CRU director admits hacked files genuine

November 20, 9:31 AMEssex County Conservative ExaminerTerry Hurlbut

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In the most serious admission yet in the developing story of the hacking of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, its director now admits that the content of the hacked files is in fact genuine and did indeed come from his organization.

Dr. Phil Jones stated in an interview with Ian Wishart of Investigate magazine that he had known about the hack for the past three or four days. He had not called the police because he had not known which files were compromised.

He further confirmed to Wishart that his organization had changed all e-mail and file-sharing passwords, and had acted so hastily that Jones himself was briefly unable to access his own e-mail account.

When asked to explain the most damaging statement attributed to him thus far, about "using Mike's nature trick...to hide the decline," Jones said this:

No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.

Jones also protested that this was an e-mail he had sent ten years ago.

In a separate blog post, Mr. Wishart quoted an e-mail in which Jones declares his intention to influence a board of peer reviewers to keep an article questioning the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) consensus from being published. The letter is from Phil Jones to Michael Mann, dated July 8, 2004:

The other paper by MM is just garbage - as you knew. De Freitas again. Pielke is also losing all credibility as well by replying to the mad Finn as well - frequently as I see it. I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is ! [sic]

Cheers

Phil

The "De Freitas" referred to is presumably Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a known AGW skeptic. For example, in May of 2009, Dr. De Freitas said this:

Predictions of future climate are usually based on global climate models. Up until now, these models have failed to consider variable energy from the Sun. The significance of this cannot be overstated as the Sun is the only source of energy to power Earth's climate, so all global climate change is directly or indirectly linked to it.

If this is a sample of Dr. De Freitas' commentary, then how Dr. Jones thought he would have sufficient grounds to deny Dr. De Freitas publication in a peer-reviewed report is far from clear.

The "Kevin" could be Kevin Trenberth of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. His name appears in about five other e-mails that also mention de Freitas' name, usually in a derogatory manner.

Dr. De Freitas is far from being the only target of the often scathing and dismissive comments in the e-mails received. Stephen McIntyre of the Climate Audit site is an object of frequent scorn.

The hacked archive is no longer available at its original source. It is, however, available at two other file-sharing services: MegaUpload and FileDropper.

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