Wikileaks Greatest Hits: Climategate

[struggle4progress]

This week, as millions of adoring fans around the world celebrate the enduring achievements of Julian Assange, who is currently enjoying the warm hospitality of Ecuador's diplomatic staff in London, it is perhaps appropriate to remember the wonderful things that Wikileaks has brought all of us, wherever we may live

And so, today, we bring you yet another capsule from the story of Wikileaks: Climategate

Some weeks before the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference ("Copenhagen Summit&quot , servers containing documents and emails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked. Prominent global warming skeptics promptly learned about the material, and a large-scale concerted attack on the integrity of climate science began immediately. The political uproar eclipsed the Copenhagen Summit, which collapsed in chaos and ended without any definite results

And who published the Climate-gate emails? You know! Let's all give Wikileaks another round of applause!

... its past publications have included the stolen “Climategate” emails from East Anglia University ...

WikiLeaks Tightens Ties To Anonymous In Leak Of Stratfor Emails
Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/02/27/wikileaks-tightens-ties-to-anonymous-in-leak-of-stratfor-emails/

Assange @ 1:10 ff: "We released over ten years of emails from the CRU and those climate scientists"

[morningfog]

1. Nobody can say you don't work hard.

[struggle4progress]

2. Do you remember Climategate and the subsequent collapse of the Copenhagen Summit?

A lot of scientists had to drop everything they were doing and spend a lot of time answering accusations based on misleading quotes, mined from the hacked emails. The accusations were loud and without any scientific merit, but they produced a very large media controversy, that just happened to overlap with the Summit. This gave global warming deniers a perfect opportunity to control public perceptions of the Summit, because lazy reporters could fill column inches with cheap quotes about the emails. It certainly destroyed any limited ability that the United States might have had to play a positive role in the Summit

None of that was an accident: it was a stunningly well-coordinated campaign to prevent global progress on carbon emissions reductions. To judge from the video, BTW, Assange is proud of what he accomplished there: at best, he's a clueless numbnuts; at worst, he's a smirking craven sell-out; but, hey! at least he's proud!

[marmar]

3. Animotion comes to mind.....

you are an obsession
I cannot sleep

I am a possession unopened at your feet.
There's no balance
no equality

Be still
I will not accept defeat.
I will have you
yes
I will have you

I will find a way and I will have you.
Like a butterfly
a wild butterfly

I will collect you and capture you.
You are an obsession
you're my obsession

[struggle4progress]

4. Do you think the release of the hacked E Anglia emails represented a great leap forward?

[morningfog]

5. Struggle for Assange!!1!1!!1

[struggle4progress]

6. You have no opinion whatsoever about Climategate?

[morningfog]

7. I remember the collapse at Copenhagen, and it wasn't solely or even

mostly because of Wikileaks. It was because of the climate change deniers.

[struggle4progress]

8. You don't think the huge phony Climategate scandal helped the deniers?

[struggle4progress]

11. ... "We're facing an effort by special interests who are trying to confuse the public,"

said Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a lead author of the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report ...

The scientists—Somerville, Michael Mann of Penn State and Eric Steig of University of Washington—were supposed to be discussing their new report, the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a dismal update of the UN IPCC's 2007 climate data by 26 scientists from eight nations.

Instead they spent much of the time diffusing the hacker controversy, known in the media as "Climate Gate" ...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/11/25/us-solveclimate-skeptics-idUSTRE5AO4TW20091125

[struggle4progress]

10. A controversy over leaked e-mails exchanged among global warming scientists is part of a "smear

campaign" to derail next month's United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, one of the scientists, meteorologist Michael Mann, said Tuesday ...
Scientist: Leaked climate e-mails a distraction
Updated 11/25/2009 1:21 PM
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-11-24-copenhagen-united-nations-emails_N.htm

[morningfog]

15. What is your position?

I see you post every anti-Assangne/wikileaks article you can find, including those in untranslated foreign languages.

Do you think wikileaks has always been wrong? Are you anti-whistle blower or just anti-Assange?

[struggle4progress]

18. Did you know that the US embassy cable releases effectively killed a bill to protect whistleblowers

in the 111th Congress?

And the premeditated disinformation campaign around the E Anglia emails killed the Copenhagen Summit

Assange is a childish and manipulative man. One minute he's promising to bring down a bank or two with his leak of internal documents; the next, he's tweeting that everyone should pull their money out of BoA; then, he's on TV chuckling about how much fun it is to watch all the bank executives panic; and finally, he's saying he doesn't think he really has anything interesting in his bank documents, because they're too technical to understand

Assange is also morally vacuous. He released a bunch of unredacted materials about Afghanistan; then, when reporters asked whether that might not put opponents of the Taliban in danger, he simply said it didn't matter, because those people were "informants"

[SidDithers]

9. Leave Julian alone!!...

/Crocker.

Sid

[Cha]

12. I did not know this, struggleforprogress!

"Some weeks before the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference ("Copenhagen Summit&quot , servers containing documents and emails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked. Prominent global warming skeptics promptly learned about the material, and a large-scale concerted attack on the integrity of climate science began immediately. The political uproar eclipsed the Copenhagen Summit, which collapsed in chaos and ended without any definite results."

Thanks.

[treestar]

13. For some it could be an invasion of privacy

That unit does not sound governmental.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. To be fair, they weren't the first to publish them

As this denier site makes clear, because it thinks publishing them was a good thing, but doesn't want Wikileaks to have the 'credit':

Jeff Id links to a YouTube video of WikiLeaks’ Assange making a variety of untrue or inflated claims about Climategate and WikiLeaks’ role.

Assange falsely claimed that the Climategate emails were broken by WikiLeaks. This is obviously untrue as CA readers know. I can date WikiLeaks’ entry by contemporary comments. The first notice of the emails at WikiLeaks was 2009/11/21 at 2.50 AM Eastern (12:50 AM blog time). The emails had been downloaded by many people (including me) from a Russian server on Nov 19 and had been downloaded by WUWT moderators on Nov 17. A contemporary comment in a CA thread says that WikiLeaks was down and refers people to megauploads. WikiLeaks has not even been a major reference for Climategate – that belongs to eastangliaemails.com (originally anelegantchaos.org) which was up on Nov 20 and provided a searchable database.

http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/30/assange-on-climategate/

('WUWT' is "Watts Up With That", another denier site)

[struggle4progress]

16. Your comment may be accurate: a number of the denier sites do object to Wikileaks claiming credit

I do not know how to sort out the full story here, without devoting much more time than I want to this particular matter

In any case, Assange and Wikileaks certainly did take credit for releasing the emails, in this sordid affair

If Wikileaks was not the real source, then its taking credit may save it from accusations that it is a sell-out to climate-deniers, but only at the expense of proving that that Wikileaks is eager to puff itself up, without much regard for the truth

And, given the coordinated propaganda campaign associated with the emails, Assange's eagerness to take credit also suggests (at best) a certain insensitivity to the very troubling issues involved in this case

[Care Acutely]

17. I fail to see how that constitutes an improvement.

Outside of a sibling rivalry or an elementary playground "but he did it first" is not a valid argument.