Climategate

On November 19th, the author of The Air Vent made a post entitled Leaked FOIA Files 62 mb of gold. The post opened with, "This is the biggest news ever broken here. The first thing I have to say is that I have no connection to the source of these files. It was left as a link on my blog while I was hunting for cloaked deers (fruitlessly) in the Upper Penninsula." Someone had posted a link to a zip archive in the comments of his site. The archive contained hundreds of e-mails and code obtained from a server at the Climate Research Unit in England. You will find plenty of heated discussion about the content and implications of these e-mails on the web. Over at The Air Vent, the verdict is that Climate Science is ruled by a cabal zealots who perverted the peer-review process to exclude dissent against the theory of man-made global warming. Over at Real Climate, the verdict is that skeptics of anthropomorphic global warming are making a big deal out of a few private e-mails. (We should mention, however, that Real Climate is run by the people who's e-mails were contained in the zip archive.) The Guardian newspaper's George Monbiot says that the some of the climate scientists involved should be sacked from their positions, but the revelations in no way undermine the case for man-made global warming. Over at Climate Audit the verdict is that prominent scientists colluded upon data manipulation to deceive the public. There is a lot of name-calling going on. Even the Wikipedia Entry has been "protected from editing until disputes have been resolved".

I have no interest in accusing anyone of foul play or fraud. I would, however, like to look at the code in the archive that makes corrections to tree-ring temperature estimates. There is a searchable database of the e-mails here and another here, but neither includes the code samples. Any help finding the original archive would be much appreciated. Also, I can't find any original papers by Briffa et al. on maximal density tree ring (MXD) studies. I'd appreciate a link to one of those papers, and some older data.

UPDATE: Found the zip archive here. List of all files containing the word "artificial" is here, and the piece of code that adds artificial corrections to the tree ring data is this one.