Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Leaked emails won't harm UN climate body, says chairman

There is "virtually no possibility" of a few scientists biasing the advice given to governments by the UN's top global warming body, its chair said today. Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel's fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007. The emails were made public this month after a hacker illegally obtained them from servers at the university. Pachauri said the large number of contributors and rigorous peer review mechanism adopted by the IPCC meant that any bias would be rapidly uncovered. "The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that 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 said...read more

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