On the eve of the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen, the scientific community that studies global warming has recently come under the spotlight. The reason: hundreds of emails and documents spanning exchanges between officials from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) between 1996 and 2009, have recently been hacked and posted online, as confirmed by the New York Times. According to climate change skeptics, the emails supposedly offer evidence that scientists manipulated data to match predictions of temperature changes made by computers. The scandal has already become popularly known as “Climategate” although many scientists and bloggers insist it appears to be a case of attempted political manipulation. Documents hacked The emails and documents have been posted on a Russian server, and continue to be shared on many websites and over the P2P networks. Robert Graham, a specialist in computer security, issued, on his website Errata Security, a few assumptions about the hacker: The data is oddly specific. Only Phil Jones e-mails were copied, and a lot of the data that was hacked is specific to certain climate controversies. If it was not an insider, it was certainly somebody familiar with the central debate about reproducibility of climate reconstructions. The fact that they posted the data to an anonymous FTP site in Russia also points to somebody who is active in the hacking community. This narrows things down. I suspect that at the end of the data, they'll find some sort of computer administrator working for CRU. The CRU quickly acknowledged the theft and the authenticity of documents, through the voice of its director Phil Jones, one of the main participants in the scandal. “Mike's Nature trick” The climate change skeptics have seized on Climategate as evidence that there is room for doubt about the reality of global warming. Several blogs and news websites have linked to the “suspicious” emails. An email from Phil Jones got the full treatment on several blogs and news websites for mentioning something called “Mike's Nature trick” that refers to a “trick” used by Michael Mann to “mask a decline” (instead of an expected rise) in temperature. “Did they invent the numbers?” asks Sophie Verney-Caillat on Rue89.com [fr]. Skeptics have their answer. Jean S, on the website ClimateAudit, shows graphs from several different sources that help illustrate claims of data manipulation. A coordinated manipulation Lubos Motl Pilsen, who describes himself as a “conservative physicist” on his blog The Reference Frame, says he read through the files and emails thoroughly. He sees evidence that scientist not only invented data, but also manipulated stakeholders. He found a file “explaining 20 recommendations for a good propagandist”, on how to “use emotions”, the necessity to “connect alarm with ‘home’ not with ‘faraway regions’, and so on”. Additionally, he writes, “the climate scientists also synchronize their efforts to block certain papers from being published, or even eliminate a journal (Climate Research) from a de facto list of peer-reviewed journals”. This plot to discredit climate change science has been enabled by mainstream media, according to bloggers who reprimand their stance. Vincent Bénard, on his blog Objectif Liberté (Destination Freedom), describes [fr] how (french) media failed to follow-up: Par contre, il est tout à fait regrettable que les médias, et notamment les médias hexagonaux, adoptent sur ces questions, de façon quasi pavlovienne, la thèse des chercheurs du GIEC. Ils adoptent de ce fait une posture purement idéologique et oublient toutes les bases du journalisme sérieux: vérification de l'authenticité (faite par le New York Times et ses pairs anglo-américains), analyse, recoupements, et conclusions. Nos journalistes environnementaux écrivent d'abord la conclusion, puis l'habillent d'analyses à l'emporte pièce, en tenant pour acquis un seul point de vue et en dénigrant par avance toute opposition. Image from vadlo.com “Much Ado About Nothing”? UEA and CRU have refuted the charges that any of their data is false. In an article posted on the website of the university, they state that 95% of climatic data collected has been published.