Climategate Deja vu

For those following the climate change 'debate', you could be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja vu today. Reminiscent of the 2009 'climategate' scandal, 5000 + emails and documents from the University of East Anglia have been leaked just weeks out from the UN climate negotiations in Durban. It is not believed to be a seperate incident, rather just a series of emails left over from the original hacking in 2009.

In a statement from the University of East Anglia it noted that all of the “new” emails date back to the original 2009 hacking incident:

“…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 number of studies – including, most recently, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group.”

Climate skeptics will be sure to cherry pick statements from these emails and take them out of context as a means to try and discredit the science, even though since the 2009 scandal three official inquiries in the UK and two in the US could not find fault with the science. It seems some people just love a good conspiracy theory over good old fashioned evidence based science.

I am sure there will be more to come on this story.

Update: Phil Jones at UEA has responded by providing the context for the cherry-picked phrases taken from the hacked emails. His response may be found here.

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