OK, maybe the CRU hackers weren't Russian teenagers

A few weeks ago I speculated with reasonable cause that the hackers who broken into the Climate Reseearch Unit computers and absconded with email conversations of researchers, thus precipitating the so-misnamed "Climategate", were paid Russian teenagers. Paid by the oil and gas industry of Russian who would prefer that their clients keep burning oil and not splitting atoms or spinning turbines. And this seemed somewhat supported by the fact that the email file got posted on a server in Russia which had been utilized by this sort of thing before.

Well, the Russians claimed they didn't do it. And searching around, it seems that they are vindicated. Even though the stuff was posted on a Russian server, there's been sufficient tracing to find that it came through Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with an IP address deep in the scientific center of China -- "the Research Institute of Forest Ecology and Environment Protection", no less.

Now does that make sense? What would motivate someone(s) working on environmental protection in China to undermine the climate change community in the West?

How about -- someones that don't want the environmental protections of slowing down fossil fuel energy production to slow down the go-go-go economy of China? What if the RIFEEP is a rip-off; a front that has a nice sounding environmental name, like the "World Climate Report", the propaganda arm of Patrick Michaels, and they really are intending not to research forests and protect the environment? It's been done before. If this is the true heart of the matter, then it makes the Chinese look remarkably nefarious.

But given the next post on the oil spill, you can understand why. The Chinese government -- if you can call it that -- doesn't care about the environment as long as the economy is pushing them to the #1 spot of world domination.

Here's the article discussing this:

Chinese Hackers May Have Leaked ‘Climategate’ E-mails

This is from the original Daily Mail article:

"Several professors from this institute are regulars at climate change conferences where they have shared a platform with the University of East Anglia experts.
After our enquiries in Malaysia began, the suspect computer links to China were suddenly cut."

So this appears to be where the electronic trail leads -- and probably ends.