From Across The Pond: "The End Of A Hoax"?

This, assuming that the details are accurate and the story true, could be huge in the coming days.  At the very least, it may convince members of Congress that passing "cap and trade" could be deadly to their careers:

"If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more."

Whew! Are we to conclude that there is a vast, left-wing environmental conspiracy afoot that has not only ignored scientific evidence but may have actively destroyed it?  Is there a "war on science" being conducted by the left?  It sure looks that way on these reported facts. But let's see if they ultimately hold up.  Unlike the rush-to-judgment proponents of "climate change," we should first look for the facts, analyze them, and then draw rational conclusions based upon them.

More here.

And (h/t Instapundit) even more here from The New York Times(!):

"Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information.

“This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents."

A word of caution, followed by a sort of confirmation:

"Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.  But several scientists and others contacted by the Times confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific e-mails included in the file."

This will continue to make news for a while, as well it should.