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Earth

Researchers must stay on the moral high ground

25 November 2009

The disclosure of personal emails can be embarrassing. And so it proved this week when hundreds of them, accumulated over more than a decade in the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK, tumbled into the public domain as a result of an illegal hack.

Climate change deniers claim that the emails expose a conspiracy at work to make human-induced global warming a fact. A columnist for the Guardian newspaper in London said that the emails could scarcely be more damaging. One blog for the Daily Telegraph, also in London, called it “Climategate:…

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