 the ‘hoax’ has been revealed and congratulations are handed out all round…Net effect on lay people? Confusion. Net effect on science? Zip.”
So how much of a nuisance was McIntyre? Consider his attempts to procure the crucial global temperature data sets that are jointly held by the CRU and the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre. McIntyre dogged the CRU for access to them for years, a campaign that escalated over the course of 2009. The CRU repeatedly turned down these requests, arguing that granting them would violate agreements over data its partners had collected. Then, in June 2009, McIntyre found out that the CRU had provided the very information he had been requesting to a scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology. In response, McIntyre penned an angry screed on Climate Audit. In just the last week of July 2009, CRU received 58 FOIA requests from McIntyre and others (PDF) affiliated with Climate Audit. CRU head Phil Jones argued that responding to these requests was creating an unmanageable burden.
Emails from this period show the scientists lashing out against McIntyre. He is referred to as a “bozo” and “a playground bully.” McIntyre clearly gets a rise out of irking scientists, whom he frequently refers to as “the Team“—another play on the hockey-stick metaphor. He likes to “tease these guys and kind of make fun of them,” he says, and their evident aggravation at his inquiries only egged him on. “I think it was a mistake for them to in effect adopt a fatwa against Climate Audit,” says McIntyre.
McIntyre’s latest requests for both the raw CRU data and the email correspondence between scientists about those data were formally denied on November 13, 2009. Four days later, a massive bundle of files named FOIA.zip was anonymously posted on several prominent skeptic blogs and RealClimate. In it were years’ worth of the climate scientists’ email exchanges. McIntyre says he doesn’t know who posted the file but adds that the timing is one of several “really strange coincidences” surrounding the emails, “if it is a coincidence.” It was also, notably, just days before the start of the Copenhagen climate talks, which many hoped would result in a new global deal for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
SOMETIME ON OR AFTER November 12, more than 1,000 emails between climate scientists and 3,587 other documents, including raw data and computer code, were copied from the CRU server. The files were posted online, with duplicates posted to several other servers around the world. At 7:24 a.m. EST, a link to the files appeared in a comment on McIntyre’s Climate Audit.
Around 7:30 a.m. that day, Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA and cofounder with Mann of RealClimate, awoke to find his site disabled. He attempted to log in and failed. When he finally got in as the administrator, he found that the files had been uploaded to the site. At that very moment, the hacker was using a ghost administrator account to try to create a blog post that linked to the files and quoted some portions of the emails.
Schmidt recalls, “I was going, ‘What’s this? Oh God, this is some emails. I wrote some of these emails.'” Schmidt emailed Mann, Jones, and other scientists whose emails were included.
That same evening, a comment on Watts Up With That? (WUWT)—a prominent skeptic blog run by Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist—linked to the files posted on a Russian file transfer protocol (FTP) site. “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps,” read the comment. Charles Rotter, who moderates the site, did not approve the comment for public view, but he did download the files in order to read them himself.
Next, Rotter called his housemate, Steven Mosher. Mosher, who works in marketing in San Francisco, is a frequent contributor to Climate Audit, WUWT, and other skeptic blogs. He is a self-described “data libertarian” and lukewarmer who has agitated for increased access to the data and computer codes that climate scientists use. Mosher says Rotter and Watts requested that he take a look at the fil