Something's Heating Up Big Time

With so much unraveling in ways the conventional wisdom establishment cannot control (health care debate, stimulus benefits in imaginary congressional districts, KSM NYC trial reaction, Sarah Palin on the move, etc.), a revelation of some hacked e-mails at a British climate research center may turn out to be the biggest story of all. This story broke on the Internet on Friday according to Powerline Blog (Intro here, follow-up details here and here).

The biggest news story of the day is one that has barely begun to break and will continue to reverberate for months or years to come. Someone hacked into a computer at the University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre, one of the main centers of anthropogenic global warming research. The hacker downloaded 62 megabytes of data from the server, consisting of around 1,000 emails and a variety of other documents. He uploaded them to an FTP server, where they were available to the public, apparently, for only a few hours. The event is described here.

Before the documents disappeared from that location, several people had downloaded them and posted them in other locations. I downloaded all of the material earlier today and have begun to review it. The emails are stunning. They are authored by many of the leading figures in the global warming movement: Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Stephen Schneider, and others. They are remarkably candid; these individuals talk to each other with the knowledge that they are among friends.

Rand Simberg has links and commentary here and here.

As has been noted for a story this significant and complex, it will take time for assessing and corroborating all of the relevant information. But considering how much the topic of "global warming" has been on the whole world's agenda for many years, this breaking story has the potential for tremendous political and social reverberation.