<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Climate e-mails were hijacked 'to sabotage summit'</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">Ben Webster, Environment Editor, in Copenhagen and Murad Ahmed</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana"> UN officials have likened the theft of e-mails from university climate researchers to the Watergate scandal, after claiming computer hackers were probably paid by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the theft from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics, but was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact that the e-mails were first uploaded to a sceptic website from a computer in Russia was an indication that the culprit was paid.

"It's very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services," he said. "If you look at that mass of e-mails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data, but it's a carefully made selection of e-mails and documents that's not random at all. This is 13 years of data and it's not a job of amateurs."

Mr van Ypersele said that publication of the e-mails had undermined efforts by the IPCC to convince the 192 countries at the summit, which begins today, that they needed to act fast on emissions. "We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators."

He rejected claims by sceptics that the e-mails showed efforts had been made to manipulate the data to exaggerate the warming trend. "It doesn't change anything in the IPCC's conclusions — it's only one line of evidence out of dozens of lines of evidence."

Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Programme, said that the theft of emails had echoes of Watergate — the burglary of the Democratic Party's offices at the Watergate building in Washington DC in 1972.

"This is not 'climategate', it's 'hackergate'. Let's not forget the word 'gate' refers to a place where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so. So the media should direct its investigations into that."

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that the stolen e-mails looked "very bad" and were fuelling scepticism, but said the media scrutiny was not unwelcome. Mr de Boer said: "I think it's very good that what is happening is being scrutinised in the media because this process has to be based on solid science. If quality and integrity is being questioned, that has to be examined."

This week the Met Office will release temperature data from 1,000 weather stations around the world in an attempt to shore up public confidence in its statements about the dangers of climate change.

The raw data will be impossible for any non-expert to interpret. The Met Office is also planning "as soon as possible" to release the computer code it used to analyse the data.

It is this analysis, by the Met Office in partnership with the University of East Anglia, that is at the centre of the controversy over the leaked e-mails.

The e-mails, which were sent over a 15-year period ending on November 12, first appeared on websites run by sceptics on November 17.

Almost a month before they were posted on a website popular with climate-change sceptics, the hacked information was sent to a BBC weatherman who had expressed his doubts about climate science on his blog. The BBC has confirmed that Paul Hudson received some documents on October 12 but no story was broadcast or printed by Mr Hudson or the corporation.

Then, on November 17, someone hacked into realclimate.org, a website popular with climate scientists. The hackers put all the UEA e-mails and documents on the website, using a computer based in Turkey. The website's owners responded quickly, shutting down the site within minutes.

Finally, using a computer in Saudi Arabia, the hackers posted a link on the Air Vent blog. The link sent readers to a file that was stored on computers in Russia. Only then did others begin to pick up on the story.</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6946281.ece</font></b></span></p>

Payed > paid. Payed is correct, but obsolete.

Edited December 7, 200916 yr by Sylph

<p><span style="font-size:21pt;"><font face="Georgia">The Stolen E-Mails: Has 'Climategate' Been Overblown?</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Georgia">By Bryan Walsh</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><font face="Georgia">The controversy over e-mails stolen from global warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.

Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as "Climategate," with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it "Swifthack," a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change. (See TIME's special report on the environment.)

The truth is that the e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change. But they do hand a powerful political card to skeptics at the start of perhaps the most important environmental summit in history. Still don't know what to make of it? If you're struggling to untangle the details of the e-mail controversy, here are five key things you need to know:

1. How were the e-mails leaked? On Nov. 17, administrators of the website RealClimate, a blog about climate science written by top researchers, discovered that unknown hackers were attempting to upload onto the blog more than 1,000 e-mails apparently sent by and to scientists at University of East Anglia's CRU. The CRU is one of the most important climate research centers in the world, and one of a handful of scientific agencies that keep the global temperature records used in most major climate models. Officials at East Anglia soon confirmed that electronic theft had occurred and that the e-mails were genuine. By the end of the week, they were widely available on the Internet.

In early December, the e-mail controversy was still burning up the blogosphere, as international negotiators gathered at the Copenhagen climate summit. The head of the CRU and author of several incriminating e-mails, environmental scientist Phil Jones, has stepped down temporarily from his post while University of East Anglia conducts an independent inquiry into the e-mail controversy. The investigation will be led by Muir Russell, a prominent Scottish academic and civil servant. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania State University (PSU) announced it would conduct its own inquiry into the emails, after PSU climatologist Michael Mann also emerged as an author of e-mails that were central to the controversy.

2. What exactly do the emails say? The more than 1,000 e-mails dating back some 13 years contain a range of information — everything from the mundanities of climate data collection to comments on international scientific politics to strongly worded criticisms of research by climate-change doubters. It is mainly the last point that has skeptics crying foul. In one e-mail, sent to Mann from Jones, the topic is a pair of papers that criticize the case for man-made global warming; Jones wrote that he and his colleagues would be sure to keep the papers out of consideration for the forthcoming climate assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), "even if we have to re-define what the peer-review literature is."

In another e-mail exchange, Mann and Jones discuss ways to pressure an academic journal Climate Research to stop publishing submissions from climate skeptics, with Mann suggesting that they consider encouraging colleagues not to submit papers to the journal until it changes its editorial stance. Jones also wrote repeatedly about rebuffing requests by climate skeptics for raw temperature data from CRU, and seemingly encourages his colleagues to delete e-mails concerning a Freedom of Information request for the data.

In other e-mails, scientists appear to have trouble reconciling recent temperature data with the warming expected from climate models. And overall, the correspondence evinces climate scientists' outright scorn for global warming skeptics; in one message, Ben Santer, a researcher from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory offers — presumably in jest — to "beat the crap out of" a leading skeptic.

Perhaps most damningly, in an e-mail from 1999, Jones refers to one of Mann's studies from the prominent journal Nature in a discussion of his own data: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." (By the "decline," Jones is presumably referring to the fact that temperature data reconstructed from tree-ring density — a common way to estimate global temperatures before the widespread use of the thermometer — diverges somewhat from recorded temperatures after 1960.)

3. How have the e-mails been interpreted? To global warming doubters, the CRU emails are the new Pentagon Papers, proof that the powers that be — in this case, international climate scientists — are engaged in outright fraud and were exposed only by a brave whistleblower.

Many skeptics argue that the case for man-made global warming has been essentially undone, and that before the world goes any further in considering action to control greenhouse gas emissions, all scientific evidence for warming must be reevaluated. Jones's email about Mann's "trick" appears to indicate that climate researchers have been actively manipulating scientific data to better fit their models on climate change, while other e-mails seemingly confirm what skeptics had long suspected — that the globe in recent years wasn't warming as fast as theories on climate change had assumed. Most of all, the tone of the CRU e-mails suggests that climate scientists are mired in groupthink, utterly resistant to skeptical viewpoints and willing to use pressure to silence dissenters of the global warming mainstream. In other words, the e-mails showed what Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner called "scientific fascism," which he argues is "at worst...junk science" and "part of an international scientific fraud."

Climate scientists are taking the e-mail controversy seriously. Inquiries are underway at University of East Anglia and Penn State, and IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri has said that the controversy cannot be "swept under the carpet," promising also that the U.N. body will examine the emails independently. But global-warming skeptics have already declared victory. "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," said Mohammed Al-Sabban, Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator, according to the BBC.

4. Do the emails weaken the scientific case for global warming? Put it this way: when it comes to climate science analysis from the representative of the world's biggest oil-producing state, it's wise to be suspicious. In the weeks since the e-mails first became public, many climate scientists and policy experts have looked through them, and they report that the correspondence does not contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, which has been decades in the making. "The content of the stolen e-mails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming," wrote 25 leading U.S. scientists in a letter to Congress on Dec. 4. "The body of evidence that underlies our understanding of human-caused global warming remains robust."

According to PSU's Mann, that statistical "trick" that Jones refers to in one e-mail — which has been trumpeted by skeptics — simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures. It's an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade — hardly the stuff of conspiracy.

As for Mann and Jones' apparent effort to punish the journal Climate Research, the paper that ignited his indignation is a 2003 study that turned out to be underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute. Eventually half the editorial board of the journal quit in protest. And even if CRU's climate data turns out to have some holes, the group is only one of four major agencies, including NASA, that contribute temperature data to major climate models — and CRU's data largely matches up with the others'.

It's true that the e-mails reveal CRU climate scientists were dismissive of skeptics, often in harsh terms, but that's not unusual for scientists. Science is a rough arena, as anyone who has ever survived a doctoral examination knows, and scientists aren't shy about attacking ideas they believe are wrong — especially in private communication. Still, Jones et al. could have been more open and accepting of their critics, and if it turns out that e-mails were deleted in response to the Freedom of Information request for data, heads should roll. (Jones maintains that no e-mails or documents were deleted.)

Ultimately, though, we need to place Climategate/Swifthack in its proper context: amidst a decades-long effort by the fossil fuel industry and other climate skeptics to undercut global warming research — often by means that are far more nefarious than anything that appears in the CRU e-mails. George W. Bush's Administration attempted to censor NASA climatologist James Hansen, while the fossil-fuel industry group the Global Climate Coalition ignored its own scientists as it spread doubt about man-made global warming. That list of wrongdoing goes on. One of the main skeptic groups promoting the e-mail controversy, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, was recently revealed to have links to the energy company Exxon-Mobil, which has long funded climate-change deniers. "This is being used to confuse the public," says blogger James Hoggan, whose new book Climate Cover-Up details Exxon-Mobil's campaign. "This is not a legitimate scientific issue."

5. Will the controversy derail efforts to curb warming? Although the e-mails have no bearing on the scientific case for climate change, they'll likely have a major political impact. At the very moment when countries around the world — including the U.S. — seem poised, finally, to begin to control greenhouse gas emissions, the controversy created by the e-mails allows skeptics to roll some of the momentum back, at least by injecting doubt among a confused public.

That strategy might be working. A survey published on Dec. 3 by the conservative-leaning polling group Rasmussen Reports found that 52% of Americans polled believe there remains significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming, and that 84% of Americans believe it is at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified data to support their theories on global warming. Unfortunately, scientific truth matters less than public perception — a doubtful public is that much less likely to support tough caps on greenhouse gas emissions.

In the aftermath of the e-mails, climate scientists and advocates will need to rethink how they engage with critics. Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist at Georgia Tech, wrote in a much-discussed blog post that researchers need to make climate data much more open and transparent, and that scientists need to be wary of falling into what she calls "climate tribalism." She argues that mainstream climate scientists are now resorting to the same smear tactics that skeptics have long used against climate scientists — something Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the think tank Breakthrough Institute have called "climate McCarthyism."

"Heavy-handed efforts to narrow the scientific debate have seriously damaged the credibility of climate science," says Nordhaus, whose work has come under sharp criticism from many environmentalists. "Environmental advocates and sympathetic scientists have set back efforts to address global warming."

And yet climate scientists cannot be expected to debate with a skeptical monolith. While the largely conservative doubters of man-made climate change are a small minority, they remain immovable. What scientists view as healthy debate, critics tend to see as evidence that the scientific case is still open — and the American public, large portions of which are all but scientifically illiterate, are not equipped to make the distinction.

Despite the e-mail controversy, however, momentum on climate change action is still building. Environmentalists are feeling increasingly hopeful that the Copenhagen summit could produce concrete action on emissions cuts, with U.S. President Barack Obama changing his schedule to arrive on the final day of negotiations. "The clock has ticked down to zero," said the U.N.'s climate chief Yvo de Boer on the first day of the talks. "After two years of negotiation, the time has come to deliver." There's nothing invented about that urgency.</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Georgia">http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1946082,00.html</font></b></span></p>

Edited December 7, 200916 yr by Sylph