The United Nations panel on climate change has promised to investigate claims that scientists at a British university deliberately manipulated data to support the theory of man-made global warming.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the allegations raised by leaked e-mails in the so-called “climategate” controversy were too serious to ignore.
“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The Report programme. “We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”
The controversy was sparked by the publication two weeks ago of hundreds of hacked e-mails to and from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
Climate change sceptics around the world jumped on the e-mails as proof of a long-running conspiracy to skew the science of global warming and have prompted a public debate on the real threat from climate change ahead of next week’s summit in Copenhagen.
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Critics of the IPCC, which has spent more than 20 years engineering what it says is a now global consensus on climate change, today questioned whether it could be trusted to make an unbiased examination of the case.
“I don’t think anyone can trust the IPCC on this particular issue,” said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up by the former Tory chancellor Lord Lawson.
“Obviously the IPCC has a vested interest in this,” he added. “It’s not transparent and it’s inherently biased on this issue. We welcome the independent inquiry, but we are spectical about the IPCC.”
The UEA has already appointed a former civil servant, Sir Muir Russell, to head an independent inquiry into allegations of misconduct by its scientists. The director of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, has announced that he will stand down for the duration of that inquiry.
One of the leaked e-mails suggested that Dr Jones wanted certain papers excluded from the UN’s next major assessment of climate science. Dr Jones strenuously denies this was his intention and says other e-mails have been taken out of context.
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He labelled suggestions of a conspiracy to alter evidence to support the theory of anthropogenic global warming as “complete rubbish”.
Sir Muir’s review will also look at CRU’s policies and practices for acquiring, assembling, reviewing and publishing data and research, and its compliance with the university’s rules on freedom of information inquiries.
The investigation would review and make recommendations on CRU’s security and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds, the university said. It would be completed by spring next year and its conclusions made public.
Critics of the CRU say that it was instrumental in rewriting the historical record of climate change to erase what is known as the “medieval warm period” from the graphs to make it appear that the rise in global temperatures in the industrialised era are unprecedented and more than just a normal statistical deviation.
The medieval warm period was followed by a period of cooling in which the Thames froze over.
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The row has coincided with a hardening of positions before the Copenhagen summit, which is due to hammer out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol to be signed by 192 states on December 18.
Speaking at an event at the Natural History Museum in London, the Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, welcomed the IPCC’s decision to look at the CRU e-mails but said that it would not affect the scientific consensus.
“We need maximum transparency including about all the data but it’s also very, very important to say one chain of e-mails, potentially misrepresented, does not undo the global science,” he said.
“I think we want to send a very clear message to people about that. The science is very clear about climate change and people should be in no doubt about that.”
Mr Miliband warned that in the run-up to the crunch talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders will attempt to secure a new deal on cutting the emissions causing climate change, there were attempts to “throw dust” in people’s eyes over the issue.
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“We must resist that, and keep listening to the science and not subscribe to people who are frankly flat Earth-ers,” he said.
“There will be people that want to use this to try and undermine the science and we’re not going to let them.”
He said reports that Saudi Arabia believed the e-mails cast doubt on the evidence of man-made global warming and would have a huge impact on the climate talks in Copenhagen did not tally with his conversations with ministers from the country.