ill and ancient

I've been ill in bed for two days now, shivering, coughing, my fluids trying to escape from all facial orifices, and my head, it hurts so.

The keyboard on my wee laptop is too small to type on easily, I keep hitting caps lock or some other key that sends the cursor to the top of the screen or some other window or anywhere but where I want it.

Life goes on, the internet's still buzzing.

The latest story to hit the blogsphere is that CRU was hacked and so there are a load emails out there where climate change scientists conspire to keep the sceptics silent. Here's blogger Bishop Hill announcing the hack and here's confirmation that its for real.

And its getting a little coverage on the BBC but only on the hacking and computer security aspect of the story, rather than that the people advising world governments on climate change are a bunch of snakes.

I'm not that clued up on all the acronyms so I'll be building a glossary of them here

• AGU - The American Geophysical Union "A worldwide scientific community"
  
• CRU - The Climatic Research Unit based at the University of East Anglia
• FOIA - The Freedom Of Information Act the general right of access to information held by public authorities
  
• GRL - Geophysical Research Letters a research journal
• The Hadley Centre - The Met Office's climate change research lab
  
• IPCC - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• IPCC TAR - The IPCC Third Assessment Report
• IPCC TAR SPM - The IPCC TAR Summary for Policy Makers
  

And I guess, just to be helpful, the main players in the emails:-

• Professor Phil Jones - Head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia, notable for maintaining of the time series of the instrumental temperature record; this work figured prominently in the IPCC TAR SPM. He is director of the Climatic Research Unit and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He holds a BA in Environmental Sciences from the University of Lancaster, and an MSc and PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne - thought that the death of climate change sceptic John L Daly is 'cheering news'
• Professor Ray Bradley - climatologist and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also research director of the Climate System Research Center. Also contributing author to IPCC TAR and IPCC TAR SPM
• Malcolm K Huges - a meso-climatologist and Regents' Professor of Dendrochronology in the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. He was born in Matlock, Derbyshire, England, and earned a Ph.D in ecology from the University of Durham. Since 1998, he is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union

And for completeist's sake here's a list of the crimes revealed in the emails

• Phil Jones saying John L Daly's death is 'cheering news'
• Phil Jones perpetuating Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
• Trying to get Saiers ousted from the GRL

And other blogs that have covered this story far better than I

• Bishop Hill with highlighting the magic emails here
• Watt's up with that
• An Englishman's Castle
• Devil's Kitchen and here and here
• Tom Nelson and here
  
• The Blackboard
• Climate Audit
• RealClimate (response from CRU)