By Raphael G. Satter
Well-funded US lobbyists or a foreign intelligence agency may have been behind the theft of climate emails from the University of East Anglia last year, the former chief scientific adviser to the British government has said.
David King was quoted in The Independent newspaper as saying the theft of more than 1,000 emails and other documents from a server at the university's climate research centre last year seemed too professional to be the result of a lone hacker.
"I know there's a possibility they had a good hacker working for these people, but it was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation," King told the paper. "There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. There are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was such a group of people."
King didn't name any specific agency or lobbying group. In a brief telephone interview with the AP from Italy, he cautioned that he was not involved in the police investigation or the university's inquiry into the hacking, both of which are still ongoing.
He said powerful business interests in the United States had devoted a huge amount of money "to destabilize the science of climate change" and probability pointed either to someone acting on their behalf or to foreign spies.
The leaked emails exploded across internet last November and were seized upon by sceptics as proof climate scientists had exaggerated or invented the threat of man-made climate change.
An AP review showed the scientists stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data - but provided no proof the science of global warming itself was being faked.
No one had been arrested or charged in the attack. Police declined comment on King's statements.
King, who was Britain's top science adviser from 2000 to 2007 and once lectured at the University of East Anglia, said the sometimes nasty emails laid bare the weakness of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-affiliated group charged with setting out the scientific establishment's best guess of how the climate is changing.
"This is an artificial way of seeking consensus among the scientific community," King told AP, adding that those who challenge the panel's assessment "are seen to be rocking the boat, and this in my view is extremely unfortunate."
AP