New climate change email claims
Updated on 03 February 2010
A leading climate scientist at the University of East Anglia has dismissed allegations he tried to silence research that differed from the consensus view on global warming. Tom Clarke reports.
The revelations relate to an email from Professor Keith Briffa, deputy head of the Climatic Research Unit at UEA, in which he appears to ask a colleague for help in rejecting a paper which contained research contradictory to the established science.
The email read: "I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review - Confidentially, I now need a hard, and if required extensive case for rejecting - to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please
Keith."
In a statement, Dr Briffa told Channel 4 News that the decision to reject was not his - he was simply asking the colleague who had reviewed the paper to submit his evidence for rejecting it.
The conduct of climate scientists and the quality of their research has been under intense scrutiny since the email leaks and IPCC flaws emerged last year.
In a separate development Dr Racheda Pachauri, head of the embattled Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), rejected responsibility for the inaccurate claim in the latest IPCC report that Himalayan glaciers would melt away within 25 years.
The inaccuracy has been seized on by climate sceptics as evidence of the sloppiness of international climate change research.
Dr Pachauri today told the Guardian newspaper: "You can't expect me to be personally responsibly for every word in a 3,000 page report."
