Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang
him.
—Cardinal Richelieu
The most malicious of the assaults on climate science would be timed for maximum impact: the run-
up to the Copenhagen climate change summit of December 2009, a historic, much anticipated
committed by highly skilled computer hackers, followed by a massive public relations campaign
conducted by major players in the climate change denial movement.
The Hacking
On November 17, 2009, RealClimate was hacked by someone operating via an anonymous server
located in Turkey. At roughly 6:20 a.m. EST, the hacker had uploaded a large file, FOIA.zip, to the
site. The title was a thinly veiled allusion to the barrage of frivolous and vexatious FOIA demands
issued against the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the months preceding.
The hacker temporarily disabled our editorial access to RealClimate. Once we were able to restore
access, we found that the hacker had created a draft post clearly intended to go live shortly. It read:
“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We
hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give
some insight into the science and the people behind it. This is a limited time offer, download now.”
The e-mails highlighted were hardly “random.” While thousands of e-mails involving dozens of
climate scientists were stolen, the thieves had obviously filtered them for a few names, those of
prominent climate scientists such as Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth, Tom Wigley, Keith Briffa, Phil
Jones—and me. The twenty e-mails featured in the post had been carefully chosen to highlight single
words or phrases that, while innocent in their use, might sound damning taken out of context. The
hacker labeled each of the highlighted e-mails with a lurid title such as “IPCC scenarios not supposed
to be realistic” and “Mann: dirty laundry.” The accompanying FOIA.zip file contained a cache of
over a thousand e-mails, themselves selected from many thousands of private correspondences of
scientists from CRU dating back to 1996. The e-mails had been stolen, it turned out, from a
vulnerable CRU backup server.
While the underlying crime—the theft of proprietary materials from a major UK university—
remains unsolved and is still under investigation by UK authorities, a few things came out in the
months immediately following. The first link to the purloined information temporarily stashed on
