Is this the end of the IPCC?

Yet more embarrassing revelations have befallen the scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit who brought us Climategate. Not renowned for climato-scepticism The Guardian leads today with news that Phil Jones, at the centre of last year’s leaked emails affair, is once again facing fresh claims that he “hid problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.” Hacked emails and documents from the University’s climatic research unit show that measurements used from Chinese weather stations were “seriously flawed” and that related documents “could not be produced.” Said flawed measurements were cited in a 1990 report on the effect of cities on global warming, to be then taken up by the IPCC in its 2007 report on climate change. The 1990 paper concluded that rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather than the fact that Chinese cities are simply getting bigger, and therefore give off more heat, as cities are wont to do. However, when challenged a total of 105 times under the Freedom of Information Act to reveal the location of the Chinese weather stations, the UEA refused 95 of such requests. You don’t need to be a climate-change sceptic, or even the UK’s deputy information commissioner who drew attention to these blocking manouevres, to sense that the withholding of data whether flawed or not isn’t particulary sound scientific practice.

All this bolsters the cause of those who cock snoots at the IPCC, still in a jam after its recent false claim that the Himalayan glaciers could be simply all melted away by 2035. While the twittersphere was backed up last night with gloating quips as to who to send flowers to now the international panel was dead, the timing of IPCC's Himalayan wheeze in the wake of the non-event that was the Copenhagen summit smacked of panic. Such a headline grabber must have looked like one way of concentrating minds on the dangers of global warming after the assembled leaders of the planet failed to come up with agreement. This despite the fact that in countless strangely un-urgent sounding speeches they were telling us the planet’s days are numbered. Commentators have noted that the talking up of threats, be they swine-flu and sundry epidemics, terrorist attacks, WMD or extreme rises in the surface temperature of the planet, tend to multiply as real threats recede. We are getting to a point where we can almost deduce a rule - i.e. Institutions warn of pending catastrophe = no worries. Not forgetting the huge damage the IPCC has already inflicted on public confidence in its cause, here’s hoping that in the coming days it doesn’t pull another alarming-looking rabbit of apocalypse out of its hat to awe a public it seems to have little regard for. My point is not about the reality of man-made climate change, but concerns relentless doom-mongering which has the unintended consequence of provoking disbelief.

Gerry Feehily