Hacked Climate Change E-mailsReveal Extent of Hostility Toward Skeptics

Scornful of the positions taken by so-called global warming skeptics, climate scientists discussed taking steps to prevent the skeptics’ work from being published in international reports and scientific journals, according to e-mails stolen from Britain’s Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The Washington Post reports that the center’s director, Phil Jones, wrote in an e-mail that he was adamantly opposed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishing the work of scientists who questioned the link between human activities and global warming. In one e-mail, Jones vowed to “keep them out somehow — even if I have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” In another, Jones and a respected U.S. climate scientist — Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University — discuss pressuring an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics, suggesting that mainstream scientists stop submitting articles to the journal if it publishes the skeptics’ work. The hacked e-mails have set off widespread controversy in the climate science community, with global warming skeptics claiming the correspondence reveals a conspiracy among mainstream climate scientists to present a one-sided view of climate change.