AGW Fraud?

[Update at end]

From M. Simon:

 Have the AGW folks have been cooking the books? Do we have a smoking gun? No. A fire at the Colt factory. An explosion at the ammo dump. Three fish just above the keel. Abandon ship. Sauve qui peut.

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-files-hacked.html

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/11/some-verification-of-hadley-cru-files.html

This may be the most important news to date about AGW:

Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

There have already been e-mails posted proving that the AGW proponents cooked the books:

Some of the most embarrassing e-mails are attributed to Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU; Keith Briffa, his assistant; Michael E. Mann of the University of Virginia; Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona; and others. One such e-mail makes references to the famous "hockey-stick" graph published by Mann in the journal Nature:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

The emphasis in the above quote was added.

Mr. Mosher offered this summary of the rest of the e-mails that he had found:

And, you get to see somebody with the name of phil jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre. And lots lots more. including how to obstruct or evade FOIA requests. and guess who funded the collection of cores at Yamal.. and transferred money into a personal account in Russia[.] And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain.. you get to see how they “shape” the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy. [Y]ou get to see what they say about Idso and pat micheals, you get to read how they want to take us out into a dark alley, it’s stunning all very stunning. You get to watch somebody named phil jones say that John daly’s death is good news.. or words to that effect. I don’t know that its real.. But the CRU code looks real

John Daly (not to be confused with the professional golfer of the same name) is identified in one of the e-mails as a global-warming skeptic who died in January of 2004.

[Please note M. Simon's second link to his post,  which offers Some Verification Of Hadley CRU Files Hacked; it looks like these files are the real deal.]

It will take time for the "skeptics" (who thankfully were never successfully silenced by the AGWers who likened skeptics to Holocaust deniers and wanted to make AGW denial a crime against humanity) to go through all the files but what has already shown up is damning.

When scientists refuse to release their raw data, they short circuit the workings of the scientific method which looks for independent confirmation of hypotheses in order to avoid unconscious bias and the even more egregious fraud.  The AGW academia-governmental complex is an industry that has siphoned off many, many billions of dollars in grants; it has spawned an entire parasitic industry devoted to managing and minimizing our Carbon output; it has threatened to cripple the global economy and return us to pre-industrial subsistence while empowering  non-accountable bureaucrats in their attempt to gain never before imagined power over every human on the planet.  How fitting that this construct which has been seized upon by the radical environmentalist left may well turn out to have been constructed upon a fraud.   

Update: Luboš Motl links to a statement by Phil Jones confirming the provenance of the files; Luboš notes:

The conclusion looks pretty clear. These people should be put in jail as soon as possible. You know, these are not just small tricks in an academic discussion. These people have acquired millions if not billions of taxpayers' money by methods that seem to be provably fraudulent.

I concur.