Scientist slams 'pathetic' climategate 2 email dump

WHAT'S HAPPENED?
More emails sent between prominent climate scientists have been released onto the internet by hackers on the eve of the COP17 UN climate change talks in Durban, South Africa. The hack is an apparent attempt by sceptics to discredit the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change.

The emails are thought to be from the same batch that were posted on the internet two years ago before UN climate talks in Copenhagen. The events were described then as 'climategate'. Inevitably yesterday's hack was immediately dubbed 'climategate 2'.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
The climategate email hack of 2009 led to accusations that the globally respected Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia was suppressing inconvenient data and victimising those who disagreed with their analysis that anthropogenic global warming is a reality. There were a series of inquiries, all of which exonerated the findings and methods of the scientists involved but criticised their attempts to hold back data from the public.

Like many sequels, Climategate 2 appears to be more of the same – literally. The CRU thinks the 'new' emails are from the same batch as those stolen and released in 2009. The New Scientist reports that the same prominent climate scientists involved in the original affair appear again: Phil Jones of the CRU and Michael Mann of Penn State University.
 
One of the emails seized on by sceptic bloggers this time round is from Peter Thorne at the Met Office and was sent to Jones among others way back in 2005. It read: "Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others…

"I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run."

Emails as seemingly damning as this appeared in the last batch but were generally regarded as illustrating the cut and thrust of scientific debate. The trouble for sceptics is that the science of climate change is stronger and more robust than ever, having been subjected to such scrutiny over the intervening two years.

Mann told the Christian Science Monitor the "criminal hacking of websites" was "a truly pathetic episode" and a sign of desperation. "I hardly see anything damning at all, despite these snippets all being taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled, in the first round, the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad."

WHAT NEXT?
A new inquiry, on top of the three that followed the original climategate scandal, seems unlikely – especially if it is confirmed that the new data is from the same batch.

Delegates will travel to COP17, which opens in Durban on 29 November, with the latest row ringing in their ears – but even before climategate 2 broke, few expected anything of substance to be agreed there.

As Bryan Walsh writes in Time magazine: "Ultimately, the emails are a sideshow - and the unhappy result that's almost certainly to come at the UN climate summit in Durban, will have little to do with them." ·