'Climategate,' the climate change email hacking controversy, will be investigated by the UN, according to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri who Chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate. (Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images)
Initially, the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, said the issue would not have any bearing on the upcoming talks in Copenhagen, saying there was “virtually no possibility” of a few scientists biasing advice. “Even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he told The Guardian on Nov. 29.
But on Dec. 4 he said the UN would be conducting its own investigation.
“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he told BBC Radio 4's Today program. “We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”
Emails leaked or hacked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain have been taken by climate change skeptics as proof of a deliberate skewing of evidence, and hiding raw data. The scandal has been dubbed “Climategate.”
The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, has strenuously denied that the emails are evidence of any such deception, and that they have been quoted piecemeal and out of context. Jones has stepped down from his position as the university, which has already launched its own investigation into the emails, headed by an independent civil servant with no connection to the university or the climate change debate.
The UN announcement comes on the heels of comments by the lead Saudi climate change negotiator, who said that the hacked emails were enough to derail negotiations on the biggest issue at the Copenhagen climate change talks.
“It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he told BBC News.
The Daily Mail in the UK reported on Dec. 6 that the email hack has been traced to a server located in a small town in Russia.
Many analysts have pointed out that with a fossil-fuel based economy; countries such as Saudi Arabia and Russia have a lot riding on the outcome of the negotiations.
Global warming skeptic and editor of the journal Climate Research, Chris de Freitas, said the hacked emails are revealing. De Freitas is an Associate Professor at the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is also the subject of many of the hacked emails that discuss ways to exclude and discredit him and his theories that are contrary to the global warming theory.
“I think it’s serious because there have been many different people claiming the so-called ‘objective experts’ have been not totally 100 percent with their claims, and certainly the data they have used to back up their claims,” he said.
