If he's the guy, we nominate Dr. Paul Dennis Time magazine's Person of the Year.

The Guardian UK today broke the huge news that it believes Climategate can now put a name to its heroic whistleblower. They say our man on the inside appears to be top scientist, Paul Dennis, Head of Stable Isotope and Noble Gas Geochemistry Laboratories of the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The Guardian reminds of some facts about Dennis:

Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because “science isn’t done by consensus”.

University sources say the head of department, Professor Jacquie Burgess, received a letter from Dennis at the height of the email uproar, calling for more open release of data. He appears to have disapproved of the way Jones resisted FoI requests.

Dennis’s own research, which dates fluctuating temperatures in ice cores stretching back thousands of years, does not support the more catastrophic current predictions of runaway global warming.

He has a history of contact with the American bloggers who bombarded Jones’s unit with FoI requests, and were the first to receive the leaks. The ensuing global row led to Jones standing aside from his post. Last week he was rebuked by the Information Commissioner’s office for apparent breaches of FoI rules.

If he is the whistleblower, Mr. Dennis has our utter admiration. But we doubt Norfolk Police will be giving him plaudits and bouquets right now. The police will have taken at least one signed statement from Dennis so that they will have in both black and white and full audio-recorded detail the how and why of why this scientist felt compelled to nobly sacrifice his prestigious career.

But hold on just a second.

Now that we have heard from the Guardian, What does Mr. Dennis have to say? Well, he went public and made a comment today, after the article hit the internet, on the Bishop Hill blog. He denies it:

It’s very amusing to read the many conspiracy theories being put forward by readers on the many blogs and newspaper comment sites. So before we get too carried away let me set the facts straight:

1) I did not leak any files, data, emails or any other material. I have no idea how the files were released or who was behind it.

2) My first knowledge of anything untoward was a departmental email circular saying that emails and files were hacked from ENV (environmental sciences) and CRU (climatic research unit). My interest was piqued so I emailed Steve McIntyre to ask if he was aware of anything. Steve replied that he wasn’t and that if he did find out anything he’d let me know. It was apparently this email that I sent that confirmed to both Steves (McIntyre and Mosher) that the leaked files were authentic.

3) The following day Steve emailed me a single url. It was to Jeff Id’s site. I clicked the link but couldn’t find anything and forgot about it.

4) Next day all hell breaks loose as the files have gone wild.

5) Now stepping back a few days. Prior to the leak, about a week or so, I had sent Jeff a paper I recently published in Geophysical Research Letters on a new study of the Gomez Glacier in Antarctica that had a 150 year isotope record that could be backed out as temperature. I thought Jeff might be interested in it as I knew he was working, along with others, on a new Antarctic paper in response to the Steig et al article in Nature that was published 12 months before.

6) In December the police saw me twice. I described the interview here under the blog ‘Parsing the Police’ on January 9th. The police were perfectly civil and we talked about many things including my research. I showed them round my labs and they came to coffee with me and my research group.

The police had copies of my email correspondence with Steve McIntyre and Jeff Id and a copy of my paper which kind of amused me. They said it was because I had sent the emails that they were interviewing me. I have absolutely no problems with that.

7) Two weeks ago David Leigh of the Guardian interviewed Andrew and Andrew mentioned my name and my contribution to the blog. Fred Pearce emailed me and I directed him to the university press office. Leigh followed Pearce’s email with one of his own and I ignored it. He then emailed saying he was running the story and out of courtesy he wanted to chat about it. Our conversation was about palaoeclimate science, ice cores, speleothems, mass spectrometers and the hockey stick. I told Leigh about the email I had sent Steve McIntyre and the papaer I had sent to Jeff. There’s no mysterious police leak here. I gave Leigh a copy of papaers I had written on ice core, speleothems and a nice little article on a freshwater snail, Lymnaea peregra.

That really is the end of the story. I reiterate that I have absolutely no knowledge as to who did what and their modus operandi. I’m as amused by all the theories, suggestions etc. and I am grateful that many have suggested that I deserve the nobel prize, or at the very least a knighthood but in all honesty I’ve done nothing to deserve either.

So, which is it? He Paul Dennis the whistleblower or not? The way breaking climategate news now comes out hourly it seems, we’re sure we’ll know very shortly.

Whether or not it was Paul Dennis, it seems the police think it was a whistleblower. If this is the case, it is a huge public relations win for skeptics. There’s no way a jury would convict a whistleblower, since the information released were the actual files requested under the FOI, so on this basis it would not fulfill the public interest requirement to bring a prosecution – it would be deemed frivolous. Besides, a shrewd defense attorney would cite mitigation such as the whistleblower was actually complying with the law that the ICO prosecutor officially conceded was broken by the employer. However, feasibly they could prosecute under the UK Data Protection act–this is because, as Dr. Costella tells us, the leak included personal data so that constitutes breaches of data protection law.

Source: Guardian, Bishop HIll

An “inconvenient truth” for Mann is that an ally of ours, former CIA agent Kent Clizbe, has this weekend emailed the proxy professor’s co-workers with details of the tempting offer that could turn 2010 into quite a prosperous New Year. We hope someone at this premiere world research institution will come forward and substantiate the facts from evidence already uncovered from the government emails leaked on November 19, 2009. The emails, among other things, show correspondence between Michael Mann and British Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research, which discuss methods to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.

If any of the dozens of co-workers in the US or the UK are prepared to give evidence, even if it doesn’t lead to any convictions, they could benefit from a share of tens of millions of dollars in recovered public funds. The Whistleblower idea came up in Internet discussions with top US fraud lawyer, Joel Hesch, of Hesch and Associates and former CIA agent, Kent Clizbe. Clizbe’s idea was to email the offer to all 27 of Mann’s co-workers at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center (ESSC) this weekend.

Whether convictions are obtained or not, Mr. Hesch assures prospective whistleblowers they will receive a substantial share of any monies recovered. Federal investigators reward whistleblowers with an average payment of $1.5 million based on the sums of money recovered. The US Federal government has paid out almost $3 billion so far in such rewards. The largest rewards to date exceed $150 million, and one out of every five applicants gets a monetary reward. Estimates of the total sums invested in government climate research already exceed $50 billion. The offer put on the table to Mann’s colleagues could be the most lucrative whistleblower deal ever made.

Kent Clizbe, who authored the email to Mann’s co-workers, has extensive experience in protecting the confidentiality and security of his clients. Both as an executive recruiter, and as a former government intelligence officer, Kent specialized in protecting the confidentiality of interactions with his clients.

ESSC employees will read Kent’s offer Monday morning when they switch on their computers to check their email. In his message, Kent tells them, “the whistleblowers with inside knowledge of misused federal grant dollars will enjoy the highest level of confidentiality possible. We suggest that you contact Kent using an email account outside of your work. Details can be found at www.kentclizbe.com. Alternatively, you may also contact attorney Joel Hesch, of Hesch and Associates, through his website HowToReportFraud.com.

We at Climategate.com made the decision to give our scoop to the widely read climate change skeptic and journalist, James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph, for maximum dissemination of this story. Earlier today he went public with it in Climategate: Michael Mann’s very unhappy New Year at the Telegraph.