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British police have closed their three-year investigation into the theft of hundreds of climate science e-mails published to the Web, saying Wednesday there was no hope of finding any suspects behind the breach.

The theft caught researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit discussing ways to dodge right-to-know requests, keep opponents’ research out of peer-reviewed journals, and destroy data. The unguarded and occasionally unprofessional messages dented the reputation of several researchers and provided ammunition to skeptics of mainstream climate science, many of whom seized on the documents to claim that the threat of global warming was being overhyped.

Several overlapping inquiries have since vindicated the researchers’ science — if not their attitude — but the furor over the scandal dominated debate in the run-up to the crucial 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen.

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