LONDON — More than 1,700 British scientists have signed a petition insisting that global warming is man-made, a spokesman said Thursday after leaked emails sparked a row over the science behind climate change.
The emails, intercepted from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top centre for climate research, have been seized upon by sceptics as evidence that the experts twisted data in order to dramatise global warming.
But the British scientists' petition, released on the fourth day of a landmark United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen, insisted the evidence was clear.
"We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities."
Some of leaked emails expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming and discussed ways to counter the campaigns of climate change naysayers.
A spokesman for the Met Office, Britain's national weather service, said its head John Hirst had written to 70 colleagues last Sunday asking them to sign "to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change."
The petition was then forwarded to scientist colleagues to generate support "for a simple statement that we... have the utmost confidence in the science base that underpins the evidence for global warming," the spokesman said.
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