Prince Charles opens new Science Museum gallery

Fri, 03 Dec 2010

London - Britain's Prince Charles opened Friday a new gallery devoted to the environment in the Science Museum in London and took up the cause of scholars who had come under attack in the so-called "climategate" scandal.

The 4.5-million-pound (7-million-dollar) gallery titled "Atmosphere" illustrates the possible effects of global warming, an issue which the environmentalist prince has long been involved in.

While on a tour of the new exhibit, the Prince of Wales expressed his support for scientists at East Anglia university who had come under fire amid allegations of manipulating data on climate change.

He said that "climate science has taken a battering of late" and explained why he chose to visit the university whose Climatic Research Unit CRU became embroiled in controversy.

"I wanted to discuss with them the appalling treatment they had endured during the so-called climategate row because, as they reminded me, the University of East Anglia is not a campaigning NGO, nor an industry lobby group," Prince Charles said.

He praised the school's work in the effort to "understand precisely and dispassionately what is happening to our world, to separate the facts from the fiction and build the sum of human knowledge on the one issue that could very well balloon into the cause of our downfall."

The climategate controversy came when emails from CRU scientists were hacked and released online in 2009, and were used by skeptics of climate change to contend that researchers were manipulating and suppressing data to back up a theory of man-made global warming.

Later inquiries into the matter turned up no evidence of scientific malpractice.

Charles has campaigned for decades on environmental issues including global warming. He recently published a book called Harmony outlining how people can sustain the planet's environment.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/356473,new-science-museum-gallery.html.