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For those concerned about climate change and trying to persuade politicians and populations that something must be done about it, these are not good times. First, there was the hacking of emails from one of the world centres for climate research, at the University of East Anglia, some of which show scientists behaving in ways that fall far short of the candour and integrity expected of top researchers. Then there was the disappointment of Copenhagen, where an attempt to agree on a legally binding accord that would give the world something to succeed the Kyoto Protocol was sunk, primarily by the machinations of China and India. And since then it has emerged that two rather startling predictions of climate-change disaster turn out to rest on nothing more substantial than a magazine interview and an article by non-scientific members of a pressure group.

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As the wrangling at Copenhagen showed, achieving political consensus for action on climate change is fiendishly difficult at the best of times. It is an area in which political action is heavily dependent on confidence in the integrity of the science underpinning it. The doubts that have been raised over some material publicised by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and on the behaviour of the scientists involved in climate research, do nothing to make it any easier.

The latest furore has been over assertions that glaciers in the Himalayas were likely to disappear by 2035 and that Amazonian rainforest would shrink calamitously because of rising temperatures. The glacier claim turned out to have been an off- the-cuff remark made during a telephone interview with a journalist from a scientific magazine, and the rainforest claim had its origins in an article written by two non-scientific environmental activists. The head of the climate change panel, Rajendra Pachauri, has been forced to retract the discredited material and apologise for it, but he has since come out swinging against the latest revelations, giving interviews with at least two major London newspapers this week accusing his critics of "skulduggery of the worst kind".

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It is an unfortunate line to take given that the emails leaked from the University of East Anglia, whose work the IPCC relies upon, apparently show climate-change scientists massaging data to support the results they wanted, ganging up to bully those whose views they disagree with, withholding information from others in the field and so on.

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For all their headline-grabbing appeal, the glacier and the Amazonian rainforest stories are, so far as the science is concerned, insignificant. Far graver, from this point of view, are the underhand practices of particular climate researchers revealed in the leaked emails. Both stories do, however, severely damage public trust that the IPCC operates according to the most rigorous standards.

There is a mass of evidence that suggests that man-made climate change is a problem and that political action will need to be taken to avert severe consequences for the globe. But that evidence, like all scientific evidence, must be properly weighed and must be subject to challenge. That is necessary not only to get good science but also to get the public consensus required for any action that may need to be taken.

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