UN to investigate ClimateGate

Hardly impartial…

Amazingly, the ABC did report this one! Don’t hold your breath, it will be the IPCC effectively investigating itself, so we can be pretty sure it will be a whitewash.

A top UN panel is to probe claims that British scientists sought to suppress data backing climate change sceptics’ views, its head said ahead of the the landmark Copenhagen summit.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the claims – which led a top expert to leave his post temporarily this week – were serious and needed to be investigated.

Professor Phil Jones has stood aside as head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, after emails allegedly calling into question the scientific basis for climate change fears were leaked onto the internet.

Hackers [It ain’t no hacker. This was an inside job – Ed] penetrated the centre’s network and posted online thousands of emails from researchers, including Professor Jones, ahead of the Copenhagen summit which starts Monday.

The CRU at the university in Norwich, eastern England, is a world-leader in the field. [Maybe that should be “was” – Ed]

Dr Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations panel since 2002, told BBC radio: “We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it.

“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.” (source)

I won’t hold my breath. And at the same time, Australian scientists are doing just that: brushing it all under the carpet and hoping it will go away – all lovingly reported by the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, professor of marine science at the University of Queensland, said a few out-of-context quotes gained by illegally trawling through ”electronic garbage” did not undermine the huge amount of peer-reviewed scientific data on climate change.

”I think the denialist movement is so desperate, given the overwhelming conclusions of the science, that they’ll do anything,” he said. (source)

I think we all know who’s in denial now, Ove.