THE ONLY PLACE GETTING HOTTER IS EAST ANGLIA

The heat is on at East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit.  According to the UK's Mail Online, the pressure is on for the head of CRU to resign due to his role in the ClimateGate scandal.  A leading environmentalist, George Monbiot, is calling for Phil Jones to quit.

'I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken,' he said. 'There are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad.
'There appears to be evidence of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a Freedom of Information request.
'Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.'The head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.'

So far, Jones has refused calls for his resignation, stating,

'We absolutely stand by the science we produce here at the University of East Anglia and it has been peer reviewed and published.


'Some of the emails probably had poorly chosen words and were sent in the heat of the moment, when I was frustrated. I do regret sending some of them. We've not deleted any emails or data here at CRU.

'I would never manipulate the data one bit - I would categorically deny that.;

Hmmm...really?  Is that your final answer, Mr. Jones?  You might want to rethink it.  No, technically they didn't delete it - they just lost track of it.  Not that he didn't try to get some of them deleted. 

There is also a possibility that the emails were released because of the FOIA requests.  The had apparently been assembled by East Anglia staff.  Why were they actually released and why is Jones saying they were hacked?  Well, maybe they accidentally released the stuff they were supposed to bury, and are trying to say it was a crime in order to make themselves the victim and try to distract from what the emails contained.  Or maybe they really were hacked, and the accidental release is just another rumor.

At least we know the emails are real now.

And things are starting to happen.  Like investigations.  Hopefully the British authorities will check into the much larger crimes perpetrated by those scientists, and not just if or who hacked the emails.

As Pat Michaels so aptly put it, "This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud."