In their Tuesday-released report about the stepped-up pace of climate change, three scientists - Richard Somerville of Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Michael Mann of Penn State; and Eric Steig of University of Washington – said that last week’s leaked emails controversy was apparently a part of a “smear campaign,” attempting to wreck the climate summit in Copenhagen next month.

The clamor about the leaked emails began on November 20, with an unknown hacker breaking into a server at the well-known Climate Research Unit (CRU) of Britain’s University of East Anglia; stealing nearly 169 megabytes of emails from the institute’s computers; and posting them online.

While climate skeptics said that the leaked documents are a clear revelation of the deliberate effort by some scientists to overemphasize the effects of man-made global warming, the University said that the rather candid messages were a part of the ongoing debate among leading change specialists about the ways in which to address recent data showing temperatures leveling off.

Steig called the skeptics’ attempt as a “desperate” one launched right before the Copenhagen conference, while Mann termed it as a convenient “cherry picking” episode.

Mann said: “What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world.” He further added that the skeptics had largely turned “something innocent into something nefarious.”