British scientist defends research amid cover-up claims

The University of East Anglia scientist at the centre of an ongoing row about climate research has defended his work against allegations that he covered up flawed data on temperature rises.

Prof. Phil Jones, of the university's Climatic Research Unit, said a 20-year-old study questioned by sceptics "stands up to scrutiny" and was corroborated by more recent work.

The research centre has been under fire from climate sceptics since 13 years of emails were stolen from UEA servers and posted online in November, in the run-up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen.

The Guardian newspaper has claimed Prof. Jones withheld information from sceptic Douglas Keenan, who queried data from Chinese weather stations used in a 1990 study on global warming.

The research found temperature rises were the result of climate change rather than the spread of urban areas, which are warmer than rural sites.

The 1990 paper was one of a number of studies referred to by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their key 2007 assessment of global warming, to show urbanisation had only a small effect on rising temperatures across the world. But Mr Keenan raised concerns about the lack of information on the location of the weather stations, and that some had moved, invalidating the data. He accused Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University of Albany in the US, who had supplied Prof. Jones with the data, of scientific fraud - a charge the university cleared him of following an inquiry.

Prof. Jones said UEA had responded fully to a freedom of information request from Mr Keenan, and had supplied the temperature data and the locations of the weather stations - although he did not have information about sites which had moved. A study he published in 2008, using improved data from the China Meteorological Administration from sites used in the 1990 research adjusted to take into account any movements of stations, had almost exactly the same results as the original, he said.