December 2009 printable subscriber newsletter

Ecologist

27th November, 2009

In this month's newsletter we look at the implications of a plan to privatise Indonesia's coastline; we ask whether fossil carbon and tree carbon are equivalent; examine whether the Arctic will become more dangerous as it melts; and wonder whether evolution has anything to offer environmentalists. To download, scroll to the bottom of the page...

Make no mistake: the emails from the University of East Anglia climate scientists which were obtained from a hacked server and posted onto the internet in November paint a shocking picture.

The emails reveal the private conversations of scientists who commanded universal respect amongst environmentalists, politicians and journalists. And they're not pretty...

The headline revelations have been well bandied-about in the mainstream press. In one particularly shocking email, Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at UEA, tells his US counterpart Professor Michael E Mann that he will try to block the inclusion of a controversial scientific paper in the forthcoming IPCC report, 'even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is'.

In another, perhaps even more disturbing exchange, Professor Jones claims that he will delete an unfavourable temperature record from his computer rather than risk it being made public through a Freedom of Information request - the kind of obfuscation that was more usually associated with the early years of the Bush administration.

The fall-out has been extensive: climate sceptic Lord Lawson has called...

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