Update: Former chief scientist for the British Government, Sir David King said the theft of a thousand e-mails and two thousand documents that caused a wave of skepticism to flood the Copenhagen climate summit was the sophisticated work of a foreign intelligence agency. In an interview with the Independent newspaper the scientist dismissed the idea that the leaks were run of the mill hacking. He also considers the timing of the leaks not mere coincident. Sir David said, "The e-mails date to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years." Dr. Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies foiled the hackers who had penetrated the RealClimate website on November 17th and attempted to load the e-mails onto the site. Later the stolen information appeared on the TomCity server in Tomsk, Russia. Dr. Schmidt agrees that the hack was sophisticated and required considerable skill and knowledge not usually possessed by a casual hacker.{first post 12.7.09}The leaked e-mails of senior climate scientists discussing how to manipulate and hide unhelpful data has caused a sensation among right-wing bloggers. But The Independent reports an even more sensational allegation has surfaced. A member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the computer hack gaining access to 13 years of data was not an amateur job. The leaked e-mails originally appeared on a server at the firm Tomcity located in the Siberian city of Tomsk [photo: The Independent]. The firm has a history of issuing statements praising hackers for efforts to disrupt perceived anti-Russian statements on the Web. The FSB also has a record of paying friendly hackers, as well as running coordinated cyber attacks against websites it considers unfriendly. Of course suspicious coincidence does not make a case, but as the head of the Climate Change Panel said, the hacks will fuel more skepticism about global warming and make agreement on action even more difficult. Russia has an ambivalent attitude towards making reductions in carbon levels for good reasons. The oil and gas industry is a major contributor to its GDP. Putting the immense Siberian natural resources off limits to development will cost the country billions as would modernizing its creaking industrial infrastructure to meet tougher emission standards. On the other side of the balance is the catastrophic potential of melting the vast northern permafrost on which railroads and entire cities like Yakutsk are built. If that is not bad enough, the permafrost caps huge deposits of methane gas which, if released into the atmosphere by melting, would drastically increase global temperatures perhaps to the level of another extinction event*.
*there have been at least five extinction events in geologic time. The two most well known are the Permian (largest in terms of genera lost) and the Cretaceous extinctions (Earth's most successful terrestrial animal order--dinosaurs--killed off). Climate change is thought to have played a significant role in both, although there is disagreement over the triggering event. The EPA has, bless its heart, declared greenhouse gas emissions hazardous to human health which will allow CO2 levels to be regulated as an air pollutant in the United States.