The "Climategate" dispute over global warming science was reignited yesterday when thousands more hacked emails from climate researchers, some of them potentially damaging, were released online on the eve of a vital UN climate conference.
The private messages between senior scientists in Britain and America, hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA), were released five days before delegates from nearly 200 countries meet in Durban, South Africa, in an effort to agree a new international global warming treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, which runs out next year.
The emails' release was widely seen as an effort to destabilise the Durban meeting, as they were part of the same batch of emails originally hacked from the CRU's computers in November 2009 and released in an effort to damage the UN climate conference in Copenhagen the following month.
The 2009 hacking, which became known as "Climategate" and is still being investigated by the police, was seized on by climate sceptics who said the emails showed researchers manipulating data to support the theory that global warming was man-made and obstructing requests for information.
A series of reviews in Britain and the US later cleared researchers of any scientific impropriety and said the affair had not undermined the scientific basis of global warming, although the university was criticised for its failure to be sufficiently open and respond properly to Freedom of Information requests. Some of the emails did not show scientists in the best of lights and are likely to have contributed to a growth in climate scepticism. In yesterday's release, a compressed zip file containing more than 5,000 further, hitherto unseen emails was suddenly made available to download on a Russian server ~ as had happened in 2009 ~ and links to the file were posted on climate-sceptic blogs. This time those responsible, calling themselves FOIA, added a message appearing to equate fighting climate change with abandoning the fight against poverty.
Last night, UEA could not officially confirm that the emails were genuine, but the university said that they "had the appearance" of being part of the batch that was hacked two years ago.
The emails, which all date from before 2009, are apparently between some of the most senior figures in climate change research in the UK and the US, led by Professor Phil Jones, who was the head of the CRU at the time of the original hacking two years ago and who stood down from his post while the inquiries were carried out.
Other figures mentioned appeared to include Professor Jones's CRU colleague Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office and Sir John Houghton, formerly head of the Met Office and a leading figure in the IPCC.
