(Analyst's note:  Oh those pesky little details ....)

The Met Office Hadley Centre

Well, somebody went and hacked into the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. last week. They came out with a bundle of 62 Megs-worth of what appears to be incriminating communication between Climate Change scientists – some 72 documents and 1079 emails in all. And then they went and published it all online. Cool, huh?

As you might imagine, there are lot of people really upset about this. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) proponents are crying foul because of the illegal way the data was obtained. And they have a point. Not much unlike like the point ACORN proponents have about the way O’Keefe and Giles illegally obtained allegedly incriminating information about ACORN. Defenders of CRU, like with the defenders of ACORN, suspect that the published evidence “may have been edited.”  This cautions investigators that what they are reading, seeing, or hearing, might not be what was written, done, or said, which is helpful to know in any investigation.  As you might also imagined, there are a lot of people who are really excited about this, too. Like, take me for example.  I’m kind of feeling like I imagine Al Gore might have felt in those early days when he first learned about Jim Hansen (sometimes confused with Jim Henson, the guy who invented The Muppets).  Dr. Jim Hansen is the guy who invented Global Warming.

The British online science website , Real Climate,  lays out a scientific defense over this much-ado-about-nothing incident that includes such convincing arguments as “Clearly no-one would have gone to this [hacking] trouble if the academic object of study was the mating habits of European butterflies.” You must admit, it’s tough to argue with that.  But their biggest beef is over the use of the word “Trick” that one climate scientist allegedly (because remember,  it might have been edited by the hacker) used when communicating with another climate scientist. You see,  the opponents are making a huge fuss over the use of the word “Trick.” This is yet another parallel with the illegal Giles and O’Keefe investigation. The opponents are taking “Trick” to mean “to trick” or “to fool” or “to bamboozle.” But the proponents are not interpreting it that way at all. They say the scientist used the word “Trick” to mean “a good way to deal with a problem.” And they say that’s how scientists talk.  After all, who would know better than scientists about that sort of thing? And as I’ve shown, “Trick” in today’s language is a multi-functional word.

But you can also see the opposition’s point when they argue that the word “Trick” was nestled into the scientist’s sentence,

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

While admittedly, excitement can cause people to leap to conclusions, when you add the verb “hide” in the same sentence with “Trick”, it might cause even a rational person to consider more carefully the intended meaning of the word “Trick” in that sentence.  If only a New World Government, individuals’ wealth and liberties, and certain Nations’ Sovereignty wasn’t hanging in the swing of this Man-Made Global Warming mess, I’d like to believe these folks would probably all just get along. But since that’s not the case, we are likely going to have to suffer through some more bickering over the word “Trick” for awhile.

Now, it should also be noted that Real Climate emphatically states that there is “confusion” with newspaper and blog reports and that CRU “…has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution.” This apparently matters since Hadley happens to be the U.K.’s foremost climate research centre that provides the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with their official scientific data on Anthropogenic Global Warming.  Unfortunately, some mainstream reporters are combining the two institutions into their reports about this scandal anyway, so I guess that’s just another thing we’ll have to bicker about.