Climate Scientists Back off Sea Level Claim
February 22, 2010
Guardian
By David Adam
Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.
The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.
At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results”. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information about ice sheet melting and that the true rise could be higher.
Many scientists criticised the IPCC approach as too conservative, and several papers since have suggested that sea level could rise more. Martin Vermeer of the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany published a study in December that projected a rise of 0.75m to 1.9m by 2100.
Siddall said that he did not know whether the retracted paper’s estimate of sea level rise was an overestimate or an underestimate.
Announcing the formal retraction of the paper from the journal, Siddall said: “It’s one of those things that happens. People make mistakes and mistakes happen in science.” He said there were two separate technical mistakes in the paper, which were pointed out by other scientists after it was published. A formal retraction was required, rather than a correction, because the errors undermined the study’s conclusion.
“Retraction is a regular part of the publication process,” he said. “Science is a complicated game and there are set procedures in place that act as checks and balances.”
Nature Publishing Group, which publishes Nature Geoscience, said this was the first paper retracted from the journal since it was launched in 2007.
The paper – entitled “Constraints on future sea-level rise from past sea-level change” – used fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements to reconstruct how sea level has fluctuated with temperature since the peak of the last ice age, and to project how it would rise with warming over the next few decades.
In a statement the authors of the paper said: “Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.
“One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes.”
In the Nature Geoscience retraction, in which Siddall and his colleagues explain their errors, Vermeer and Rahmstorf are thanked for “bringing these issues to our attention”.
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Climate Chief Was Told of False Glacier Claims Before Copenhagen
February 3, 2010 by Andrew
Filed under Government
February3, 2010
The Times
By Ben Webbster
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.
Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”
Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”
However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”
The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.
Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.
Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.
Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”
Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.
“And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”
Dr Pacharui has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Fish Numbers in the Wild Depleting As Fish Farming Increases
February 1, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Rather than relieving pressure on wild fish stocks, the explosive growth of aquaculture has actually exacerbated this pressure, according to an international study led by Rosamond L. Naylor of Stanford University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers surveyed trends in the farming of several different fish species, finding that by the end of 2009, half of all fish consumed in the world will have been raised on an aquaculture farm. This has led to a concurrent increase in demand for wild-caught fish meal and fish oil to feed these fish, including for vegetarian species such as tilapia and carp.
“Our assumption about farmed tilapia and carp being environmentally friendly turns out to be wrong in aggregate, because the sheer volume is driving up the demand,” Naylor said. “Even the small amounts of fishmeal used to raise vegetarian fish add up to a lot on a global scale.”
Fish fed on fish meal and oil grow faster and tend to have more flavor than fish fed on a natural diet, providing a profit incentive for fish farmers to buy more wild-caught fish. The researchers found that the amount of fish meal fed to vegetarian fish increased drastically in the early 1990s. Even though this trend began to reverse in 1995, carp and tilapia farms were still responsible for consuming more than 12 million metric tons of fish meal in 2007.
Farmed salmon also place a huge burden on wild fish stocks, with five pounds of wild fish required to produce every pound of farmed salmon.
“As long as we are a health-conscious population trying to get our most healthy oils from fish, we are going to be demanding more of aquaculture and putting a lot of pressure on marine fisheries to meet that need,” Naylor said.
“Our thirst for long-chain omega-3 oils will continue to put a lot of strain on marine ecosystems,” she said.
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An Idle Brain May Raise Learning Abilities
Why is it so hard to remember even things we don’t want to forget? The problem, suggests a growing body of research, may be that we’re thinking about them too much in the first place.Popular wisdom once held that a mind at rest was like an engine idling — not much going on under the hood. To glean insights into how the brain worked, scientists would study only volunteers in action, measuring their physiological or biochemical responses as they completed specific mental tasks. But more recently, thanks in large part to the proliferation of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which precisely maps brain activity based on changes in blood-oxygen levels, neuroscientists have found that important activity in the brain — related in particular to memory and learning — may occur when it is at rest.
Many studies over the past decade have suggested that sleep is crucial to the consolidation of memories and learning; people who take a nap after learning a new task, for instance, remember it better than those who don’t snooze. And now a small but compelling new study from the lab of New York University (NYU) cognitive neuroscientist Lila Davachi finds similar evidence that the brain at rest, even while remaining awake, is conducting meaningful activity. “Your brain is doing work for you even when you’re resting,” says Davachi, who just published a study in Neuron showing that certain kinds of brain activity actually increase during waking rest and are correlated with better memory consolidation. “Taking a rest may actually contribute to your success at work or school,” she adds.
The 16 participants who served as Davachi’s guinea pigs in the study were each scanned, while at rest, before the experiment began. Then, each volunteer was asked to lie flat on the bed of an fMRI machine, outside the magnet, while shown a series of paired images. First they looked at pairs of faces and objects, and were instructed to imagine the person pictured interacting with the object (such as a beach ball). Then they got a few minutes’ rest, before being rolled into the magnet for another scan. The experiment was repeated with pairs of new faces and scenes. Afterward, the participants took a pop quiz to measure their recognition of the faces, objects and scenes they had previously seen.
The purpose of the scans was to compare the relative levels of spontaneous neural activity in two key brain regions involved in memory — the hippocampus and visual cortex — during rest, both before and after the visual tasks. The NYU team noticed that levels of activity in the two areas were more closely correlated several minutes after people had looked at the images than before they started the experiment. That suggests that the visual-learning tasks had affected the brain’s seemingly random firings during rest, and perhaps that the brain was conducting memory-consolidating activity during that time.What’s more, the more closely correlated the brain activity during the rest period, the better the person performed on the tests of recognition. “We found that higher correlations [of activity in the hippocampus and visual cortex] during rest periods leads to high future memory,” notes Arielle Tambini, a graduate student in Davachi’s lab and lead author of the paper.While the NYU study tested memory and simple recognition, other recent research looking at activity in the brain at rest and the learning of complex visual tasks has yielded similar results. Neurologist Maurizio Corbetta of Washington University in St. Louis recruited 14 people to use their peripheral vision to identify a hidden pattern — an inverted T — that was flashed briefly on a screen inside an fMRI machine. After each daily training session, lasting one to two hours for about a week, participants were given an hour’s rest, during which time Corbetta scanned their brains.
As reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, Corbetta’s team found that spontaneous brain activity in two separate regions of the cerebral cortex appeared to be correlated after the participants had learned the visual task, but were not linked beforehand. The brain activity in those who were best at finding the hidden pattern onscreen was most strongly related. “Our test was like a video game. What this research shows is that we have a very dynamic landscape of ongoing activity [in the brain] even when we are at rest,” notes Corbetta.One question that has plagued researchers is whether the observed increase in brain activity that occurs after the completion of a mental task is just a ripple or echo effect, rather than a distinct event that helps solidify memories. Harvard researcher Dale Stevens believes he has more or less ruled out the former possibility by showing that even tasks that produce similar levels of neural activity while they are being performed, such as recognizing a face versus a landscape, result in different levels of activity after each task is completed. In Stevens’ studies, brain activity remained high after people viewed landscapes, but was much lower after they looked at faces. People tend to be much better at remembering landscapes than faces, so it makes sense that those differences would be mirrored in the brain-activity levels during rest periods, says Stevens, whose paper was published online in Cerebral Cortex in December 2009.While the NYU, Washington University and Harvard studies all used different approaches, their overall findings were remarkably similar. “The brain is trying to weave ideas together even when you don’t think you are thinking of anything,” notes Johns Hopkins behavioral neurologist and memory expert Dr. Barry Gordon. That’s something to keep in mind the next time you catch yourself daydreaming in a meeting or idly surfing Facebook when you should be studying.
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Exercise Great for the Brain, too
January 22, 2010
BBC News
The report, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found mice which exercised performed better on memory tests.
These mice also grew more new cells in a part of the brain linked to memory than those which did not exercise.
The authors believe the new brain cells were behind the improvement in cognitive performance.
The aim of the study, which was carried out by scientists from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge and researchers at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, was to find out why exercise might improve brain function.
Previous research had suggested that exercise helps mental performance in both people and animals. Studies had also shown that exercise increases the number of new brain cells in rodents.
Unlimited action
The new finding in this study is that mice which exercise are better able to distinguish between memories of similar things. The authors believe this is explained by the additional brain cells generated by exercise.
The study was conducted on two groups of mice over a period of 105 days. The mice were trained to touch a box on a computer screen to get food pellets.
One group were then allowed unlimited access to an exercise wheel. They ran over 20km (12 miles) a day on average. The control group were not able to exercise.
Both groups were then repeatedly shown two boxes on a screen, one of which provided a treat when it was touched.
The mice learned which box released the treat, and then the boxes were moved around. First the boxes were moved close together, which made it harder for the mice to remember which one to touch to get the food.
The exercising mice did better on this task than the non-exercising mice.
Similar memories
The task was then made easier by placing the boxes further apart so that they seemed more distinct. This time there was no difference in the performance of the exercising and non-exercising mice.
“Keeping similar memories distinct is an important part of having a good memory” says the senior author of the study, Timothy Bussey from Cambridge University.
“It is this aspect of memory that is improved by exercise, our study shows.
“The human equivalent might be remembering which car parking space you have used on two different days in the previous week. It becomes difficult to distinguish memories when events are similar.”
By the end of the experiment, the animals which exercised had more than twice as many new brain cells as those that did not.
These cells were in the hippocampus, an area of the brain which is important in memory and learning.
The Cambridge team believes the results of their study may well extrapolate to humans, a view shared by another researcher who studies the impact of exercise on memory.
Stan Colcombe, from Bangor University, said: “Their data strongly suggest that new neurons created after exercise can play a role in improving cognitive function, which likely has direct implications for human research into the effects of exercise on neurocognition.”
He described the research as “a very elegant experiment” which “made a valuable contribution in understanding the effects of exercise on brain health and function”.
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Climate Science Is Just A Game of Telephone
January 19, 2010 by joel
Filed under Government
January 19, 2010
First Things News
By Joe Carter
Remember this game you played as a kid: The first player whispers a sentence to the next player and each player successively whispers what that player believes they heard to the next. The last player announces the statement to the entire group, which invariably has changed in a quite amusing ways from the original. When kids play this game it’s called “Telephone”; when climate scientist play this game it’s called “peer-reviewed research.”
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”
The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.
“Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.”
Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. “I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about,” he said.
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.
Read the whole thing, for the entire article is stunning. The fact that this type of mistake could be made in the first place is disconcerting. But for the IPCC chairman—who obviously knew nothing about the veracity of the claim about the Himalayan glacier—to say that any criticism is “voodoo science” is a level of hubris that can only come from a bureaucrat. If the IPCC can’t even be trusted on the simple issues how are we to trust them when they make claims about complex, controversial matters?
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Doomsday Clock Pushed Back 1 Minute
January 15, 2010
The Washington Post
By Dan Zak
Man is the only creature that knows it’s going to die, and atomic scientists are the only professionals who measure the amount of time before man annihilates himself. But there is good news from those scientists: Humanity inched away from Armageddon on Thursday morning. The Doomsday Clock was set back one minute, from 11:55 to 11:54, reversing a precipitous slide toward midnight, the zero hour, ultimate self-destruction.
The clock was reset to reflect a “more hopeful state of world affairs,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced at the New York Academy of Sciences and over a live feed on the Internet. Forty policymakers, scientists and Nobel laureates on the board of the Bulletin — an online magazine that covers threats to humanity — decided to move the clock after spirited debates about current trends in science and politics.
“We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons,” the board said in a statement. “For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable.”
This is the 19th time the clock has moved in 63 years. The creators of the Manhattan Project wound up the symbolic device in 1947 to remind the world of the consequences of abusing nuclear power. Since then, the clock has moved forward 11 times and back eight times. It came closest to midnight in 1953, when the testing of hydrogen bombs nudged it to 11:58, and moved furthest away in 1991, when it slid to 11:43 after the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The clock has been steadily ticking toward midnight since the mid-’90s, as increased terrorism destabilized regions of the world and India and Pakistan tested nuclear bombs.
So, atomic scientists: Are they a nervous bunch?
“I actually think most of them are optimists,” says Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin. “They think human beings can channel technology and have the capacity to cooperate and tackle these problems. That’s why they bother to get word out. They’re not on edge.”
The Bulletin’s statement also cited President Obama’s “pragmatic, problem-solving approach,” arms reduction talks with Russia, negotiations with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program and support for a fissile material cutoff treaty at the U.N. Security Council last September, though Obama has also endured partisan challenges to his leadership on national security over the past year.
The number of nuclear weapons in the world has decreased by 4,000 over the past three years, to 23,000, according to Benedict. Regardless, Hollywood still churns out apocalyptic movies (“The Road,” “2012″ and “Knowing” premiered over the past 10 months), and 50 million Americans still believe the world will end in their lifetimes, according to Nicholas Guyatt, author of “Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans Are Looking Forward to the End of the World.”
“Continuing tensions with Iran, the bad weather in Europe and especially the earthquake in Haiti will all be taken as ‘end times’ indicators,” Guyatt, a history professor at the University of York, writes in an e-mail. “My guess is that [apocalyptic Christians] would happily move the clock forwards by a couple of minutes. The irony, of course, is that these guys — unlike the atomic scientists — are actually rooting for doomsday.”
On the eve of the massive quake in Haiti, the Rapture Index rose to its highest point since Sept. 11, 2001, on the Web site Rapture Ready, which describes itself as the largest prophecy site on the Internet, with 240,000 unique visitors a month.
“Scientists seem to be driven by what’s going on politically,” says the site’s founder, Todd Strandberg, who lives in Benton, Ark., calls himself an end-time believer and recalculates the index every Sunday based on man-made, natural and allegedly supernatural phenomena. “I suppose we tend to be the eternal pessimists because the Bible says it’s going to get worse. So any time they move [the Doomsday Clock] back, the general reaction is scorn.”
Expect another crucial prognostication soon: Next month a groundhog will divine the probability of six weeks of winter, leaving nuclear winter to the scientists and the rapture to the prophets.
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Climate Skeptics Give Greenpeace a Dose of Their Own Medicine in Copenhagen
December 18, 2009 by Andrew
Filed under Government
December 18, 2009
Info Wars
By Patrick Henningsen
On Wednesday, Global warming skeptics from CFACT pulled off an international climate caper by using GPS triangulation from Greenpeace’s own on-board camera photos to locate and sail up long-side its famous vessel, Rainbow Warrior. Then in Greenpeace-like fashion, the ‘climate realists’ dropped a banner reading “Propaganda Warrior” in order to highlights how the radical green group’s policies and agenda are based on a series of scientific myths, lies and exaggerations about global warming and climate change.
Earlier that day, CFACT’s “skeptivists” also boarded Greenpeace’s other seafaring vessel, the Arctic Sunrise, gaining passage on deck by distracting Greenpeace crew with boxes of doughnuts whilst they unfurled yet another banner hand-painted with the slogan “Ship of Lies” off of the ship’s starboard side.
Using its well-known radical approach to activism, campaigning group Greenpeace has become one of the key components behind the proliferation of man-made global warming theory, as well as its subsequent rebranding into what is now commonly known as “climate change”. Greenpeace leader Gerd Leipold was recently forced to confess during an interview with the BBC that his organization issued misleading and exaggerated information claiming that Arctic ice would disappear completely by 2030. Greenpeace’s own members commonly cite the group’s reports on climate change as ‘trusted’ science, when in reality their claims are politically motivated, promoting selective science. The organisation’s co-founder, Patrick Moore, who has long since been chased out by radical left elements in the group, foresaw this as a genuine flaw in Greenpeace’s hierarchy. Moore stated in 2008 that “I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs. Ultimately, a trend toward abandoning scientific objectivity in favor of political agendas forced me to leave Greenpeace in 1986.”
After nearly a decade of campaigning for vague concepts as ‘climate action’ and ‘climate justice’ with virtually no direct public opposition, Greenpeace members will certainly be shocked and horrified to see a genuine physical challenge their assumed moral hegemony over all things environmental.
CFACT executive director Craig Rucker masterminded the operation and explains, “Greenpeace has been using these kinds of tactics for decades, and now they can find out what it’s like to have a little taste of their own medicine“.
After nearly a week of fundamentally meaningless street protests by climate action groups and their hundreds of arrests, how refreshing to see climate realists take action- certainly they are an environmental movement with a brain. It might seem like a modest skirmish on the high seas, but with any luck, The Battle of Copenhagen will be remembered as a rallying cry for lovers of real science and common sense everywhere.
G.O.P. Urges U.N. to Get Independent Investigator for Climate Gate
December 11, 2009 by Andrew
Filed under Government
December 11, 2009
Fox News
A band of 28 Republican senators is calling on the United Nations to appoint an independent investigator to probe leaked e-mails they claim raise serious questions about the science behind global warming.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, announced last week that the U.N. would conduct an investigation, saying at the time that the controversy over the e-mails was serious and that he didn’t want to “brush anything under the carpet.”
But the GOP senators wrote in their letter to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon that while such an inquiry is a “positive step,” they want an investigation “that is truly independent of the IPCC and the U.N.” — in the style of the independent investigation led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in the wake of the Oil for Food scandal.
“The United Nations must now appoint another independent investigator with an international team to pursue this matter,” the senators wrote. They also urged the U.N. to open the books on the matter to the U.S. Congress and general public.
“The investigation must be conducted without political interference and manipulation from individual countries, non-governmental organizations, those within the U.N., those who have contributed to the IPCC, those being investigated, or any closely related associates,” the senators wrote. “In the interest of transparency, it is imperative that the U.S. Congress have full access to all documents, as well as transcripts and interviews, from the investigation, and that they be released to the public.”
Republican officials in Washington have been waving red flags ever since the release of the e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit that appeared to show climate scientists discussing the manipulation of data. The unit has been involved with several of the IPCC’s own assessments.
The controversy comes in the midst of the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, where world leaders are working toward a new global treaty aimed at reducing emissions. Obama administration officials insist the e-mails do not discredit the underlying science behind global warming.
Climate Scientist Receives Death Threats
December 11, 2009 by Andrew
Filed under Government
December 11, 2009
ABC News
By Antonette Collins
Dr Tom Wigley, a former director of the university’s Climatic Research Unit, has had several of his emails hacked and used by climate change sceptics to suggest that he and his colleagues have been distorting data about the evidence of global warming.
He is unable to reveal the details of the threats, as they are now being investigated by the FBI and UK police.
Dr Wigley told Eleanor Hall on The World Today that, while the threats are genuinely frightening, he is not surprised.
“This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behaviour – criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past,” he said.
“So this is a worse manifestation but it’s happened before so it’s not that surprising.”
He rejects suggestions that scientists have been exaggerating about the effects of climate change and says the emails were simply scientific questioning.
“We don’t base policy by what is said in personal emails from people who are just developing some sort of scientific story,” he said.
“The real basis for developing policy has to be reports like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and literature that appears in scientific journals that’s gone through what’s called peer review.
“I think the best approach to these people who criticise our work, whether it’s in other scientific papers or on blogs or whatever, is to fight science or pseudo science with science. And that’s what we often do.”
