Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are now meeting in Copenhagen to wrangle over the details of a new global climate deal — a potential successor to the Kyoto Protocol. See Nature’s Road to Copenhagen special for more coverage.

After months of preparation, the Copenhagen climate summit finally kicked off today. Nature’s Jeff Tollefson has a run down of the big questions over on Nature News.

Elsewhere in the world, there’s been another IT-related climate theft incident.

Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria in Canada and the IPCC, says there have been two successful break-ins at his office. An old computer was stolen (National Post).

“They went through my desk drawers. It was bizarre and the only computer that wasn’t secured was stolen. It wasn’t secured because it was broken. There was nothing on it,” says Weaver (CanWest News).

A university spokeswoman also said there had been attempts to hack into climate scientists’ computers and people posing as staff to gain access to offices. The incidents come after the hacking of emails at the University of East Anglia and the subsequent ‘Climategate’ pseudo-scandal (see our past coverage).

In a twist to that story, there are now media reports that the hacking was carried out by the Russian secret service. This theory seems to be based on the fact that the emails may have been initially leaked from a server located in the Siberian city of Tomsk and hackers in Tomsk have in the past been used by the Russian secret service to attack the websites of people they disapprove of.

“It’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random. This is 13 years of data, and it’s not a job of amateurs,” says Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC (Independent, Daily Telegraph) .

He added, “It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services.”

Saudi Arabia has already cited the stolen emails in claiming that humanity may not be causing global warming.