“Pretty Awful Emails”

The university professor at the heart of the “Climategate” row over leaked emails admitted yesterday that some of his correspondence had been “pretty awful.” “Professor Phil Jones, the head of the of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), made the remark to a powerful cross-party committee of MPs, when challenged about saying he would not release data to a climate sceptic, ‘because all he wants to do is find something wrong with it.’ Defending himself in public for the first time, Professor Jones faced a fierce grilling from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee about the emails hacked from UEA computers, which critics say are evidence of how climate scientists continually obstruct requests for information. The ‘climategate’ affair has resulted in major controversy about climate change science and policy, because Professor Jones’s unit is one of three centres in the world which put together the global temperature record going back to the 19th century and even earlier. Climate skeptics say that its conclusion that the world is now warmer than at any time for 1,000 years – because of current global warming – is flawed, and have been seeking the raw data on which the record has been constructed, in order to challenge it.”