Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at England's University of East Anglia, told The Sunday Times he was unprepared for the backlash that followed the publication of his e-mails, and suffered a "David Kelly moment" -- a reference to the British scientist who killed himself in 2003 after casting doubts on government claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
University of East Anglia
Phil Jones, here in an undated photo, said he has received death threats and suffered health problems since hackers released e-mails from him on climate changed.
"I did think about it, yes. About suicide," said Jones. "I thought about it several times, but I think I've got past that stage now."
The climate scientist was thrust into the limelight last November when hackers leaked hundreds of messages they had stolen from CRU e-mail accounts. Some of the e-mails -- released just before the Copenhagen Climate Summit -- appeared to show Jones calling on colleagues to withhold or destroy scientific data requested under Britain's Freedom of Information (FoI) laws.
Jones said he believes skeptics -- possibly organized by Stephen McIntyre, a former minerals prospector whose skeptical blog, ClimateAudit.org, was the first site to link to the leaked messages -- deliberately flooded the CRU with FoI requests to slow its work. The CRU received 60 FoI demands from across the world in last July alone. As each request takes at least 18 hours to process, and the CRU has only 13 staff members, dealing with them all would have meant surrendering large chucks of research time.
He now accepts that he should have treated the requests more seriously. "It was just frustration," Jones said of his reaction. "It was taking us away from our day jobs." He added that no data were ever destroyed by the CRU. "We have no data to delete," he said. "It comes to us from other institutions around the world. We interpret data. We don't create or collect it. It's all available from other sources."
The scandal has taken a heavy toll on Jones' health. He said that he has lost more than 14 pounds and that he takes beta blockers to help him get through the day and sleeping pills to get him through the night. He told The Sunday Times he has received numerous death threats, including two in the past week, after Britain's deputy information commissioner ruled that Jones had failed to follow FOI regulations.
Jones has temporarily stepped down as director of the CRU, while Sir Muir Russell, the former vice chancellor of Glasgow University, reviews the climategate affair. But while the CRU has been criticized for its handling of the FoI requests, nobody has yet been able to find a hole in the team's research, which suggests humans are the key cause of climate change.
The science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the U.N. body charged with investigating global warming -- appears far less rigorous, however. Just weeks after it was discovered that the IPCC's 2007 report falsely claimed the Himalayas could be glacier-free by 2035, more errors have been spotted in the 3,000-page report.
Most damaging is the suggestion that global warming could halve rain-fed North African crop production by 2020 -- a claim quoted in speeches by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman. Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC's climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times there was no hard scientific evidence to back up this statement, which appears to have been pulled from papers that were not peer reviewed.
Scientists convinced that human activity is a major cause of global warming say it is now essential that the IPCC and other research groups get their houses in order, as the steady flow of scandals is eroding climate science's credibility. A BBC poll this weekend found that since the climategate scandal broke last November, the percentage of Brits who don't believe in climate change has climbed from 10 percent to 25 percent.
