Sir David King, the UK’s former chief scientist, strongly believes that the theft of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was carried out by highly-paid professionals, perhaps a foreign intelligence agency, and was deliberately designed to destabilize the Copenhagen climate talks last December.

The highly sophisticated hacking operation involved stealing more than 1,000 emails and some 2,000 documents from a backup server at the University which would have been difficult to access remotely. 

According to The Independent newspaper, King believes the hack “was carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States.” 

"It was a sophisticated and expensive operation. In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system which is a very likely source of finance. Right now, the American lobbyists are a very likely source of finance for this, so the finger must point to them," he said.

Hours before President Obama leaves for the Copenhagen climate summit, Greenpeace activists deployed an emergency response team to declare the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters a “Climate Policy Hostage Area,” and a “Global Warming Crime Scene.” 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already done everything it can to kill the chances of a legally binding agreement emerging from the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Now it can sit back, relax and watch the action from a coffee shop outside the United Nations conference, content that its efforts to derail U.S. climate policy have effectively hamstrung the international negotiations.

As explained clearly in “The Global Climate Change Lobby,” an excellent new report from the Center for Public Integrity, corporate lobbyists and trade associations focus their attention on tampering with domestic legislative efforts, and then stand by and watch as their positions and talking points contaminate international negotiations indirectly.

Business interests (or BINGOs as they’re called in U.N. speak) “can have very little effect at these meetings,” according to Nick Campbell, a European industry lobbyist who has represented the International Chamber of Commerce at U.N. climate talks since the early 1990s when the global effort to fight climate change began with the Rio Earth Summit.

If the Chamber or other lobbying groups send any staff to international summits like the upcoming Copenhagen conference, their goal is to “loiter” in the coffee shops and collect business cards from delegates they can target later on legislative matters back home.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has announced in its latest World Energy Outlook that every year of delayed action to address climate change will add $500 Billion to the price tag of saving the planet.

The climate denial industry should foot the bill, since they are responsible for causing the delay.

In the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, a growing number of government leaders from around the world - and even high level United Nations representatives - have suggested that an ambitious, legally binding agreement is all but impossible to achieve in Denmark this December.  Some have indicated that it may take six months to a year beyond Copenhagen to cement a global agreement.  Nearly all point the finger at the United States for causing this delay.

But it is not President Obama’s fault, a fact that is difficult for many outside the U.S. to comprehend. Shouldn’t the U.S. president, often considered the “most powerful man in the world,” be able to commit the nation to specific emissions reduction targets and financial contributions to help developing countries deal with climate change?

It is not that simple, though. 

The real blame lies at the feet of the climate denial industry, which has spent the past 20 years working to confuse the U.S. public and lawmakers about climate change. More than any other single factor, the climate denial industry can claim responsibility for the present stalemate in both domestic U.S. and international climate policy debates.

Groups like the Heartland Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, American Enterprise Institute and a host of oil and coal industry front groups, including the now-infamous American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), have collectively thrown a wrench in the cogs of U.S. climate policy, grinding the nation’s response to climate change to a halt.

At the U.S. delegation press conference this afternoon on the final day of the Barcelona climate talks, I asked U.S. deputy climate change envoy Jonathan Pershing what effect, if any, Senator James Inhofe (R-Denial) might have on the process in Copenhagen, and whether GOP intransigence is hurting Obama’s ability to come up with a firm number on U.S. emissions reductions.

While most climate activists are focused solely on the Waxman-Markey legislation that is due to be voted on by the US Congress any time now, a group of youth climate activists are taking the time to make sure that President Obama and Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel know that the youth movement demands strong action at the upcoming