UN claims University of East Anglia was deliberately hacked to derail climate summit

It was obvious. The timing was just too much of a coincidence. The UN is now claiming that data from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was hacked into by climate change skeptics intent on derailing the talks which begin in Copenhagen tomorrow.

Achim Steiner, director of the UN Environment Programme, had this to say:

This is not ‘climategate’ it’s ‘hackergate’. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place [Watergate] 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, vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that:

If you look at that mass of e-mails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data but it’s a carefully made selection of e-mails and documents that’s not random at all. This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs

You can read the article which appeared in The Times here.

But please, please, lets not go referring to this as ‘climategate’ anymore. That cliche is so overused and is just annoying these days. Wish they’d find something else to call scandals.