UNITED STATES

UK: Climate scientist receives death threats

An Australian-born scientist at the centre of the East Anglia University email affair says he has received a number of death threats, reports Antonette Collins for ABC News. Dr Tom Wigley, a former director of the university's Climatic Research Unit, is unable to reveal the details of the threats, as they are being investigated by the FBI and UK police.

Wigley had several of his emails hacked and used by climate change sceptics to suggest that he and his colleagues have been distorting data about the evidence of global warming. He told Eleanor Hall on "The World Today" that while the threats are genuinely frightening, he is not surprised.

"This sort of thing has been going on at a much lower level for almost 20 years and there have been other outbursts of this sort of behaviour - criticism and abusive emails and things like that in the past," he said. "So this is a worse manifestation but it's happened before so it's not that surprising."
Full report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation site