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Climategate controversy has echoes of Watergate, UN says
UN officials likened the Climategate controversy to Watergate today, claiming that computer hackers who stole thousands of e-mails sent by a senior climate scientist were probably paid to do it by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit.
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the theft from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics but 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.
"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 Copenhagen that they needed to act fast on emissions.
"One effect of this is to make scientists lose lots of time checking things.
"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 the theft of e-mails had echoes of the Watergate scandal.
"This is not 'climategate' it's 'hackergate'. Let's not forget the word 'gate' refers to a place [Watergate] where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so. So the media should direct its investigations into that."
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