Trying to change the subject of people behaving badly

Times:

UN officials have likened the theft of e-mails from university climate researchers to the Watergate scandal, after claiming computer hackers were probably paid by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the theft from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics, but was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact that the e-mails were first uploaded to a sceptic website from a computer in Russia was an indication that the culprit was paid.

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

Mr van Ypersele said that publication of the e-mails had undermined efforts by the IPCC to convince the 192 countries at the summit, which begins today, that they needed to act fast on emissions. “We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators.”

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These guys really want to avoid a discussion of the content of the emails. Look, if these guys were operating in good faith there would have been nothing in the content of the emails and other data to be concerned about. What the emails showed was extreme unprofessional conduct and in some case conduct that appears to be fraudulent.

Talking about the hackers is a diversion from a conversation these guys still want to avoid.