LONDON: A leading climate change scientist whose private e-mails are included in thousands of documents that were stolen by hackers and posted online said on Sunday the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month's global climate summit in Denmark.

Kevin Trenberth, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado, said he believes the hackers who stole a decade's worth of correspondence from a British university's computer server deliberately distributed only those documents that could help attempts by skeptics to undermine the scientific consensus on manmade climate change.

Trenberth, a respected atmospheric scientist, said it did not appear that all the documents stolen from the university had been distributed on the Internet by the hackers.