high-polluting fossil fuels. But a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia has suggested that people began altering the climate thousands of years ago, as primitive farmers burned forests and built methane-bubbling rice paddies. The practices produced enough greenhouse gases, he says, to warm the world by a degree or more. Other scientists, however, have said the idea is deeply flawed...

Environmentalism: As polls show belief in global warming is dropping, a new study suggests that dogs and cats, like people, are a plague upon the earth. They say people should have edible pets. Here, kitty, kitty. A new Pew Research Center study conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 says the number of Americans who think there's solid evidence the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades has plummeted from 71% in April 2008 to 57% today. Over the same period, there's been a comparable decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising...

Politics: Move over, John McCain and Olympia Snowe. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is fast becoming the Democrats' favorite Republican as he partners with John Kerry to push cap-and-trade through the Senate. Earlier this year, eight Republican congressmen made it possible for Waxman-Markey, the 1,400-page job- and economy-killing cap-and-trade legislation, to barely pass the House of Representatives. At the time it seemed dead on arrival in the Senate if it was brought up there this year. Once again, as with their medical plan, the Democrats seek to better the odds by putting a GOP hood ornament on a Democratic clunker....

Climate Change: As a Colorado Rockies playoff game is snowed out, scientists report that Arctic sea ice is thickening and Antarctic snow melt is the lowest in three decades. Whatever happened to global warming? Al Gore wasn't there to throw out the first snowball, er, baseball, so he might not have noticed that Saturday's playoff game between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies was snowed out — in early October. The field should have been snow-free just as the North Pole was to be ice-free this year. It seems that ice at both poles hasn't been paying attention to...

Representatives of the world's 17 biggest and most polluting nations held talks Sunday to search for a breakthrough on financing efforts to contain climate change and reduce gas emissions causing global warming. Pressure has been mounting for the United States to finalize its position before a decisive December conference in Denmark meant to cap two years of negotiations on a global climate-change treaty. "With only 50 more days to go before the final talks at Copenhagen, we have to up our game," British Environment Minister Ed Miliband said in a statement released Sunday. "Britain is determined to throw everything at...

<p>STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - An autumn stormed has dumped as much as six inches of snow in parts of northern Pennsylvania.</p> <p>The National Weather Service says between five and six inches fell in State College, which set a record for earliest snowfall on record. The previous earliest snow there was one-tenth of an inch on Oct. 18, 1901.</p>

Fossil boffins say that dense triple-canopy rainforests, home among other things to gigantic one-tonne boa constrictors, flourished millions of years ago in temperatures 3-5°C warmer than those seen today - as hot as some of the more dire global-warming projections. Just like a modern jungle. Except with bloody enormous snakes. The new fossil evidence comes from the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia, previously the location where the remains of the gigantic 40-foot Titanoboa cerrejonensis were discovered. The snake's discoverers attracted flak from global-warming worriers at the time for saying that the cold-blooded creature would only have been able to survive...

Andrew's Mailbag It's been a fascinating week for climate reporting and the BBC. On Tuesday, an astonished Jeremy Paxman was heard asking Global Warming advocate Chris Rapley on Newsnight to confirm that the Earth's temperature hasn't risen this century. (No, Rapley agreed, it hasn't. But clearly, from the amazed look on his face, nobody had ever thought to fill Paxo in on this minor detail - until now).Last week we described the hurried amendments made to a BBC News Online story about global warming, and this ran round the internet like a contagion, prompting widespread commentary on US TV -...

For years, claims that UN climate reports represent the consensus of the majority of international scientists have been mindlessly accepted and regurgitated by left-leaning policy makers and the media at large. But in the past week or so, it’s become more apparent than ever that those who’ve accused the international organization of politicizing science and manipulating data have been right all along. This latest disclosure again concerns what has become the favorite propaganda propagation tool of climate activists -- the infamous “Hockey Stick Graph.” The familiar reconstruction, which deceitfully depicts last millennium’s global temperatures as flat prior to a dramatic...