It didn't take a mysterious "hacker" to reveal this bias. It has been known for a long time.
I heard about the "smoothing over" of the MWP and the weighted bias used to produce the hockey stick many months ago. A significant number of climatologists have been vocalizing these concerns in varying degrees for some time. No one would listen to them.
The only reason YOU are hearing about it now is that once light was shed on the CRU shennanigans, it lent legitimacy (whether or not it is deserved) to said climatologists, and the opportunity to voice their concerns to a larger listening audience.
But as cited in the article Mr. Mann tried to put Climate Research "out of business" as it's put after a 2002 paper didn't agree with him. If YOU heard about the smoothing over of MWP data only months ago doesn't make it very current. The paper was from 1999. It's not like this stuff just happened within the last year.
If these small enclave of scientist felt CRU was being railroaded why did it take 10 years for them to get a larger audience? They couldn't come up with some way to expose this problem? He's sending these emails around. I'm sure plenty of them were CC'ed on one or two of them. "as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." Those emails could have been sent along to any paper and they would have been published. There are plenty of journals that could have published this research, and would have been happy to do so if they were compelling.
Why did someone choose to expose this through the shady hacker route?
At least Patrick Michaels went to WSJ when he wrote his article.
I heard about the "smoothing over" of the MWP and the weighted bias used to produce the hockey stick many months ago. A significant number of climatologists have been vocalizing these concerns in varying degrees for some time. No one would listen to them.
The only reason YOU are hearing about it now is that once light was shed on the CRU shennanigans, it lent legitimacy (whether or not it is deserved) to said climatologists, and the opportunity to voice their concerns to a larger listening audience.