Hacked climate e-mail rebutted by scientists

A group of the nation's top scientists defended research on global climate change Friday against what they called a politically motivated smear campaign designed to foster public doubt about irrefutable scientific facts. The allegations came after skeptics seized upon a series of hacked e-mails at England's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit as evidence of a climate change hoax. The scientists from two major research centers, a national think tank and NASA, claimed during a telephone news conference that the e-mail exchanges were taken out of context in an attempt to influence pending greenhouse gas emissions policies. It is, they said, a cynical, blatantly dishonest effort to cloud the fact that the world is now confronting a huge, potentially disastrous climactic shift.