For the record
The NYT puts a stake in the ground (HT: American Thinker):
A thick file of private emails and unpublished documents generated by an array of climate scientists over 13 years was obtained by a hacker from a British university climate research center and has since spread widely across the Internet starting Thursday afternoon.
Before they propagated, the purloined documents, nearly 200 megabytes in all, were uploaded surreptitiously on Tuesday to a server supporting the global warming Web site realclimate.org, along with a draft mock post, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist managing that blog. He pulled the plug before the fake post was published.
I have a story in The Times on the incident and its repercussions, which continue to unfold. But there’s much more to explore, of course (including several references to me). The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
The UK Telegraph has a different approach to the matter. For what it’s worth, we think it is more likely that there was a whistleblower involved in this episode than not. Finally, the Times not publishing information “never intended for the public eye” in this case makes us think of the Pentagon Papers and the NSA pseudo-scandal, among other stories. Interesting editorial choices.
November 26th, 2009 at 1:01 am
He’s right about one thing: they were never meant for public viewing.
I find it unbelievable that they can take such an arrogant stand when they were the first to publish any leak that came out of the White House that used a name and could be considered personal. Didn’t they also publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers as well? Could it be that they are hiding their own activity in promoting this massive global hoax? Let’s start having the hearings they are always screaming for and find out!