On Monday, New Year’s Eve, a hacker group announced it had breached a law firm handling cases related to the September 11 attacks, and threatened to publicly release a large cache of related internal files unless their ransom demands were met.
The news is the latest public extortion attempt from the group known as The Dark Overlord, which has previously targeted a production studio working for Netflix, as well as a host of medical centres and private businesses across the United States. The announcement also signals a slight evolution in The Dark Overlord’s strategy, which has expanded on leveraging the media to exert pressure on victims, to now distributing its threats and stolen data in a wider fashion.
Leave it to a bunch of hackers and a Russian server to reveal that a cabal of environmental theorists may be fudging the figures on the amount of climate change that the world is actually enduring.
Al Gore's new book "Our Choice" may refer to climate change researchers choice of stats that only back their claims
“Follow the money.”
That’s the motto investigative journalists chant when they’re delving into the lives of Republican politicians or big, nasty corporations. But that motto doesn’t appear to apply to left-leaning figures or causes like heroic climate change theorists or climate change research programs, which, as it happens is the biggest gold rush of grants, donations, and government funding that has ever hit academia since the Ice Age scare of the 1970s.
Leave it to a bunch of hackers and a Russian server to reveal that a cabal of environmental theorists may be fudging the figures on the amount of climate change that the world is actually enduring.
According to the New York Times:
The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views.
The emails also refer to a “trick” on how climate temperature statistics can be manipulated to show more dramatic increases.
In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide the decline” in temperatures.
A Penn State researcher we know says a “trick” is not a secret, but a scien-terrific term for solving a problem. And perhaps that problem is the possibility that funds to investigate phony climate-change claims would one day dry up.
