The CRU Hack

I've been busy and have only been able to spend about 2 hours reading about the CRU hack, and some of the documents themselves.

A few comments:

1. Can we assume all this is genuine? Some of it certainly seems to be, from what people have said. And there's surely too much to totally invent. But all of it? I don't know. It's easy to imagine the hackers making word changes and sentence additions, etc., before releasing it back out.
2. Nothing I've seen so far gets me very excited. I don't see any evidence of a worldwide conspiracy to enslave us all into gray, communist conformity, nor any type of scientific collusion. What I see it just the ordinary exchange that takes place among...people, scientists included. They have their own inside language, thoughts, and jokes, and words that some conspiracy theorists are picking at are clearly just inside language that scientists use and that laypeople are not going to understand. They say things imprecisely and informally and off the cuff, like all of us, and don't imagine their emails are going to be splashed across the Web any more than you imagine your own emails will be for endless scrutiny by your enemies. Which of us could not be made to look completely evil if anyone were given access to all the emails we sent and received?
3. Nor do I have any concerns about inside groups peer-reviewing other's papers. For any subspecialty in science these days, there are only a few people/groups who are going to understand it and who are potential peer-reviewers. When my advisor and I wrote our first paper together when I was in grad school (on using jets to detect quark-gluon plasmas), we got the (anonymous) reviewer's comments and immediately knew who they were -- one of the few groups to be able to properly evaluate the work and put it into context. We had read all their papers and knew all about their work. Graciously they suggested ways in which we might extend our results, but we went ahead and published without doing that and sure enough a few months later this reviewer and his student published the augmentation he had suggested. We weren't surprised at all. Nor did I feel like he did us any favor. In fact, in such small specialities there is often more competition than usual, and you have to work even harder to impress your colleagues (especially when they get the chance to be somewhat anonymous). Scientists love to tear one another down, as anyone who has ever attended a Friday afternoon department seminar knows. Then afterward they go out on the patio and have a beer together.
4. I saw that my name popped up in a few places in the emails. I don't have much to say about them (which is neither a confirmation or a denial of whatever was claimed) except I do not at all recall ever threatening Sonia Boehmer-Christiansen (editor of Energy & Environment) with "litigation" (mail file 1068239573.txt) I can't imagine doing that as a journalist, and even if I wanted to I don't know what I'd threaten, unless it was to tell her I was going to file a FOIA, which I certainly did not do in this case since (a) I didn't think that that any of her internal journal correspondence was subject to a FOIA, as it was unrelated any government function, and (b) I don't even know if an American can file whatever the equivalent of a FOIA is in Britain. I do, though, plead guilty to having called her multiple times, whether it annoyed her or not. That's my job.
5. The Arctic is still melting, glaciers are still receding, sea-level is still rising, tree lines are moving north, and both land and sea are getting warmer.

If there are excerpts of the emails you think I've missed, please point them out in the comments.