(CNSNews.com) - As President Barack Obama prepares to travel to a global climate summit next week in Copenhagen, the White House is dismissing the "climategate" controversy that has arisen over the leak of email communications between top climate-change scientists that some skeptics say cast doubt on the legitimacy of the science behind the theory that human activity is causing global warming.Obama will be attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference on Dec. 9. The conference in Copenhagen comes soon after the emails released by a computer hacker has led one Republican U.S. senator to call for an investigtation.
Some global warming skeptics have referred to the e-mails--from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in England--as "climategate."
But White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs dismissed the controversy on Monday, saying that most people don't dispute global warming.
"In the order of several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening," Gibbs said. "I don't think that any of that is, quite frankly among most people, in dispute."
Leading global-warming skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, wants an investigation into the content of the e-mails. He has asked all government agencies to retain e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.
"It appears that, in an attempt to conceal the manipulation of climate data, information disclosure laws may have been violated," Inhofe said in a statement last week. "I certainly don't condone the manner in which these emails were released; however, now that they are in the public domain, lawmakers have an obligation to determine the extent to which the so-called 'consensus' of global warming, formed with billions of taxpayer dollars, was contrived in the biased minds of the world's leading climate scientists."