The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide “smoking gun” evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

The files, which in total amount to 160MB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: “We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry.”

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.

“It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating,” said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. “You can’t tell what they are talking about. Scientists say ‘trick’ not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something – a short cut can be a trick.”

In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying “in an odd way this is cheering news”.

Ward said that if the emails are correct, they “might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public.” But he added, “Let’s separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way.”

The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data – reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. “Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data,” he said. “At the heart of this is basic physics.”

Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. “It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that.”

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: “I’m not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I’m hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows.”

When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.

The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is “value added” by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.

Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, “Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world’s leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we’re experiencing is not down to natural variation.”

“With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic.”

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: “If you looked through any organisation’s emails from the last 10 years you’d find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke.”

• This article was amended on Wednesday 25 November 2009. A unit was garbled: the files amount to 160MB of data, not 160MbB. This has been corrected.

Article by: The Guardian in the UK

As an advocate for climate change I took part in a meeting that was one of many meetings held around the world.

Greenpeace hosted 1,ooos of meetings all over the world to address the issue that climate change is real, and we need to take action!

Every person around the world should reduce their carbon footprint and bring down our emissions to 350!!…. not 390!!!!,  because the level of 390 (our current fossil fuel emission level)  is on the path to causing devastating effects for our planet

From Asia, Africa, Europe, Washington D.C., and even Campbell, CA held meetings that were attended by millions to let political figures know we will not sit by and do nothing.

Although this meeting was rather small compared to the others, I still feel like I made a difference.

If you would like to find out more about the day please visit www.greenactionhub.com

Global Warming Culprits: Cars and … Cows

“Cows contribute more to climate change than cars”

Cows that are fed corn rather than grass they burp up more Methane gases into the atmosphere.

As a result, the cows contribute to putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Solution: Buy beef that is grass fed, you can find this beef at Whole Food Market. Another benefit of buying grass fed and free range beef is you are eating animals that are treated in a more humanely way.

Solution: Everytime you make a regular paper bag, you must consider the energy used to cut down the tree with labor and machines, and the fossil fuels you use to transport the logs to the factories. Not only are fossil fuels used for all above the above, it is also used for breaking down the logs and converting them to actual paper products. The best alternative is remembering to bring your reusable bags to the grocery store.

• Alternative Energy: Phase out your dependence on using fossil fuel energy.

Solution: By choosing to drive a energy-efficient hybrid car or electric car, you are able to significantly cut down your expensive visits to the gas pump. Also, some electric car now has features that allow you to convert the car’s breaking energy to in turn give energy to giving the car air conditioning)

• Use Eco-friendly Toilet Paper and Paper Towels

Solution: If  you buy “Seventh Generation” brand, Whole Foods, or Trader Joe’s paper towel and toilet paper you are purchasing 100% recycled paper. As a a result you are using recycled paper opposed to rainforest tress that are cut down in order for you to have your commodity)

On October 24th greenpeace members, businesses, and various publics will hold a meeting in their hometown to discuss what “we” can do to reduce our carbon footprint on this planet.

Before the meeting you are supposed to email your local meeting facilitator and state your own contribution of what you will do to help reduce your own footprint.

If you are interested please contact www.greenpeace.org or www.greenactionhub.com

A Celebrity that is not GOING GREEN: Celine Dion

Greenpeace greets world leaders with this sign on a bridge in Pittsburgh with a message about climate change (2009).