The story breaks…

At last, the story is out in Australia, with coverage in The Australian and others:

The Australian – Hackers expose climate brawl

COMPUTER hackers have broken into Britain’s leading climate science research centre, making public thousands of private emails between top climate change scientists and, in the process, laying bare their bitter disagreements about the cause of climate change.

The emails — more than 2000 of them, plus 3000 documents — began appearing online late on Friday, and are widely available.

Some are malicious — in one, the head of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, says he is “cheered” by news of the sudden death of a prominent Australian climate sceptic, John L. Daly, who died of a heart attack at his Launceston home in 2004.

Others show scientists referring to sceptical colleagues as “prats”, “charlatans” and “idiots”.

The emails also acknowledge the frustration of trying to find evidence to “prove” man-made climate change. (source)

The Daily Telegraph – Warming to the climate con job

An anonymous statement attached to the emails announced: “We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

It sure does. Few outside of climate nerd circles have ever heard of Jones, Mann, Briffa etc, but these blokes (why are climate alarmists usually rich white men, by the way?) are largely the reason we’re all talking about destroying our economy in order to save some forest sweepings for our cave-dwelling grandchildren to eat.

Should they be proved genuine, which is looking likely at this point, in the absence of any denials, these emails are absolute dynamite. In one, CRU director Jones mentions using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in certain temperatures. (Hilariously, one of his online defenders subsequently claimed: “Scientists often use the term trick to refer to a good way to deal with a problem, rather than something that is secret, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all.” Could’ve tricked me. As for hiding a decline, the same defender meekly admits to “a poor choice of words”.)

Other words also seem poorly chosen, such as these, also allegedly from Jones: “If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.” Considering that we’re told by these gumbies that the consequences of global warming would be untold death and destruction, Jones is clearly quite committed to his cause. Most normal people would cop the odd error here or there if it saved a single life; Jones would apparently rather people die than be shown up as wrong. (source)

The Australian – Sorting fact from fiction in climate of confusion

CLIMATE change may indeed be happening but how can we know if we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth? (source)

Courier Mail – Scientists accused of “manipulating global warming data”

The hackers claim the emails show that the scientists at the world-renowned climate change research centre manipulated data to bolster their argument that global warming is genuine and is being caused by human actions. (source)

Let’s hope our politicians are reading the papers this morning.

P.S. Guess what? Our national broadcaster, the ABC (that’s the Alarmist Broadcasting Corporation): zip, nada, nothing. What a surprise.

The only news organisation in Australia so far to run a story on the CRU leaked emails (apart from the great work of Andrew Bolt on this) is, surprisingly, the Herald. All I can say is that the rest had better catch up. And again, “hackers” are suspected, but it is reasonably balanced (for the SMH):

Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online _ stoking debate over whether some scientists have overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said in a statement Saturday that the hackers had entered the server and stolen data at its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. The university said police are investigating the theft of the information, but could not confirm if all the materials posted online are genuine. [We’re 99% sure they are – Ed]

…

The University of East Anglica said that information published on the Internet had been selected deliberately to undermine “the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world’s climate in ways that are potentially dangerous.”

“The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way,” the university said in a statement. (source)

Yes, that’s probably because the scientists at CRU were not interested in “engaging in the issue in a responsible way”, by withholding and massaging data, and then smearing critics.

As the whole thing is online now, here is a link to a searchable database of the CRU material:

Alleged CRU Emails – Searchable (as Anthony Watts suggests, try “moron”)