Environment

Climate science fracas

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The United Nations is conducting an investigation into claims that British scientists manipulated data on global warming to support their argument that it’s man made. The World’s Laura Lynch has the story.

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston.  A controversy has erupted just days before the Copenhagen climate summit gets underway.  It involves allegations that some scientists in Britain and elsewhere may have tried to manipulate climate research.   Climate skeptics say the incident challenges the scientific consensus on global warming.  Others say it’s all about sowing unfounded doubt about humans’ responsibility for climate change. The World’s Laura Lynch reports from London.

LAURA LYNCH: The controversy started two weeks ago.  That’s when hundreds of emails were stolen from the Climactic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia and then posted online.  The writers of the hacked emails say their comments were taken out of context.  But this week, the head of the climate unit stepped down while the university conducts an investigation. And today, the head of the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change, Rajendra Pachauri, jumped into the middle of the dispute, vowing to uncover the truth.

RAJENDRA PACHAURI: We certainly will go into the whole lot and then we’ll take a position on it. So we certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. We don’t want to sweep it under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we certainly will look into it in detail.

LYNCH: Meanwhile, climate change skeptics have been quick to argue that the emails show that scientists are hiding evidence.  The university is looking into those claims, but the vice chancellor Edward Acton is defending the institute’s work.

EDWARD ACTON: My central focus is on the questions which concern the practice of scientists at my university. On the wider question, I think the fact that 95 percent of the data that the center uses is, and has long been, available from other websites and subject to scientific analysis by different methods and different teams of scientists, makes the sort of stakes for the inquiry in terms of what humanity thinks about climate change much lower than you suggest.

LYNCH: The stakes are high. With just days to go before the start of negotiations at the Copenhagen climate change summit, Britain’s climate change minister, Ed Miliband has leapt into the debate.

ED MILIBAND: One string of emails does not undermine the global science on climate change. And there will be people who want to use this to say somehow it casts doubt on Copenhagen or on the scientific evidence and I think frankly that is nonsense. And we must resist those siren voices.

LYNCH: One of those voices appears to be coming from Saudi Arabia’s chief climate negotiator.

Mohammad al-Sabban said the emails prove there was “no relationship whatsoever between human activity and climate change.”  Miliband says he’s never heard the Saudis take that position.

MILIBAND: I’ve obviously met him in the past and indeed the minister that he works for. They have never said to me that Saudi Arabia’s position is that climate change is not man-made or is not happening. My sense is that the vast majority of countries at the talks will not be swayed by one chain of emails.

LYNCH: But veteran environmental journalist Bud Ward, who edits the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, thinks the emails have the potential to affect the Copenhagen talks.

BUD WARD: It’s an early Christmas gift for those skeptics or contrarians who want to use it for political purposes.

LYNCH: That includes skeptics in the US Congress.  Ward says while the emails themselves do raise some serious questions about the science at the university, that doesn’t really matter to those who want to challenge claims that global warming is man-made.

WARD: I think it also shifts the field of play from the science field, from the science arena to the political arena, and that is home court advantage for the skeptics and contrarians because they have benefitted most when they have been able to get this issue and deal with this as a political issue.

LYNCH: Jonathan Porritt admits that is his biggest concern. He’s founder of the Forum for the Future and a former environmental adviser to the British government.

JONATHAN PORRITT: You can see why lots of people might jump on this in order to strengthen the case that they’ve already made, that they don’t want to go along with a new legally-binding treaty, they don’t want deep cuts, they don’t want to find a different way of creating wealth in a very low carbon world. So the implications of this are huge.

LYNCH: The vast majority of climate scientists say the evidence is overwhelming, that the earth’s climate is changing and that humans are largely responsible.  But the emails, and the questions they raise, are succeeding in taking the focus off the drive to find agreement in Copenhagen.   For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

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