In 2009, the "Climategate" email were released. These exposed the AGW project as a hoax. The Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University in Britain prepared 156 megaybytes of emails by their climate researchers for release under the Freedom of Information Act. This database was somehow leaked, either prematurely or by a whistleblower after the institution had second thoughts. In the most notorious message, Phil Jones, director of the unit, wrote, "I've just completed '''Mike's Nature trick''' of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to '''hide the decline'''."<ref name=MISH /> This should not be understood to mean that real temperature were declining, but rather that the researchers were attempting to cover up flaws in their tree-ring based data set. The flawed graph in question was a version of the famous "hockey stick" that shows global temperature constant for 2,000 years, followed by a dramatic warming in the last century. ''Nature'' is considered one of the most authoritative science journals. So the quote indicates that a chart prepared for this magazine was faked with the approval of Jones as supervisor.
In another Climategate email, Jones enthusiastically demands that the IPCC review process be rigged: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Jones also admitted that the reason he claims the Earth is warming is political and not scientific: "The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn't statistically significant."<ref>Jones is ignoring the fact that 1998 was an unusually warm year due to an El Niño event. But the point remains that Jones is committed to the claim that the Earth is warming regardless of what the data might say.<br/>Steyn, Mark, "[http://www.steynonline.com/2697/how-the-science-got-settled How the Science Got Settled]", December 6, 2014</ref> Jones's reluctance to make the call based on CRU's own data set is understandable. The CRU temperature record, considered one of the most authoritative, has a staggering array of problems documented in the "Harry read me" files, also part of the Climategate trove.<ref>Brownlow, Andie, "[https://pjmedia.com/blog/climategates-harry_read_me-txt-we-all-really-should/?singlepage=true Climategate's Harry_Read_Me.txt: We All Really Should]", Dec. 11, 2009.</ref>
==The temperature record==