STATE COLLEGE — A Penn State professor and climate researcher said he welcomes scrutiny into leaked e-mails at the center of an international controversy over what's causing global warming after the university said it would look into the issue.

Hackers breached servers at a climate change research center in London two weeks ago, stealing thousands of e-mails and other documents and posting them on the Internet.

The correspondence covered more than a decade of communication between leading British and U.S. scientists, including Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann. His research has been a target of criticism for years from skeptics of man-made global warming theories.

Penn State formed a committee this week to look into the matter after its College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, in which Mann works, announced in a statement last week that it would conduct an inquiry.

The statement called Mann a "highly regarded" faculty member whose work had been reviewed and deemed sound in a National Academy of Sciences report in 2006.

Some questions raised through leaked e-mails "may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases," the statement said.

Mann said he welcomed the inquiry.

"They are just reviewing the facts and (looking) into whether there is any validity to the specious claims, in my view, that are being made," he said in a phone interview Wednesday night. "That's exactly what they should be doing, and I am fully in support of that."

The security breach at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia leaked correspondence that critics have said proves scientists may have hidden evidence and overstated the case for man-made global warming.

The British university on Thursday said it also will investigate whether scientists fudged data on global warming. The unit's director stepped down earlier this week pending the result of the investigation.

Skeptics have long targeted Mann's research into what is known as the "hockey stick" theory, which suggests the past five decades had been the hottest in at least several centuries, and that man-made global warming was to blame.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., singled out Mann at a Congressional hearing Wednesday, saying the 2006 NAS study showed Mann's hockey stick was incorrect and that his theory was discredited.