Climategate Row Erupts Again As New Emails Leak

Thousands of stolen emails from climate researchers have made their way onto the internet, in a leak which threatens to disrupt a UN climate conference in Durban (COP17), held in just five days time.

The emails, sent between senior British and American scientists, are believed to have been taken from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and are part of the batch of emails released in 2009’s ‘Climategate’ scandal, in which climate-change deniers attempted to use scientists’ communications to discredit the science of global warming.

Climategate Part Two

Five thousand emails have been made available on a Russian sever, just as they were in 2009, and were immediately seized upon by climate change sceptics.

UEA was not able to confirm if the emails were genuine, but said that they were similar in tone to those hacked the last time. The emails all date from before 2009 and could prove embarrassing for some of the scientists involved.

The original Climategate scandal erupted after hackers stole private emails from the researchers and were use to criticise scientists in the run-up to the COP15 UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. It had been hoped that Cop15 would set mandatory carbon emisssion limits for the world’s nations, but it failed – and it has been argued that Climategate contributed to this.

The emails did not reflect positively on the researchers, but an inquiry in July 2010 cleared the scientists of altering climate data to improve the case for man-made global warming. But they were also criticised for not being open enough and for not dealing with Freedom of Information acts more effectively.

However the failure of the conference and the Climategate scandal had lasting repercussions as it was revealed that half of business leaders did not believe in man-made climate change.