As revelations in the “Climategate” scandal continue to undermine the theory of manmade climate change, the chief scientific advisor for former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair is claiming that "foreign spies" may be responsible for the leak of the embarrassing documents.
A report was posted at Independent.co.uk about claims mad by David King, who served as Blair’s advisor for seven years:
In an interview with The Independent, Sir David suggested the email leaks were deliberately designed to destabilise Copenhagen and he dismissed the idea that it was a run-of-the-mill hacking. It was carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States, he said.
However, King is not content merely to generically blame “a foreign government”; instead, he appears prepared to lay the blame at the door of the Russian government, in part, apparently, because of an effort by the hackers themselves to leave a trail of evidence leading back to Russia. According to the Independent:
Experts have suggested that loading the email file onto a Tomsk computer server may have been a clumsy attempt to lay a trail to the door of the Russian intelligence service, which has since denied any involvement in the hacking incident. Some commentators in Russia have said that China had more to gain from destabilising the Copenhagen conference than Russia.
Sir David said, however, that it was not possible to dismiss the possibility of Russia’s involvement. "If it was a job done on behalf of a government, then I suppose there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency," he said.
"If it was a maverick group then I suppose it could be the Americans, but I am hazarding a guess as much as anyone else. The only thing is, I’ve worked within government and I’ve seen this in operation," Sir David added. "It was a sophisticated and expensive operation. In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system which is a very likely source of finance. Right now, the American lobbyists are a very likely source of finance for this, so the finger must point to them," he said.
The confusing "blame game" that has emerged in the various theories of King and others with a blur of references to China, Russia, and "a maverick group" of Americans connected to “lobbyists” makes for a fairly complicated set of conspiracy theories.
However, even if the notion of a shadowy group of “skilled professionals” laboring on behalf of “anti-climate change lobbyists” were proven correct, what does not change is the fundamental problem confronting adherents of the theory of manmade climate change: the very existence of the leaked e-mails. The identity of the hackers and their motivations for releasing the e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia does not negate the facts contained within the e-mails, and those facts are devastating to the global-warming theory. As any good scientist knows, ultimately the facts are what matters, and the motivations of the hackers behind Climategate does not change the fact that the CRU e-mails authored by some of the most significant proponents of the climate-change theory have done much to effectively undermine their argument in the minds of the public.
