The head of a United Nations panel said it will investigate claims that scientists manipulated data about global warming, days before climate-change talks in Copenhagen.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC the allegations were serious. “We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet,” he said.
The controversy arose from the release of thousands of emails, between scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and their peers around the world, which suggested attempts to suppress or manipulate data.
Climate-change skeptics have seized on the correspondence, saying they showed researchers exaggerated the case for man-made global warming.
In the U.S., congressional Republicans, who had called for investigations in the wake of the email controversy, pounced on the U.N. announcement Friday.
House and Senate Republicans argued that the Obama administration’s climate-change efforts should now be reconsidered because the Environmental Protection Agency uses reports from the U.N. climate-change panel to support the regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions. The IPCC’s reports often extensively cite data provided by the University of East Anglia’s climate unit.
Congressional Democrats have accused Republicans of latching on to the email controversy as a way of deflecting attention from evidence that human activity is damaging the planet.
Republicans called for the EPA to withdraw its proposed finding that automobile greenhouse-gas emissions endanger human health.
An EPA spokeswoman said the agency is “confident” that the basis for the agency’s final decision “will be very strong,” adding that the EPA will publish “a detailed description of the scientific basis for that conclusion.”
There has been speculation the emails could influence talks in Copenhagen, where world leaders will seek a deal on curbing the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.
Ed Miliband, the U.K. climate-change secretary, acknowledged the emails could have an impact on the deliberations in Copenhagen, but dismissed those who said the emails showed the case for man-made climate change was exaggerated, calling them “flat-Earthers.”
Michael Oppenheimer, director of the program in science, technology and environmental policy at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, said he didn’t believe the controversy would affect Copenhagen talks. “I don’t even see it registering on the meter,” he said.
The University of East Anglia announced an independent review of the allegations Thursday. The head of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, Prof. Phil Jones, has stepped aside pending the outcome of the probe. Prof. Jones insisted emails had been taken out of context. Another scientist who figures in the emails, Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, on Friday said they were taken out of context and welcomed a Penn State inquiry.
