LONDON — A leading climate-change scientist whose private e-mails were included in thousands of documents stolen by hackers and posted online said Sunday that the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month’s global climate summit in Denmark.
Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder said he believes the hackers who stole a decade’s worth of correspondence from a British university’s computer server deliberately distributed only those documents that could help attempts by skeptics to undermine the scientific consensus on man-made climate change.
The University of East Anglia in eastern England said hackers stole from its computer server last week about a decade’s worth of data from its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change.
About 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents have been posted on websites and seized on by climate-change skeptics, who claim correspondence shows collusion among scientists to overstate the case for global warming and that some have manipulated evidence.
“It is right before the Copenhagen debate. I’m sure that is not a coincidence,” Trenberth said in a telephone interview.
Representatives of 191 nations will attend the Copenhagen climate summit in December to seek a new global treaty limiting emissions of greenhouse gases.
Trenberth, a lead author on the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments, said he had found 102 of his own e-mails posted online.
