'New release' of climate emails
A text file included with the batch, apparently written by someone involved in the release and headed "FOIA 2011 - Background and Context", reads: "'One dollar can save a life' - the opposite must also be true. "Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels."
What appears to be a new batch of emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit has been released.
Contents include more than 5,000 emails and other documents, some relating to work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
A similar release in 2009 triggered the "ClimateGate" affair and accusations of fraud that inquiries later dismissed.
Now, as then, the release comes shortly before the annual UN climate summit.
The university has yet to comment on the document cache, which is posted on a Russian server.
A text file included with the batch, apparently written by someone involved in the release and headed "FOIA 2011 - Background and Context", reads: "'One dollar can save a life' - the opposite must also be true. "Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels."
It then picks a number of phrases from the email batch, whose senders and recipients - if the batch is genuine - include UEA's Phil Jones and Michael Mann from Penn State University in the US.
Reviews of "ClimateGate" in the UK, of the IPCC, and of Michael Mann's work by Penn State authorities, have all cleared scientists of fraud and malpractice, although recommendations were made on increasing openness.
The writer of the "FOIA 2011" file claims to have 220,000 more emails, but says he/she will not be releasing them.
Drip, drip
The first "ClimateGate" material arrived on the web almost exactly two years ago, just before the UN climate summit in Copenhagen that was scheduled to see about 140 heads of state and government deciding on a new global climate treaty.
A hacker entered a backup server at the university and downloaded a file containing administrative passwords, which were subsequently used to access a vast number of files and emails dating back to 1997.
It was clear at the time that only a small portion of the total tranche downloaded had been released. It is likely that the newly-released material was accessed during the original hack.
Three inquiries in the UK found that the CRU team had not acted fraudulently or tried to manipulate data, as they were accused of doing.
But the university accepted it needed to revise its policy for dealing with Freedom of Information requests, which it has now done.
CRU has also released all of the data it held from weather stations around the world - even some that the original owners of such data wanted kept private.
In partnership with the UK Met Office, CRU maintains one of the three most important global temperature records that have been used to demonstrate the reality of 20th Century warming.
A police investigation into the hack is still ongoing.
Follow Richard on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment