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UN OFFICIALS have likened the theft of emails 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 emails 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 emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data, but it's a carefully made selection of emails and documents that's not random at all. This is 13 years of data and it's not a job of amateurs"...
