Climate data allegations to be investigated

Physics Today : Rajendra Pachauri , the director general of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s The Report program that the IPCC will investigate allegations of data manipulation brought to light by the release of e-mails from a hacked server at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia .

“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he said. “We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”

Pachauri told the Guardian last week there was “virtually no possibility” of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the IPCC.

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said.

Andrew Watson, from the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences , says that “despite the best efforts of the skeptics, there is no instance in these e-mails that anyone has found so far—and there are millions of people looking—that suggests the scientists manipulated their fundamental data.”

The next stage of international negotiations regarding a new greenhouse-gas emission treaty starts in Copenhagen on Monday and there is concern that the accusations by climate skeptics may derail progress in developing a new treaty.

The UK’s climate change secretary Ed Miliband said : “We need maximum transparency including about all the data, but it’s also very, very important to say one chain of emails, potentially misrepresented, does not undo the global science. The science is very clear about climate change and people should be in no doubt about that. There will be people that want to use this to try and undermine the science and we’re not going to let them.”

Paul Guinnessy

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