xxonMobil funding, trotted out Horner at every opportunity: In May 2010, he wrote about what he called “green thuggery” at the National Review’s website. In July 2010, Michaels was back in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages accusing scientists of “ugly pressure tactics” and “professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data.”
The story unleashed darker forces, as well. Mann’s inbox was flooded with messages, the most civil of which called him a “fraud.” Some contained death threats. Images of Mann and other scientists were posted on neo-Nazi sites. The CRU’s Jones temporarily stepped down from his post; he later said he contemplated suicide.
A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, the question of who stole the emails and released them has never been answered. Mosher and other climate skeptics maintain that it was likely an inside job, carried out by someone at the University of East Anglia who wanted problematic science exposed. The CRU, on the other hand, maintains that it was the work of someone outside of the university—a “very professional job,” says Trevor Davies, pro-vice chancellor for research at East Anglia and the former head of the CRU.
Meanwhile, the university hasn’t disclosed the evidence for its assertion, nor has the Norfolk Constabulary, the local police department responsible for the official ongoing investigation. McIntyre says British counterterrorism officers have contacted him and other bloggers about the case, but as far as he knows, nothing has ever come of the inquiry.
It’s clear that the hacker was at least familiar with the climate-science debate; he knew enough to search through the hacked emails using keywords like “Mann,” “hockey stick,” and “Phil Jones” and to sort them accordingly. A source close to the CRU explains that the unit’s security wasn’t very tight—its server is separate from the rest of the university’s.
That said, the cybersecurity experts I talked to noted that a hack like this would have required some sophisticated skills. Once the hacker breached the server, he still would have had to find his way into the system administrator’s account, a feat that could have required special software to access the password. Then, in order to remain anonymous when posting the emails online, he would have had to scan the internet for nonsecure servers to work from—this would have allowed him to cover his own IP address. The hacker also used servers in multiple countries, making it even more difficult to trace his whereabouts.
It later became clear that CRU was not the only target. In the fall of 2009, unknown parties posing as network technicians attempted to break into the office of a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. There were also attempts to gain access to servers at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. According to a source within the institution, there were also unsuccessful attempts to breach the server at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. A US diplomatic cable that WikiLeaks released in late 2010 also revealed “evidence of an attempt to gain unauthorized entry to computer systems” belonging to the State Department’s climate bureau in 2009. The cable warned that “as negotiations on the subject of climate change continue, it is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist.”
SO DID THE SCIENTISTS DO something more diabolical than gripe about critics and fret over how their research would be interpreted? Not according to seven separate inquiries on the subject, each of which found that the researchers’ work was not in question—though several concluded that their behavior was. An independent probe organized by the University of East Anglia (PDF) found that some had turned down “reasonable requests for information” and had, at times, been “unhelpful and defensive.” It noted “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness.”
But none of the exonerations mattered: The scientists had lost control of the narrative. The percentage of peo