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Fantastic news for a change - the Guardian reports that the UK police are finally making some concerted attempts to identify the hacker behind the criminal invasion of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

The Guardian reports:

On Wednesday, detectives from Norfolk Constabulary entered the home of Roger Tattersall, who writes a climate sceptic blog under the pseudonym TallBloke, and took away two laptops and a broadband router. A police spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Norfolk Constabulary had "executed a search warrant in West Yorkshire and seized computers". She added: "No one was arrested. Investigations into the [UEA] data breach and publication [online of emails] continues. This is one line of enquiry in a Norfolk constabulary investigation which started in 2009."

Tattersall posted on his own TallBloke's Talkshop blog that:

"I got the feeling something was on the go last night when WordPress [the internet host for his blog] forwarded a notice from the US Department of Justice."

What excellent news to hear that the Justice Department is getting involved with this investigation, it's about time. Perhaps this came in response to the remarks by Rep Ed Markey (D-MA) last month?

Either way, it is reassuring to know that the investigation into the criminal hacking of climate scientists' emails is, in fact, ongoing.  Last month, we reported about troubling indications that the UK police effort seemed inadequate given the tiny expense reports divulged after a Freedom of Information request by a UK journalist. 

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In a breathless update on the tawdry Wegmangate tale of plagiarism, mining promoter and amateur statistician Stepehn McIntyre (proprietor of Climate Audit) has tried to distract from the case at hand by imagining an earlier instance of plagiarism, allegedly committed by Edward Wegman’s victim, Raymond Bradley.

For those just catching up, the blogger Deep Climate and his research partner John Mashey have produced a document that shows just how extensively the once-respected statisitician Wegman cribbed from one of his apparent victims (Ray Bradley) in a report that Wegman produced for Congress. Mashey argues that Wegman’s errors and plagiarism were more than merely unprofessional: he says that they constitute a barefaced and illegal effort to mislead Congress. George Mason University is currently investigating the plagiarsim charges.

McIntyre has chosen to run interference on that complaint not by actually defending Wegman (whose shoddy work seems increasingly indefensible) but by attacking Ray Bradley, one of the authors of the iconic “hockey stick graph” that Wegman had been hired to attack. McIntyre points out in his post that Bradley had earlier used a series of figures from a 1976 book by H.C. Fritts and, according to McIntyre, provided inadequate credit.

This, however, seems less like plagiarism and more like an effort to build good science on a solid foundation.

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In the Canadian tradition, it would be “unparliamentary” to accuse ClimateAudit’s Steve McIntyre of purposefully misrepresenting climate science, but his latest attack on the so-called “hockey stick” suggests that McIntyre is a great deal more interested in scoring distorted debating points than in saying anything that is actually factually correct.

McIntyre, apparently a retired mining stock promoter, has enjoyed a certain degree of fame in the denier community since 2003, when he and an economist named Ross McKitrick launched an attack on a graph (inset) by the highly respected actual scientist, Michael Mann.

In response to the M&M attack, Mann published an amendment to his original work, giving deniers the world over the courage to say that the original graph had been “debunked.” They then extrapolated to say that if there was an error in this single graph, that must mean that climate change wasn’t happening or wasn’t caused by humans - that the whole anthropogenic theory had collapsed in the math of a single published paper. Here is a recent and typically ridiculous example.

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There is a warm air of celebration in the DenierSphere because the statistical mavens at Climate Audit and WattsUpWithThat have discovered an error in the October global temperatures as reported by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

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UPDATE: there is only a 600 vote gap now, if you haven't voted please do so right away!

Its the last day of voting for the 2007 Weblog Awards and it looks like the leader in the "Best Science Blog" category at this point is "Climate Audit," a bastion for those who actually still believe that global warming is natural and humans have nothing to do with it.

In other words, Climate Audit is a climate change denial website.

As with anything climate change, the whole affair has turned into a left wing blog vs. right wing blog fight for who can pull the most votes to their side.

Of course, I'm being totally unbiased when I say that the site "Bad Astronomy" which is running a very close second place right now to "Climate Audit" is definitely worth a vote or two (um, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, ya know what I mean)!

You can cast your vote here. (did I mention "Bad Astronomy")