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The Climatic Research Unit hacking incident came to light in November 2009 when it was discovered that thousands of e-mails and other documents had been obtained through an alleged hacking of a server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England. The subsequent dissemination of the material caused a controversy, dubbed "Climategate", regarding whether or not the e-mails indicated misconduct by climate scientists. The UEA described the incident as an illegal taking of data. The police are conducting a criminal investigation of the server breach and subsequent personal threats made against some of the scientists mentioned in the e-mails.

The Information Commissioner's Office stated that the UEA had breached the Freedom of Information Act by not dealing properly with requests for information made by an individual, a retired engineer, but as sanctions had to be imposed within six months of the offence it was too late to impose them.

The University of East Anglia has announced that an independent review of the allegations will be carried out by Sir Muir Russell and that the CRU's director, Professor Phil Jones, would stand aside from his post during the review.

Timeline

The incident began when someone accessed a server used by the Climatic Research Unit and copied 160 MB of data containing more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 other documents. The University of East Anglia stated that the server from which the data were taken was not one that could easily have been accessed and the data could not have been released inadvertently. It is not known when the breach occurred.

The breach was first discovered on 17 November 2009 after the server of the RealClimate website was hacked and a copy of the stolen data was uploaded. According to Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate, "At around 6.20am (EST) Nov 17th, somebody hacked into the RC server from an IP address associated with a computer somewhere in Turkey, disabled access from the legitimate users, and uploaded a file FOIA.zip to our server." A link to the file on the RealClimate server was posted from a Russian IP address to the Climate Audit blog at 7.24 am (EST i.e. at 2009-11-17 12:24Z) with the comment "A miracle just happened." Schmidt discovered the RealClimate hack minutes after it occurred. He temporarily shut down the website and deleted the uploaded file. RealClimate reported that they had notified the University of East Anglia of the incident.

On 19 November an archive file containing the data was uploaded to a server in Tomsk, Russia before being copied to numerous locations across the Internet. An anonymous post from a Saudi Arabian IP address to the climate-sceptic blog The Air Vent, described the material as "a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents" and defended the data breach on the grounds that climate science is "too important to be kept under wraps".

The Norfolk police subsequently confirmed that they were "investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia" with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime unit, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the National Domestic Extremism Team (NDET). Commenting on the involvement of the NDET, a spokesman said: "At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations." However, the police cautioned that "major investigations of this nature are of necessity very detailed and as a consequence can take time to reach a conclusion."

On 27 January 2010, the ICO released a statement referring to requests made by an individual under the Freedom of Information Act: "The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information." They said no legal action could be taken against the university because the six-month limit for prosecution set by the Act had expired.

Content of the documents

The material comprised more than 1,000 e-mails, 2,000 documents, as well as commented source code, pertaining to climate change research covering a period from 1996 until 2009. Most of the e-mails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate research, such as data analysis and details of scientific conferences. The controversy has focused on a small number of e-mails, particularly those sent to or from climatologists Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, and Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University (PSU), one of the originators of the graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph". Some of the now widely publicised e-mails included discussions of how to combat the arguments of climate change sceptics, unflattering comments about sceptics, queries from journalists, and drafts of scientific papers. Allegations were made that the e-mails showed climate scientists colluded to withhold scientific information, interfered with the peer review process to prevent dissenting scientific papers from being published, and deleted e-mails and raw data to prevent data being revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. Officials from the Information Commissioner's Office have stated that the e-mails show that requests made by an individual under the Freedom of Information Act were "not dealt with as they should have been," and that the CRU breached rules by withholding data.

Concerns were also raised about the quality of the code found in the documents.

Responses

In the United Kingdom and United States, there were calls for official inquiries into issues raised by the documents. Lord Lawson, a prominent British Conservative politician and founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation said, "The integrity of the scientific evidence... has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay." United States Senator Jim Inhofe also planned to demand an inquiry.

University of East Anglia

The University of East Anglia was notified of the possible security breach on 17 November, but when the story was published in the press on 20 November they had no statement ready. On 24 November, Trevor Davies, the University of East Anglia pro-vice-chancellor with responsibility for research, rejected calls for Jones' resignation or firing: "We see no reason for Professor Jones to resign and, indeed, we would not accept his resignation. He is a valued and important scientist." The university announced it would conduct an independent review to "address the issue of data security, an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests, and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed."

The university announced on 1 December that Phil Jones was to stand aside as director of the Unit until the completion of an independent review. Two days later, the university announced that Sir Muir Russell would chair the review, and would "examine e-mail exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data" as well as review CRU's policies and practices for "acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review, and disseminating data and research findings" and "their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice". In addition, the investigation would review CRU's compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests and also 'make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds."

UK Met Office

On November 23, a spokesman for the Met Office, a UK agency which works with the CRU in providing global-temperature information, said there was no need for an inquiry. "The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be."

On December 5, however, concerned that public confidence in the science had been damaged by leaked e-mails, the Met Office indicated their intention to re-examine 160 years of temperature data, as well as to release temperature records for over 1000 worldwide weather stations online. The Met Office remained confident that its analysis will be shown to be correct and that the data would show a temperature rise over the past 150 years.

UK Government

On January 22, 2010, the Science and Technology Select Committee of the Parliament of the United Kingdom announced it would conduct an inquiry into the incident, examining the implications of the disclosure for the integrity of scientific research, reviewing the scope of the independent Muir review announced by the UEA, and reviewing the independence of international climate data sets. The Committee plans to hold an oral evidence session in March 2010.

With reference to freedom of information requests made by David Holland, a retired engineer in Northampton, the Deputy Information Commissioner with responsibility for the Freedom of Information Act, Graham Smith, issued a statement on 27 January 2010 that "The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland's requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information." He also said that as sanctions have to be imposed within six months of the offence it was too late to impose sanctions, but the ICO would be making a case for the law to be changed for future offences. He was advising the university of East Anglia on its legal obligations, and the ICO would be considering whether to take regulatory action once reports of the independent and police investigations were available.

Other responses

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC in December 2009 that he considered the affair to be "a serious issue and we will look into it in detail." He later clarified that the IPCC would review the incident to identify lessons to be learned, and he rejected suggestions that the IPCC itself should carry out an investigation. The only investigations being carried out were those of the University of East Anglia and the British police.

Pennsylvania State University announced in December 2009 it would review the work of Michael Mann, in particular looking at anything that had not already been addressed in an earlier National Academy of Sciences review which had found some faults with his methodology but agreed with the results. In response, Mann said he would welcome the review. As a result of the inquiry, the investigatory committee determined there was no credible evidence Mann suppressed or falsified data, destroyed email, information and/or data related to AR4, or misused privileged or confidential information. The committee pointed out that the 2006 National Academy of Sciences report found that "Dr. Mann’s science did fall well within the bounds of accepted practice", but deferred final evaluation of the question if Mann operated within the accepted practices for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities to a newly formed investigatory committee of faculty members.

See also

• Global warming conspiracy theory
• Global warming controversy
• Criticism of the IPCC AR4

References

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External links

• The Independent Climate Change Email Review, an independent review funded by the UEA, chaired by Sir Muir Russell
• "The Great Climategate Debate". A video of a lecture held at the MIT School of Science on December 10, 2009. The moderator was Henry D. Jacoby (MIT). Speakers were Kerry Emanuel (MIT), Judith Layzer (MIT), Stephen Ansolabehere (MIT and Harvard), Ronald G. Prinn (MIT), and Richard Lindzen (MIT).

• Climate change assessment and attribution
• Environmental controversies
• Global warming
• Environmental skepticism
• Ethics of science and technology
• Hacking (computer security)
• 2009 in science
• 2009 in England