Climategate: The Fallout Continues from CRU Hacking

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By Keith Johnson

So where do we stand on “climategate,” the case of the hacked emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.?

For those living in caves, or with an excessively long Thanksgiving break, the release in late November of the documents—related to more than a decade of climate-change research—has caused something of a firestorm. There’s more on all that at Climate Audit and Real Climate.

Not much news on the investigation into the hacking itself, which is being conducted by local police in the U.K. Initial reports about “Russian hackers”—the files were posted on a Russian FTP site—may well be misleading.

One avenue of investigation making the rounds now is the use of open proxies by hackers to mask their identities. Since those third-party proxies can be located anywhere, they don’t offer concrete clues into the identity of the hackers. Computer forensics could help track down their identity—or at least the Internet Protocol address where it all started.

Over the weekend, the CRU took aim at one of the issues at the heart of the spat between its researchers and independent climate scientists around the world: Access to data. The CRU reiterated that most of its climate-research data is publicly available, and that it plans to make the rest of it available when it secures permission from national meterological services which own the data and control its dissemination.

For more on the propriety of how the CRU researchers do their science, Andy Revkin at Dot Earth has a post, including some juicy input from a fellow climate researcher at East Anglia on the future of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In any event, much of the attention in recent days has focused less on the how than the what. That is, the snarky emails among climate scientists that talked about the peer-review process, blocking rivals from publishing, and the like have yielded to the rest of the documents included in the hack.

One in particular that’s drawing attention: “Harry_Read_Me,” the three-year diary of a programmer’s efforts to make sense of the CRU’s computerized databases on global temperatures. More on that here and here.

The big issue: Just how reliable is the information that is at the heart of the climate center’s conclusions about global temperature trends? The CRU, for its part, stresses that
“our conclusions correlate well to those of other scientists based on the separate data sets held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).”