With impeccable timing, a new round of hacked emails from professors at Britain's East Anglia University has surfaced, about a week before the start of a global climate change conference in Durban, South Africa. The same hacker who released emails from the same professors in 2009 that appeared to show the scientists inappropriately manipulating data to falsely emphasize human-caused climate change has now made public a new batch of messages that apparently do the same thing. The first batch of emails, released shortly before the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen, led to a series of investigations that eventually found the science was sound, The New York Times reports. "This second batch deals less with climate science than with how some prominent scientists framed the issue and recruited colleagues to serve on panels such as the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Washington Post reports. But as The Times points out, the hacker perhaps needn't have bothered: "Climate scientists said the release was likely intended to torpedo any potential progress in the Durban negotiations, though not much progress had been expected anyway given that countries have been reluctant to commit to binding emissions limits."

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Adam Martin