This is from George Mon­biot one biggest warmists.

It’s no use pre­tend­ing that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the cli­matic research unit at the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia could scarcely be more dam­ag­ing. I am now con­vinced that they are gen­uine, and I’m dis­mayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the mes­sages were obtained ille­gally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excru­ci­at­ing if made pub­lic. Yes, some of the com­ments have been taken out of con­text. But there are some mes­sages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evi­dence here of attempts to pre­vent sci­en­tific data from being released, and even to destroy mate­r­ial that was sub­ject to a free­dom of infor­ma­tion request.
Worse still, some of the emails sug­gest efforts to pre­vent the pub­li­ca­tion of work by cli­mate scep­tics, or to keep it out of a report by the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data dis­cussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

I apol­o­gise. I was too trust­ing of some of those who pro­vided the evi­dence I cham­pi­oned. I would have been a bet­ter jour­nal­ist if I had inves­ti­gated their claims more closely.

The sci­ence is cor­rupted, it is far from set­tled. What’s the rush Nick and John? Pull back now.

Even warmist Tim Flan­nery who con­fronted on Late­line with the emails of the global warm­ing con­spir­acy, con­cedes holes in the “sci­ence is set­tled” argu­ment and admits to what he never has before:

We’re deal­ing with an incom­plete under­stand­ing of the way the earth sys­tem works… When we come to the last few years when we haven’t seen a con­tin­u­a­tion of that (warm­ing) trend we don’t under­stand all of the fac­tors that cre­ate earth’s climate…We just don’t under­stand the way the whole sys­tem works… See, these peo­ple work with mod­els, com­puter mod­el­ling. So when the com­puter mod­el­ling and the real world data dis­agree you’ve got a very inter­est­ing prob­lem… Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cool­ing trend.

And on these now-admitted uncer­tain­ties we must impose mas­sive new taxes, shut entire indus­tries, hand bil­lions to the Rus­sians and Chi­nese and change the way we live?

The sci­ence isn’t settled.

As for the hack­ing expla­na­tion from the dodgy, cheat­ing sci­en­tists. How about this then for an expla­na­tion? It meets Occam’s Razor perfectly.

Charles of WUWT offers a new and inter­est­ing the­ory of the file: that the file was not “stolen”, it was “found”. See
here. Charles’ epi­thet: “Never assume mal­ice where stu­pid­ity will do”.

Here’s his scenario.

The col­la­tion of files was made by the uni­ver­sity in con­nec­tion with the FOI appeal – an appeal that they were going to thor­oughly doc­u­ment because of all the pub­lic­ity dur­ing the sum­mer. They then used the intranet server to share the file among inter­ested par­ties for the FOI review on Nov 13.

And then between Nov 13 and Nov 17, some­one came along and found this aston­ish­ing file sit­ting on the server. Sound impossible?

Read last summer’s posts on the “Mole” at CRU. Phil Jones had refused to pro­vide sta­tion data claim­ing that it was cov­ered by all sorts of con­fi­den­tial­ity agree­ments (though he couldn’t find the agree­ments and couldn’t remem­ber who they were with.

One day in late July, I dis­cov­ered that they had left sta­tion data ver­sions from 2003 and 1996 on their server – with­out web­page links but acces­si­ble all the same. They were stale ver­sions of the requested data, but this data was sup­pos­edly hugely “con­fi­den­tial”. They were just sit­ting in cyber­space wait­ing for some­one to download.

Charles hypoth­e­sizes that that’s what hap­pened here. No hacker, no mole.

This the­ory could be dis­proved one way or another by the university’s FOI depart­ment. I’m sure that some­one will ask them about their role, if any, in com­pil­ing the zip file.

Doesn’t any­one find it funny that those who posted copi­ous extracts of Nicky Hagar’s book based on really stolen emails are now leap­ing to the defense of these hap­less, cheat­ing, lying sci­en­tists by denounc­ing the release of the doc­u­ments as theft and cit­ing pri­vacy issues. There was no such defense when they pub­lished all the juicy details of Don Brash’s emails.

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