I will put all of this in full context as more analysis of the revelations and their meaning emerge, but just know this was described to me as "the closest thing you're ever going to come to a 'smoking gun.'"
If you're not a global warming geek, the point of the material is that we have apparent - and I only say apparent at this point - written admissions of cooking the books, among other nastiness, by the leading names in the global warming alarmist movement.
Now, none of us can attest to the validity of what has been posted on a Russian server, allegedly by someone on the inside who has had enough (nor can we even be sure of how it was obtained, though it purports to be non-classified data held by a purely public agency subject to freedom of information/transparency laws, even if that agency continues to stonewall requests for access to the data). The alarmists would like nothing better than to pull one over on skeptics, since that keeps them from arguing substance and, say, revealing their data, codes and methods. But I'm told it's almost 61 megabytes of files, and after a few days of scrutiny by the kind of people who would know, appears to them to be legitimate. And also very revealing, both the data and what are represented to be comments and admissions by our alarmist pals.
If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignore. I didn't say impossible, they're fully vested partners in the global warming industry, as catastrophism sells. But so does scandal, and this appears to be the makings of a very big one. Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research.. Then reflect that the taxpayer spends more on climate-related research than on the entire suite of AIDS programs, far beyond drug research.
