A group of hackers has hacked the servers of a prestigious climate research laboratory. Many data have been stolen, including thousands of emails exchanged between specialists from around the world between 1996 and November 2009. Everything was put on line on a Russian server. The aim is, it seems, to discredit the report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and to call for more transparency.
The pirates have prepared well. Neither the date nor the target was chosen at random. The flight came just days before the opening of the Copenhagen climate change summit, while the target laboratory, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the British University of East Anglia, is one of the key players in the IPCC report. The researchers whose correspondence was revealed participated in the writing of the report. The university confirmed that information had been stolen, but said it does not know if all that has been published is authentic.
At the center of the controversy, exchanges taken out of context fuel the debates with more or less bad faith. For example, a sentence written by a researcher suggests that results have been tampered with using a "trick" to hide a discrepancy in results on a diagram. Reading the entire conversation shows that it was just a matter of deciding how to present the work to account for a known issue related to studying the growth of certain trees. The results used by the IPCC in its report are those of the University of East Anglia CRU. In an interview with point.fr, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, research director at CEA (to which the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences is affiliated) and co-author of the IPCC report, explains that the British laboratory "is one of the two great known for their expertise, with that of NASA ". American researchers have, according to her, arrived at results "extremely close", "to five hundredths of a degree", the meteorological data used being the same.
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