Madam, – The hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia raise serious questions about the process by which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) operates. Some scientists, even within the CRU, are now calling for the compilation of the periodic climate assessment reports to be removed from the control of the United Nations.
Regarding the immediate question of whether the IPCC is providing reliable information to the Copenhagen Climate Conference, where decisions involving the spending of hundreds of billions of euro are about to be made, there can be little doubt that the answer is yes. IPCC officials have correctly pointed out that the evidence of global warming does not depend on the graphs presented by one research centre. Other centres are independently compiling climate data from around the world and arriving at the same conclusions.
Even if the pending inquiry finds that some doctoring of the CRU graphs has occurred, this will not invalidate the essential information about global warming now being presented to the Copenhagen conference.
Other facets of the leaked e-mails, however, provide separate reasons for concern. The following excerpt from one of the e-mails is particularly disturbing: “I can’t see either [of the two papers] being in the next [IPCC] report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”.
This e-mail is attributed to the director of CRU and the attribution is presumably correct, since Dr R Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC, who publicly commented on it and attempted to minimise its importance last week, did not attempt to deny its source. The import of this e-mail is that a deliberate attempt was made by two IPCC scientists to suppress findings from the peer-reviewed literature that did not agree with their own views. This attempt to stifle the integrity of the scientific process, which depends on complete openness and transparency, is extremely damaging to the reputation of the IPCC.
Could the process of providing objective information to governments on the science of climate change be made more objective by removing it from the control of the UN? I believe there is a case to be made that this is so. If the process of compiling the assessment reports were placed under the control of the International Council for Science, a non-governmental body that operates through the National Academies of Science in the individual countries (the Royal Irish Academy in the case of Ireland), the ethos surrounding the process would be more rigorously scientific. In addition, pressure from governments such as that of Saudi Arabia, which have a vested interest in preventing controls on greenhouse gas emissions, would find it more difficult to interfere with the reports.
Finally, the choice of national representatives from all countries would lie not with governments (where political affiliation can be a major determinant of the choice) but would be more likely to be made on the basis of objective scientific criteria. – Yours, etc,