"you get to see ... how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy"

Long time readers will remember how the UK's Hadley Centre has refused to release their climate data, even under a Freedom of Information Act request. Well, there's a saying on the Internet, that "information wants to be free."

The Hadley Centre has been hacked by persons unknown, who posted thousands of data files to an Anonymous FTP server in Russia. Since this happened last night, the files have been uploaded to at least three file sharing systems, including Bittorrent.

This is very likely to be explosive, because in the thousands of files are email archives, including emails between the most prominent proponents of Global Warming. What I find most interesting is that people initially seem to be focusing not on the data, but on the emails. And they look like they're already finding things:

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 marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Emphasis added by the blogger at the link.

I plan on digging into this today, as I have some time on my hands. Initial thoughts:

1. Climate Science has become so politicized and contentious that there are a lot of people who very strongly dislike the chief proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming. There will be many eyeballs on the email archives over the next several days.

2. Anything that comes out over the next few days will be contents from emails. This is likely what the press will pick up on, since it will be a story they understand (the title of the post comes from the Examiner article, and deals with the politics of the science). It will be interesting indeed to see how the press plays this out.

3. The most interesting bits will take longer. Remember, Hadley didn't want to release their data. The implication is that they knew that something wasn't kosher with it, and that implies they were knowingly publishing misleading results (otherwise, why not release the data?). Someone will examine that data, and announce their results.

Stay tuned. We may have the modern Piltdown Man here.

UPDATE 20 November 2009 18:20: Welcome visitors from The Gormogons. There's a much more detailed update here.