LONDON - A leading climate change scientist says the leak of documents stolen from a British research institute may be aimed at undermining talks at next month's Copenhagen global climate summit.
Kevin Trenberth -- of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado -- said in an interview Sunday that hackers cherry-picked from the stolen data and distributed selected documents to try to undermine scientific consensus on man-made climate change.
Britain's University of East Anglia said hackers last week stole data from its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research centre on climate change.
Skeptics claim correspondence shows collusion between scientists to overstate the case for global warming.
Trenberth says the hackers took data out of context.
