In the eye of the storm
Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, has stepped down. He stands at the center of "Climategate" the affair of thousands of emails between climate scientists that were hacked from the computer of the renowned British research unit. Their release has triggered a heated debate about the validity of climate change research - climate deniers see the leaked emails as prove for the manipulation of data to overstate the case for human made climate change and for a vast conspiracy of the scientific community against them.
The research unit is conducting an investigation of the incident. It publishes updates about it on its homepage, amongst them a detailed explation of one of the most damaging phrases found in an email from CRU from 1999 which discussed a "trick" to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Its handling of the affair has been strongly criticized however - it apparently had been warned about the hack days before the story broke, reported RealClimate:
We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.
Yet the university initially seemed unprepared for the storm that was to follow.
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ah yes, it is U of EA's "handling of the affair" that needs to be criticized (basically the fact that thaye did not prevent the hack), not the fact that so-called scientists at this "renowned British research unit" have been manipulating data for years, threatened other scientists, falsified reports etc. It was all for a good cause - like the more recent Himalaya glacier meltdown/debacle.
BTW, may want to clean up your spelling a bit: Prove and explation...?
Comment by RACR — January 25, 2010 @ 4:34 am