CLIMATE CHANGE scientists in East Anglia at the centre of a worldwide controversy after it emerged that they had manipulated the presentation of data have been defended by colleagues and a senior British minister.
E-mails leaked last month from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit included exchanges where scientists wrote about using “tricks”, and one where a scientist urged that some e-mails should be deleted.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has ordered an independent inquiry by a former vice-chancellor of University of Glasgow, Sir Muir Russell.
The controversy has been seized upon by those who deny that climate change is linked to mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, and threatens an agreement at the crucial Copenhagen summit which opens next week.
Defending top East Anglian researcher Phil Jones, who has stood down while the inquiry is held, Prof Andrew Watson said climate change sceptics had embarked upon “a tabloid-style character assassination” campaign.
“There was no fudging of the fundamental data. If there was, people would be pretty disappointed. There has been a little bit of manipulation of the presentation of a few diagrams,” he said.
Climate change sceptics “would have us believe that the warming that has occurred during the 20th century is a construct entirely in the minds of a few climate scientists”, Prof Watson said yesterday evening.
“But this point of view surely has some difficulty in explaining why Arctic sea ice is declining so rapidly, mountain glaciers around the world are retreating so rapidly, and spring is coming much earlier now than it did 50 years ago,” he said.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who has chaired the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2002, said: “We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it.
“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”
Mr Pachauri last week said there was “virtually no possibility” that IPCC judgments could be affected by a few scientists.
“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 added.
British climate change secretary Ed Miliband, who is leading the UK’s preparations for the Copenhagen talks, said “maximum transparency” about all the data gathered and used by the East Anglian university was necessary.
“But it’s also very, very important to say one chain of e-mails, 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.
However, Mr Miliband caused a major row when he dubbed former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, Lord Nigel Lawson, and Conservative MP David Davis as “climate saboteurs”.
“We have to beware of climate saboteurs, the people who want to say that this is in doubt and want to cast aspersions on the whole process. The science is clear and settled,” said Mr Miliband.
“Who should we believe – Nigel Lawson, or the thousands of scientists who contributed to the IPCC study of 2007? One set of e-mails from the University of East Anglia does not undermine decades of climate science.
“We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific fact. Those facts are clear. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, ice sheets are retreating so fast that in summer we can now sail the northwest passage through the Arctic, and sea level rises are already threatening low-lying countries, from the Netherlands to Bangladesh,” he wrote in last night’s London Evening Standard.
British prime minister Gordon Brown said commitments made so far in the negotiations brought the world only “half-way” towards the targets deemed necessary to stop the plant warning by more than two degrees in coming decades.
“This is one of the great human endeavours of our time – to bring the world together to deal with the problem that has been caused essentially by the richest countries but is now affecting some of the poorest countries in the world,” he said.