ZZTools

I had a comment on one of my posts on the climategate email archive, saying that the messages weren't leaked, they were hacked. If you were the person that left that message, apologies - it looks as though I accidentally deleted it.

Here's my view - and this is very much my view.



I do not think that climategate was caused by hackers, or involved theft. Here's why.

The chances of teams of hackers monitoring the email to and from the CRU for 12 years are very low. During that time, the nature of the CRU servers undoubtedly changed several times, the 'hackers' would have had to gain access to each new technology and network setup, and would have had to have invested vast amounts of time in assembling a coherent storyline in the emails. How could anyone have intercepted all of that information, all the junk mail, all of the routine academic work, and then processed that into a coherent story, specially timed to coincide with a climate meeting in Copenhagen? Simply using up that amount of network bandwidth alone would have led to detection years ago.

If the hackers were supposed to have downloaded a vast amount of email and cherry picked the resulting set in a short period of time, how can one explain the more than a decade of emails which are in the archive? No University IT department would keep decades of emails on its server, and to achieve this feat, the hackers would have needed to gain access to large numbers of machines, probably many laptops, kept in different locations and used by different people. No, this too is highly improbable.

And if the 'hackers' wanted to change the course of history, the time to do that was in the 1990s, when showing the 'hide the decline' plot and the 'hockey stick' to be the frauds that they were would have stood a chance of altering major climate legislation. By the time of the Copenhagen meeting, the laws were all in place, and the majority of politicians and voters believed that CO2 taxes were vital to avoid imminent disaster.

So, no, the hacker scenario is an obvious smokescreen. Similar to the comments seen in the media about the 'trick' being an intellectual device, and 'hiding the decline' being taken out of context.

By the way, if you take two diverging quantities, and replace one with the other, then plot the result against time, it is not surprising that the original divergence has disappeared. The 'hide the decline' act was so grossly unscientific and cynically manipulative that every scientist in the world should have, like George Monbiot, called for the resignation of the scientist involved.

But as it turned out, most scientists did not read those emails, as the media did not report them. So, the climatologist strategy of saying 'nothing to worry about here - just move on' appears to be working just fine.

But returning to climategate itself. I think that the leak scenario is far more likely. With a leak the long time line is explained. An insider decided to collect some information to protect himself or herself should things get too bad, or his or her conscience become too taxed. That person was copied on a large amount of the email. That person also had access to other people's email, through loosely protected email servers over time. This was internal access within the CRU itself, not hacking.

Finally the source of the leak had the necessary experience to determine which elements of the internal CRU dialog should be released. So that person was not an IT person or an administrative member of staff, that person knew the details of the climatology in question.

If you look at the messages, it is clear that Keith Briffa is the majority recipient or a sender of the the messages. Keith Briffa does not engage in any of the 'unfortunate' behavior patterns documented in the messages. In fact, Keith is shown being shoved along in conducting his research to achieve the (pre-)ordained answer.

So I think that the emails were leaked by Keith Briffa. As he was a CRU official, and the emails were the communications of public servants, conducting research using public data, the release of the messages was not theft or hacking but the action of a whistleblower.

It will be interesting to see what emerges from the investigation which is ongoing at the University of East Anglia.

There will surely be a strong temptation for the University to continue with the 'nothing to see, please move along' messaging which is currently being used.

But, just as with Watergate, at some point the source of the information will be revealed. It will be interesting to see whether my guess has any validity!