Troubled university attacks further 'Climategate' mass email release

Officials at the university say they are looking into the leak, in what they claim "appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change".

Hundreds of delegates are to meet next week in South Africa for a UN climate summit to discuss calls for a deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Internal messages that appeared to have come from the university's troubled Climate Action Research unit were reported to have been uploaded on a Russian website earlier today.

Two years ago, a series of e-mails written by climate experts from the university were hacked by an unknown group and loaded onto the internet, just before a UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

The leaked e-mails contained private correspondence dating back to 1996 and sparked a series of inquiries following accusations of cash-swindling and selective use of evidence to support the theory of climate change.

The exchanges, which became known as Climategate', revealed scientists making jokes about climate sceptics and described how to select and present data to make the global warming argument appear more convincing.

Sceptics accused the team of twisting data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 fourth assessment report, which forms the basis for policy-making by many governments and decision-makers around the world.

A statement by the University of East Anglia this evening confirmed: "While we have had only a limited opportunity to look at this latest post of 5,000 emails, we have no evidence of a recent breach of our systems.

"If genuine (the sheer volume of material makes it impossible to confirm at present that they are all genuine), these emails have the appearance of having been held back after the theft of data and emails in 2009 to be released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks.

"This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and a number of studies – including, most recently, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group.

"As in 2009, extracts from emails have been taken completely out of context. Following the previous release of emails, scientists highlighted by the controversy have been vindicated by independent review, and claims that their science cannot or should not be trusted are entirely unsupported. They, the University and the wider research community have stood by the science throughout, and continue to do so," it added.

Several inquiries cleared the university of all accusations of fraud and data manipulation but did recommend it change the way it handled requests for information – the final conclusions of a US report, which called for details of spent cash, are still awaited.


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