LOS ANGELES (YBH.ME) Cyberthieves are mostly associated with hacking credit card numbers and identity theft. Over the weekend, the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K. got hacked for data much more arcane: private emails between scientists about climate change.
Climate Change Emails Set Off a Storm
The hacked emails were posted on the web by the thousands on a Russian file-sharing server. They’ve set off a bomb in the blogosphere and among politicians. Pending Cap and Trade legislation in the U.S, current carbon tax plans in Europe, and future plans to address man’s effect on the world climate are politically fraught policies with huge economic implications, particularly in the West. A shift in the world’s industrial structure is called for to save humanity, nothing less. Ex-Vice President Al Gore won an Academy Award for his film about the perils of ignoring global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth”.
But as far back as 1996, the hacked emails reveal, scientists with opposing views, or at least views which did not support drastic action, were mocked and even exiled by scientists holding positions of power and the majority view. One email suggested that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. climate science monitoring wing, include only their own views and exclude others. Data sharing with scientists with opposing views was also discouraged, and, it was apparently suggested, suppression of data which did not fit the climate change model be fudged or excluded.
Officials at the university, and some embarrassed email writers, assured their words were taken out of context and no nefarious plans were laid. Still, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, wrote an email to Penn State’s Michael Mann stating of opposing ideas, we “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” President Obama’s point man on climate change, Dr. John Holdren, had written an email defending Professor Mann which was among the hacked emails.
Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), long critical of global warming science, wants the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to act soon, or he will call for an investigation into climate science himself.
Meanwhile, in the U.K., Lord Lawson, an influential ex-government official and noted climate change skeptic, stated: “The integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.”
The upcoming Copenhagen climate change conference on December 7 is expected to be all the more rancorous. “Green” websites and blogs have downplayed the emails’ content and impact, but both sides agree: they want know who the hackers are.
