A member of the panel set up to investigate claims that climate change scientists covered up flawed data was forced to resign just hours after the inquiry’s launch.

Philip Campbell stood down after it was disclosed he had given an interview in which he defended the conduct of researchers at University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), insisting they had done nothing wrong.

In a statement, he said he was stepping down in order to ensure that the ability of the review team to carry out its investigation would not be called into question.

The inquiry, led by the distinguished civil servant Sir Muir Russell, was set up after hacked emails from the CRU scientists prompted accusations that they had been manipulating the data.

However Channel 4 News reported last night that Dr Campbell, the editor-in-chief of the journal Nature, told Chinese State Radio last year that he did not believe the emails showed any evidence of improper conduct.

‘The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong,’ he told the station.

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The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”

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