JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia’s Chief Climate Negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban has said that an e-mail leak from the Climatic Research Unit in Norwich, UK, will have a “huge impact” on this week’s UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
He made it clear that he expects it to derail the main objective of the summit — to agree limitations in greenhouse gas emissions.
“It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he told BBC News. “Climate is changing for thousands of years, but for natural and not human-induced reasons.”
The Kingdom has seized on a series of stolen British university e-mails to become the first country to officially cast doubt on the consensus about man-made climate change ahead of the summit.
The e-mails stolen from researchers at the University of East Anglia have been seen by some as undermining the case that human activity is overheating the planet. The e-mails were illegally hacked from a computer system at the university and then stored on a Russian Web server.
“On Nov. 19, a computer in Saudi Arabia was used to post a link to the stolen e-mails on a website popular with climate change skeptics and deniers,” claims a report in The Australian.
The hacked E-mails suggest climate change does not have a human cause, according to Al-Sabban. “The issue will have a “huge impact” on the upcoming UN climate summit, with countries unwilling to cut emissions,” he told BBC News. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, has long been reluctant to agree to any action to reduce carbon emissions and has only recently gone along with the 192 other governments attending the Copenhagen talks in accepting scientific evidence of man-made climate change.
But Al-Sabban has suggested that there was now no longer any point in seeking an agreement to reduce emissions. “It appears from the details... that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he said.
“Climate is changing ...but for natural and not human-induced reasons. So whatever the global community does to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have no effect on the climate’s natural variability.”
