In a on 16 May, The Times claimed that a paper by Lennart Bengtsson, professorial research fellow at the University of Reading, and four others had been rejected by Environmental Research Letters because of a reviewer¡¯s concern that it would damage what the newspaper called climate scientists¡¯ ¡°cause¡±.

In the paper, Professor Bengtsson casts doubt on the estimate by the UN¡¯s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the average global temperature would rise by 4.5 degrees if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were permitted to double.

The Times quoted a description of the manuscript by one of the reviewers as ¡°less than helpful¡± and ¡°harmful as it opens the door to oversimplified claims of ¡®errors¡¯ and worse from the climate sceptics media side¡± [sic].

The paper likened the incident to the 2009 ¡°Climategate¡± affair, in which hacked emails from University of East Anglia climate scientists allegedly revealed the manipulation and suppression of data ¨C though a series of inquiries absolved the scientists involved of scientific misconduct.

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Professor Bengtsson told The Times that ¡°some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist¡±.?

But in a subsequent statement to reporters, he distances himself from suggestions that there was a ¡°systematic ¡®cover up¡¯ of scientific evidence on climate change or that academics¡¯ work is being ¡®deliberately suppressed¡¯¡±.

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However, he remains ¡°worried by a wider trend that science is gradually being influenced by political views¡±.

¡°I was concerned that the Environmental Research Letters¡¯ reviewer¡¯s comments suggested his or her opinion was not objective or based on an unbiased assessment of the scientific evidence,¡± he says.

He welcomes the release by the journal¡¯s publisher, the Institute of Physics, of the full transcript of the review in question.

In a accompanying the release, Nicola Gulley, editorial director of IOP Publishing, rejects any suggestion of activism by the journal or the reviewers.

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She says the paper was rejected because it ¡°contained errors¡± and ¡°in our view did not provide a significant advancement in the field¡±.

¡°Far from denying the validity of [Professor] Bengtsson¡¯s questions, the referees encouraged the authors to provide more innovative ways of undertaking the research to create a useful advance,¡± she says.

¡°The journal ¡­ is respected by the scientific community because it plays a valuable role in the advancement of environmental science ¨C for unabashedly not publishing oversimplified claims about environmental science, and encouraging scientific debate.

¡°With current debate around the dangers of providing a false sense of ¡®balance¡¯ on a topic as societally important as climate change, we¡¯re quite astonished that The Times has taken the decision to put such a non-story on its front page.¡±

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A spokesman for the IoP said the journal had also released this morning for people to view after permission from the writers was obtained.

paul.jump@tsleducation.com