East Anglia hacking: no arrest, plenty of investigation

I've blogged about how global warming skeptics and ring-wing newspapers have been enjoying greatly their own interpretation of the emails and docs hacked from the University of East Anglia climate study center. Police have made no arrests in the cyber-theft. But investigations now are legion. And the findings break down along predictable political lines.

Here's a left-wing British publicaiton condemning the letters for...being "dull." No conspiracy, no cover-up. Lots of references to lunch. That pub goes on to talk about the global warming deniers use of strong emotional appeal to undermine the science. The realclimate website was where the hackers originally tried to upload the documents, apparently. Realclimate alerted East Anglia's climate center to the possible theft.

Realclimate says it's been through the emails and found, "There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."

On the other side, conservative observers can find conspiracy in the emails. Here's one talkback on an American news website "It appears that the East Anglia researchers have been not only refusing to share the raw data, but actively doctoring the results. Science has now been politicized by the left, like liberal arts, like entertainment, like what passes for print journalism. This has been going on for decades and there are no trustworthy sources anymore, which is tragic." [poll id="198"] Some readers may question why I do not post the original documents or at least excerpts as many other bloggers have. I know the hacked material is now in the public domain, if illegally so. However, I won't take part in what is a deliberate crime of cyber-theft, the releasing of documents never intended for public circulation. I shudder to think how many emails I've written about stupid people I disagree with, or going to lunch.