TKO for AGW?

I've spent quite a bit of time today going around the web looking into the hacked data coming out of a major British climate research agency. Someone broke into their computer system and downloaded more than 61MB of zipped emails, data and computer programs. The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) is one of the premier pro-warming climate research agencies in the world, with much of their research showing up in places like the IPCC reports. It has also long been the target of skeptics who have been using the British equivalent of Freedom of Information requests to try to get a look at the underlying data they use in their research. That's a fundamental tenet of science--that data should be shared so that others can verify your research--the CRU isn't a big fan of that idea.

So far, most people have focused on things like the head of CRU seeming to describe in an e-mail how he massages data to get the right result. In one memorable e-mail he talks how to overlay different data sets to "hide the decline" in temperatures. Another e-mail, I believe by the same guy, talks about how inconvenient a blip of warming was in the 1940's and how they have to massage it downwards a bit in order to hide it better.

Other bloggers are focusing on the efforts the e-mails show to hide data and to do an end-run around freedom of information requests--including sitting down with the government officials in order to show them why it is important to understand that the requests are coming from skeptics and should therefore be blocked. If these allegations can be proved, then there is actually a possibility of criminal prosecution, because interfering with an FOIA is actually a criminal offense.

Still other bloggers are looking into what appears to be pressure being exerted on peer-reviewed journals to make sure that skeptics don't get published and don't get a voice in the IPCC reports.

Lot of people are following this.

Gateway Pundit (also here) has a good overview post with lots of links.

Climate Depot is tracking links. (Also here).

As always, Watts Up With That is tracking it with a number of blog posts.

This post over on The Air Vent has a list of MSM reports on the hack. Including Fox, UK's Guardian, NPR, UK's Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Nature, the New Scientist and NRO.

People are going to be pouring over the information from this hack for a long time, and the next few days should continue to be entertaining, and hopefully enlightening.

Update: A great list of links is available here.