Just in case you think that the IPCC/climate-gate story has petered out in the last few days…
Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia scientist whose stolen emails caused the worldwide ‘climate-gate’ kerfuffle, has told The Sunday Times he contemplated killing himself.
“I did think about it, yes. About suicide,” he says. “I thought about it several times, but I think I’ve got past that stage now.”
Jones also told the paper he is now on beta blockers and taking sleeping pills in the aftermath of the email theft. He continues to receive death threats.
The issue of how climate researchers deal with freedom of information requests has become a big part of ‘climate-gate’. Now the Daily Telegraph has opened a new front in this campaign, attacking the Met Office for refusing to release correspondence between its director of climate science and colleagues on the IPCC.
It says the Met Office initially claimed the correspondence had been deleted and then later said they existed but could not be disclosed.
Meanwhile, a poll for the BBC seems to show an increase in people who don’t believe in global warming. The survey of 1,001 adults found 25% said no when asked “From what you know and have heard, do you think that the Earth’s climate is changing and global warming taking place?” This is up from 10% in November. The proportion saying yes dropped to 75%, down from 83% in November.
However, Richard Black at the BBC thinks this might just be down to the recent weather in Blighty.
“Having to dig your car out of a snowbank and sending the kids out to make a snowman would, you might think, tend to mitigate against belief in warnings of a dangerously warming world ahead,” writes the environment correspondent. “…An unusually hot summer – and globally, January was the warmest on record, in case you missed it, and El Nino conditions pertain in the Pacific – and fickle opinion might turn again.”
Finally, in a strange turn of events, Rajendra Pachauri has penned a novel entitled Return to Almora. The Times of India notes that it combines memories of the past life of its protagonist Sanjay with his current – rather sexually driven – current life as an engineer.
The Times (of London) has found the controversy here:
For a country where sex is rarely discussed in public the book mingles lectures on climate change with descriptions of Sanjay’s sexual encounters, including frequent references to “voluptuous breasts”.
More controversially, it was released in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani — India’s richest man and the head of the oil and gas conglomerate Reliance Industries, the largest private Indian company. Reliance has close links to Dr Pachauri’s The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), and has received environmental awards from it, including one for its work on HIV/Aids in 2007.
Stay tuned for more shocking climate-gate revelations…