Sneaky cyber-thieves have made millions by fraudulently obtaining European greenhouse gas emissions allowances and reselling them.

The scam has hampered trading of the credits, which are seen as an important tool in curbing climate change, in several European countries.  According to Financial Times Deutschland, hackers sent e-mails to several companies in Europe, Japan and New Zealand which appeared to originate from the Potsdam-based German Emissions Trading Authority , part of the EU's Emission Trading System.

The cyber-thieves then exploited the user data that was entered into their spoof Web site to transfer emissions allowances to other accounts, mainly in Denmark and Britain, from which they were quickly resold.

Great Richard Grave piece on Huffington Post points out the parallel's between the curret "gate" - Climategate - and the original paranoid right wing break-in that gate rise to the unimaginative, but in this case appropriate suffix.

As Graves points out, Watergate showed the worst side of a paranoid right-wing group clinging desperately to power. They committed a quite famous break-in, got nothing useful for their troubles and then crashed historically trying to cover their tracks.

This "gate" began the same way. We can only hope it ends with similar calamity for the perpetrators.

While the well-intentioned legions settled into the first full day of wrangling the minutaie of what may emerge as a Copenhagen climate accord, a well-aged rump of climate change deniers continued the campaign to hijack the talks Tuesday.

The most obvious denier effort was the first of a two-day alternative conference in the elegant Danish Writers' Union building in downtown Copenhagen. There, a greying, mostly male crowd, numbering between 30 and 50 through the day, gathered to deny the science and denounce the 15,000+ conference goers across town.

But regardless that the assembled codgers and their mostly superannuated speakers are howling in the scientific wilderness - denying sea level rises that are already occurring and celebrating the robust nature of glaciers already in retreat - the denier frenzy continues to disrupt productivity in the modern conference centre a couple of kilometres away.

There is a darkening sky hanging over Copenhagen.

It's not that things are looking worse on this first day of the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - COP15. If anything, there seems to be an unlikely optimism at the sprawling and crowded Bella Centre.

Rather, it's just Denmark in December. This is a northern capital - at a higher latitutde than Moscow, not quite so high as the Canadian tar sands capital of Fort McMurray. The city enjoys a scant seven hours of daylight at this time of year, an amount that will continue to diminish for the duration of the conference.

Of course the question, at this dark hour, is whether it will be followed by a new dawn. Organizers would like you to think so.

Alternativ Klimakonference closed to critics

No day can end badly when you begin by getting thrown out of a conference on climate change denial.

Even so, it was disappointing just to know that - on the eve of COP15 - Copenhagen is playing host to such an event and more disappointing yet to learn that there is a robust, if tiny rump of homegrown denial beyond even the famous (if famously discredited) Bjorn Lomborg.

The Alernative Climate Conference on Sunday Dec. 6, 2009 was booked into a small room in Christiansborg, the Danish Parliament building. In order to gain access, you had to have signed up days ago - and there was no press table, or any avenue of appeal, even for someone with UN press accreditation. Carefully checking off names at the door, it was clear that organizers had already identified their target audience.

The speakers list was also a well-known group. Usual suspects: Roger Pielke, the infamous former scientist Fred Singer, the failed politician and former journalist Christopher Monckton, and oil and gas company director Leighton Steward filled in as the out of town talent. Locals included the astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen, from the Technical University of Denmark, Bjarne Andresen of the University of Copenhagen and hometown boy Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo.

Given the dated nature of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel of some of the world's most respected climate scientists have put together an update called The Copenhagen Diagnosis.

The news is worse than predicted on every front.

• Global carbon dioxide emissions are up 40 per cent from 1990.
• The global warming trend has continued, despite a temporary decline in solar energy.
• Both Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass at an accelerating rates, as are glaciers the world over.
• Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice during 2007-2009 was about 40% greater than the average prediction from the IPCC's last report.
• Global average sea-level has risen at a rate 80% above past IPCC predictions over the past 15 years.
• Several vulnerable elements in the climate system (e.g. continental ice-sheets. Amazon rainforest, West African monsoon and others) could pass irreversible tipping points if warming continues in a business-as-usual way throughout this century.