LONDON: The British scientist at the centre of a row over hacked emails and altering data on climate change trends will stand aside from his post to allow an independent investigation.
But Professor Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, has denounced allegations of a conspiracy to manipulate global warming statistics as ''complete rubbish'', saying he would step aside so the claims could be fully explored.
Professor Jones said he ''absolutely'' stood by the research material produced by the centre and categorically rejected any suggestions his unit was involved in a conspiracy to support the notion that climate change is the result of human activity.
Hundreds of emails have been placed in the public domain after they were mysteriously removed from the globally renowned centre for climate research's servers and uploaded onto a website of climate change sceptics.
Their publication sparked worldwide headlines and blogs and has been widely interpreted as a deliberate attempt to hijack debate in the lead-up to the global summit on climate change in Copenhagen next week.
Professor Jones said it was important the unit be allowed to continue its world-leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible.
''After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the director's role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the university for agreeing to this. The review process will have my full support.''
The leaked material consists of thousands of emails between scientists at the unit as they discussed collection of data over many years. Sceptics on blogs seized on particular emails that, read out of context, appear to suggest omission of data.
The unit's work has argued that temperature rises are unequivocally linked to human activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and the findings form a major plank of the material used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In one 2004 email, seized and highlighted by sceptics and anti-climate change bloggers, Professor Jones wrote, when commenting on material that he regarded as flawed: ''I can't see either … being in the next [IPCC] report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!''
Scientists at the university had also previously been forced to concede that much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming were based had been thrown away.
The admission, in response to a freedom of information request, emerged after the hacking of email messages and fired further controversy.
On Tuesday, the controversy also sparked the anger of the leading economist, Nicholas Stern, who said that evidence on climate change was ''overwhelming'' and described those who express scepticism about evidence that human activity has contributed as ''muddied and unscientific''.
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