Climategate hackers may get away with it

In 2009 some hackers released a large amount of emails that were stolen from the servers of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Climate change deniers selectively picked individual phrases out of a mountain of emails and claimed these cherry-picked phrases proved misconduct on the part of climate change scientists and a conspiracy to cover-up any contrary viewpoint. The emails were leaked just before an international conference was to meet in Copenhagen to address climate change. The hackers have never been identified, but the computers used were located in Saudi Arabia. The scientists involved in this scandal have been investigated and cleared of any wrongdoing. A total of eight investigations were conducted and all of them cleared the scientists.

Of course, that has not stopped the climate change deniers of claiming otherwise.

Now, the U.K. police are closing the investigation into who was responsible for the hacking attack. The three-year statute of limitations is about the expire and they don't have any leads on who the culprits are. They did manage to clear everyone at the University of East Anglia. The attack was very sophisticated and was conducted by people that were very knowledgeable and adept at computer hacking.

But, even without knowing who the hackers were, we can deduce a lot. The fact that Saudi Arabia appears to have been involved says everything we need to know. Does anyone really think the Arabs are working in our best interests? And, the fact that climate change skeptics are still using false claims about Climategate to support their claims shows how invalid their stand on global climate change really is. If they had real science to support their arguments they wouldn't need to engage in false arguments like that.

What is most interesting is to realize that there are people out there who know who is responsible for these attacks are do nothing. If their stand on the issues is good, then they would turn in the criminals. You can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep.

And, we see what kind of company the skeptics keep.