es and evaluate whether they were real before posting them. “We didn’t know if they were a Trojan horse, a hoax, a trap, or the real deal,” says Mosher.
Meanwhile, the files were still being posted elsewhere. At 9:57 p.m., a commenter under the handle “FOIA” posted on the skeptic blog Air Vent linking to the Russian FTP. This post included a list of 20 juicy teasers from the emails—among them a quote from Mann referring to a document as “dirty laundry” and an outside researcher asking for a chapter of a report by a UEA scientist to be “beefed up.” The anonymous poster also sent a follow-up comment to WUWT asking why the original comment hadn’t yet been published. Mosher says the IP address was traced to a server in Saudi Arabia; the poster was smart enough to cover the trail.
Mosher realized that several of the emails appeared to be from McIntyre to climate scientists, so late that night he called McIntyre, who confirmed that the emails were genuine. Mosher was still parsing the files two days later when he learned that they had already been posted on the Air Vent. He began submitting snippets of the emails to another skeptic blog called The Blackboard.
“You get to see somebody with the name of Phil Jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre,” Mosher wrote. “And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain…you get to see how they ‘shape’ the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy.” As a writer on Andrew Breitbart’s conservative news site Big Journalism would later put it, Mosher “is to Climategate what Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate. He was just the right person, with just the right influence and just the right expertise to be at the heart of the promulgation of the files.”
Watts also helped to spread the word. He was returning from a conference in Brussels on November 19 when he logged on to his blog from Dulles International Airport and posted his first piece about the files, citing the most damning emails: In one, CRU’s Jones notes the death of a skeptic as “cheering news”; in another, Jones refers to scientists using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures that tree-ring data showed beginning in the 1960s. (The “trick”—substituting recorded temperature data when proxy data become unreliable—isn’t intended to deceive; it’s an acceptable practice in paleoclimatology, since most proxy data sets end around the 1980s, and recorded temperatures are more reliable, anyway.)
“It appears that the proverbial Climate Science Cat is out of the bag,” wrote Watts. He said that he had alerted two of the most vocal deniers in the US: the CEI’s Christopher Horner and Marc Morano, a former staffer for Sen. Inhofe. Morano is also the editor of Climate Depot, a Drudge Report-like clearinghouse for climate skeptics run by the oil-funded think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Blogger Terry Hurlbut posted excerpts of the emails on a conservative news site, the Examiner.
Even as the buzz around the emails kept building, scientists tried to dismiss them as a non-story. Jones only acknowledged the theft two days after the emails became public, in an interview with the New Zealand magazine Investigate. He said he wasn’t sure what exactly was in the hacked data, and noted that the university had not even alerted the police.
By the time the scientists finally reacted, the story was entering the news bloodstream. On the evening of November 19, CEI’s Horner first wrote about it on the National Review‘s website, calling it the “blue-dress moment” for climate change—alluding to the infamous evidence of Bill Clinton’s sexual exploits. That same day, Mosher sent a Facebook message to New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, flagging the emails. Revkin wrote about them the next day, November 20, noting that they were “causing a stir among global warming skeptics.”
By that time, NewsBusters, a site devoted to “exposing and combating liberal media bias,” ran a story claiming that the documents “appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the