Notes |
Intro:
On or about November 19, 2009, as yet unknown persons hacked into an email server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, U.K. The CRU is an academic department specializing in climate research and is particularly known for reconstructing past global surface temperatures on the decade to millennium time scales. The CRU is one of four organizations worldwide that have independently compiled thermometer measurements of local temperatures from around the world to reconstruct the history of average global surface temperature for the past 130 ‐ 150 years. The other groups are in the United States (NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center1 and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies2) and Japan (Japan Meteorological Agency3). From a much larger number of emails, the hackers selected and posted more than 1000 on a publicly accessible file server in Russia. The vast majority of the 1000+ emails are routine and unsuspicious. Perhaps one or two dozen of the email exchanges give the appearance of controversy, though no unethical behavior has yet been documented. Professor Phil Jones, director of the CRU, was involved in most of these email exchanges. He has temporarily stepped down as the CRU director pending the outcome of an independent investigation instigated
by the university. |
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