The CRU hack

Private e-mails between scientists at a major climate change research center, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England, were published on the Internet a few days ago. Here are several articles about the incident:

New York Times: Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

Christian Science Monitor: Hacked climate emails: conspiracy or tempest in a teapot?

Washington Post: In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes

For more background and perspective, I recommend two blogs that represent polar opposite views about climate science:

RealClimate, run by Dr. Gavin Schmidt. Dr. Schmidt is a climatologist who works for NASA (but the blog is not affiliated with NASA). A number of leading U.S. climatologists contribute to RealClimate.

Climate Audit, run by Steven McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining businessman with a background in mathematics. (Mirror site for high traffic situations)

Scientists at the CRU and RealClimate are major contributors to the reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC reports are said to represent the scientific establishment's consensus view on climate change. IPCC reports are used by policy makers around the world to justify major government controls and programs such as the cap and trade legislation currently being debated in the U.S. Congress.

Mr. McIntyre, on the other hand, asks skeptical questions about the "consensus" view of climate change.

Many of the "hacked" e-mails are between scientists at the CRU and RealClimate. And many of those e-mails are about Steve McIntyre and a handful of other scientists who ask inconvenient questions about the science of climate change.

A good place to begin to understand the controversy is with the famous (or infamous) hockey stick graph:

Dr. Michael Mann and two colleagues developed the original hockey stick graph. Dr. Mann is a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University and a contributor to the RealClimate blog. The graph shows that temperatures have risen dramatically in recent years (the hockey stick shape). This graph was featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC report.

Steve McIntyre began his blog in 2003 to question the data and methodology behind the hockey stick graph. He has continued to question the data and methodology of published articles on climate change. A recurring theme of the Climate Audit blog has been the reluctance of establishment scientists to release for public scrutiny the data and methodology behind their published articles.

And now we are getting to something about "the CRU hack" that I think the newspaper articles above missed. I titled this post "The CRU hack" because that is the title of the first post on RealClimate responding to this event. And the word "hack" is used in all the newspaper articles I cited above. But it is not at all clear that this event was a hack.

On his blog, Steve McIntyre writes about recently asking the CRU to release certain data under the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act. The CRU refused, citing contractual agreements that prevent disclosure. Mr. McIntyre appealed this decision. On Nov. 13, the CRU refused his appeal. Days later, "the CRU hack" was anonymously released to the public in a file titled "FOIA.zip" and accompanied by this message:

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. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

This could have been the work not of a hacker but of a whistleblower.

More thoughts here.