LONDON — Last November we had "Climategate," in which somebody hacked into the e-mails at the University of East Anglia and discovered that professor Phil Jones, head of the university's Climate Research Unit (CRU), had been trying to exclude scientific papers he regarded as flawed from being considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"I can't see either (paper) . . . being in the next (IPCC) report," Jones wrote in 2004. "Kevin (one of Jones' colleagues) and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what peer-review literature is!" Bad Phil!
Scientists can be rather unworldly, but within their own little world they are highly competitive and capable of considerable nastiness toward their competitors. (Q: Why are scientific politics so nasty? A: Because the stakes are so small.) It is not clear whether Jones was being serious or only mock-serious in his e-mail, but he certainly could have been planning to do exactly what he said.