A new batch of emails similar to the original Climategate emails, which were released in November 2009, were leaked Tuesday morning. The 5,000 new emails, pirated from University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, appear to have been culled at around the same time as the first round.
They have been released just days before the upcoming United Nations Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa. The first round of emails were released a month before the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
The university has yet to confirm the authenticity of the emails, reported the Guardian, but Michael Mann — the climate scientist at the center of the first Climategate data falsifying scandal — said the emails appear to include his.
Climategate 1.0 included the anonymous release of 1,000 emails and included communications between climate scientists from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that showed climate scientists conspiring to manipulate and obscure data that might potentially contradict theories of rising global climate temperatures. Professor Mann, the scientist who authored a theory of climate change that depicted the rise in temperatures on a graph shaped like a hockey stick, was implicated in the first round.
“Well, they look like mine,” Mann said of the emails, “but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”
The emergence of the new emails has GOP lawmakers calling for further reining in of the Obama EPA.
Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe — who has said for several years that a crisis of confidence would develop in the IPCC if significant reforms were not made to the organizations’s peer-review process — released a statement on Tuesday stating that, in addition to the IPCC’s faulty science and Climategate 1.0, the emails are “just one more reason to halt the EPA’s job killing global warming agenda.”
Inhofe said that the Obama EPA’s global warming regulations are the result of “endangerment findings” based “on the flawed science of the IPCC.”
“The crisis of confidence in the IPCC translates into a crisis of confidence in the EPA’s endangerment finding,” said Inhofe. “The IPCC science has already disintegrated under the weight of its own flaws, and I believe it will only be a matter of time before the endangerment finding follows suit. It’s time for the Obama administration to stop trying to resurrect policies that are all pain for no gain, and get to work on reviving our economy.”