Climategate

Samizdata looks at the release of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) What a difference an internet makes

It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a massive file of emails and code up on a server in Russia. If what has been posted is real then the balloon is about to go up.

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Amazing. If true.

As someone says, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Those were my first sentiments exactly (although I don't think that being glad when an opponent has dropped dead is all that surprising - I'm sure we all know that feeling), and the sentiments of practically everyone else in the anti-AGW blogosphere when they first heard about this. Now, it is looking ever more likely that it is true, all of it.

Not least because the first big response from the hackees has been to cry, not: load of made-up bollocks, but rather: stop thief! Yes, we have been hacked, and that's outrageous. The story is that we have been hacked. (Lots of people are suddenly discovering the case for intellectual property rights.) The BBC's first version of this story goes with this angle, and with pretty much nothing else. AGW scientists (good) robbed by anti-AGW fanatics (bad). But this response has not killed the story. It has only given it legs. If there's nothing to it, why be so fussed about the hacking?

Even if the mainstream media try to bury this, they can't stop us anti-AGWers from talking about it amongst ourselves, and my bet is that they will quickly abandon the attempt to ignore the content of this material, and instead make copious use - perhaps even acknowledged use, with links - of the work even now being done by all those damned bloggers. If they don't do this, they will merely look foolish. It's a different world, from the one where all the journalism was done by "journalists", and only those journalists could decide what journalism would be done.

Sure enough, the New York Times already has a report about this, and James Delingpole already has a piece up at the Telegraph blog. (Thank you Instapundit.) This won't now be buried, even if the story ends up being that a lot of trivia was hacked, and then a lot of incriminating stuff was forged and added, which is looking less and less like the story with each hour that passes.

Two particularly good bloggers on this story so far have been Bishop Hill (already quoted above) and Devil's Kitchen, the Bishop for the trawling through that he is already starting to do, and DK for the way he (among many others) is already teasing out what it all might mean...