From a story in The Melbourne Age:

Professor Trenberth is a bruised survivor of the so-called ”climategate” scandal, which involved the theft and publication of thousands of emails that had been sent between some of the world’s most influential climate researchers.

While he and his colleagues were cleared by a series of investigations, the people who hacked the email system at Britain’s University of East Anglia have never been caught, and the case was closed, unsolved, earlier this year.

Professor Trenberth believes it had a big impact on public debates about climate science. ”It made an immense difference – the level of vitriol and hate we received,” he said. ”Not only do we have waves of attacks when we publish and it ends up on a denialist website, but it has affected politicians.”

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently had its climate change-related research budget slashed by a fifth, affecting Professor Trenberth’s peers, as a result of online campaigns against climate scientists, he said. He believes uncertainties in climate change models scientists rely upon is being falsely inflated as a general uncertainty about the status of climate science.

”With the links between weather and climate for instance – we know they are there, but the specific numbers need work,” Professor Trenberth said.

h/t Old Ranga from Oz