Ben Santer

The public posting on a web site of private e-mails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England is going to cause an uproar.  Just a quick look at a few of the e-mails provides some startling revelations.  My colleague Julie Walsh lists a few of them in today’s issue of the Cooler Heads Digest.  Much more detail is provided at Steve McIntyre’s web site, ClimateAudit.

Here is CEI’s press release, and my colleague Chris Horner’s post is here.

Andrew Revkin’s story in tomorrow’s New York Times has already been posted on the Times’s web site.  Here is one interesting tidbit from Revkin’s story:

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millennia, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide a decline” in temperatures.

‘Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often use the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.” “It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” Dr. Mann said.

Yes, that’s right, everyone knows that “trick” is used as a technical term in many professions.  For example, in prostitution “trick” means….