Climategate Update

There was speculation on Sunday that hackers working for the Russian secret service were responsible for the theft of controversial emails in the ‘Climategate’ scandal. The speculation is just that. Speculation. There seems to be no real evidence that the Russians were involved, other than the location in which the emails first publicly appeared.

Achim Steiner, the director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said the theft of emails from CRU, which is a world-renowned centre for climate research, had similarities with the Watergate scandal which brought down US President Richard Nixon.

But he said: “This is not climategate, it’s hackergate. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place [the Watergate building] where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so.

“So the media should direct its investigations into that.”

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he believed the theft of the emails was not the work of amateur climate sceptics.

“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” he told The Times.

“If you look at that mass of emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data but it’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random at all.

“This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs.”

Which actually tends to lend credence to the growing speculation that the work was done by an inside "whistleblower" and not outside hackers. In either case, the United Nations, the British Government, democratic leaders in the United States and the leftist media are all trying to focus the attention on the "hackers" calling the current situation "Hackergate," rather than on the real problem: falsified data which has cost governments worldwide and private industry worldwide billions and billions of dollars, both directly and indirectly.