U.N. Panel Will Investigate Controversial Leaked Climate E-mails

The United Nations panel on climate change says it will investigate a collection of leaked e-mails that have raised questions about the honesty of climate scientists, The Times of London reports.

Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said accusations that a British university deliberately manipulated numbers to embellish the threat of global warming were serious and would take time to analyze.

"We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it," Pauchari told a BBC Radio program. "We certainly don't want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail."

Climate change skeptics have trumpeted the e-mails as proof of a long-running conspiracy to skew science toward the idea of man-made global warming. The scientists who wrote the leaked e-mails have said that they were taken out of context, and that they illustrated a rigorous commitment to scientific accuracy rather than the opposite.