If this is true... It is.

Have just seen the breaking news reported on a number of sceptically inclined climate blogs that someone has hacked Hadley CRU and posted 157Mb of rather stupefyingly momentous information on a Russian FTP server in a 61Mb zipped file. The big brains are currently sifting and fact checking, but from the little I've seen it doesn't look good for the pro-AGW camp. The long and short of it appears upon first reading to be that yes, the source data was fudged to make it look like the Earth was in for a period of catastrophic warming. The motivation I could guess at, but it does tend to gel with all the third hand rumours I've heard about ensuring continued funding of a Carbon Dioxide gravy train.

Now I'm not going to be celebrating because if the released data holds true this is a very bad day for the reputation of science as a whole. I will simply allow myself a small smile of grim satisfaction, and hope like hell that this release of data isn't some massive hoax.

H/T Bishop Hill, Wattsupwithat.

Wonder when (or if) this will go mainstream?

Update: Confirmation from Hadley CRU has been seen at Wattsupwithat. According to them, the hacked data is the real deal . This is not a hoax. Oh my.