Climategate emails taken ‘out of context’

THE new release of emails from the university involved in the “climategate” row just show the “frank and honest discussions” that go on between scientists, the researcher at the centre of the debate said.

Professor Phil Jones also warned the latest round of quotes taken from emails and posted on climate sceptic blogs had been “cherry picked”, with their mean ing taken out of context.

Prof Jones found himself at the centre of a controversy over climate science two years ago after hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were leaked online in 2009 before crunch UN climate talks.

Climate change sceptics claimed the emails showed scientists manipulating data to support a theory of man-made global warming, but a series of reviews later cleared researchers at the unit of any scientific impropriety.

Now thousands more emails from the university at the centre of the “climategate” row over global warming science two years ago appear to have been posted online, just days before the latest round of UN climate talks start in Durban.

The latest emails contain discussion on deleting emails in the face of freedom of information requests, models being “wrong”, references to “the cause” and other comments on research and researchers.

But Prof Jones said they showed the “frank and honest discussions of scientists that goes on at meetings and on email”.

And at a press conference yesterday he set out the context from which lines had been taken.

He said: “We need to look through them all, there are 5,000 of them, we have so far looked at these 100 or so that were highlighted, but there doesn’t seem to be much in these and they have been quite cherry picked.”

He also said email conversations on the way in which the science would be presented to the public were part and parcel of the issue of frank and honest discussion.

“It would be foolish to think scientists don’t discuss how the message of what we are doing is taken up by the public, politicians and the media,” he said.

And he denied there was much of a “bunker mentality”, with climate scientists seeing the divide between the science community and the sceptics as one of “us and them”.