climategatebak 420 capt

ggl search code broke main<div>
</div><div><div>climategate420</div><div>
</div><div>trans</div><div>
</div><div>oct 09 ce and inhofe forced extend comment period b/c of data destruction (nope)</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>esquire</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Hansen's congressional testimony back in '88</div><div>
</div><div>The first turning point was 1997, when the nations of the world agreed to limit their CO2 emissions at the Kyoto Protocol. A year later, the American Petroleum Institute hired a conservative PR expert named Steve Milloy to develop a "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." They had to tell a better story and tell it fast. ...</div><div>2006, Al Gore killed them with An Inconvenient Truth.</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy</div><div>
</div><div>The incident began when a server used by the Climatic Research Unit was breached in "a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack",[5] and 160 MB of data[8] were obtained including more than 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents" covered theur tracks;&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Lawson tried previous FOIA?!</div><div>
</div><div>November 19, 2009, an unknown hacker published a cache of emails from the University of East Anglia's</div><div>
</div><div>Trump referred to Climategate when called Fox to denouce cliate change as hoax (seven years before pulled out of Copenhagen) // prfiguted Poedesta hack ahead of 2016 election.&nbsp; Both published by Wikileaks</div><div>
</div><div>NYT</div><div>
</div><div>On November 20, a New York Times front-page story opened by noting that skeptics “say [the emails] show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.”</div><div>&nbsp;Wapo quotes Ebell;&nbsp; NBC,&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>NBC told viewers that “those who doubt that man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate say these emails…show climate scientists massaging data.”&nbsp;</div><div>ABC</div><div>
</div><div>[[Mann quickly became a central target for climate change deniers. Right-wing groups and Republican politicians called for the federal government to revoke his research funding and for his university to investigate him. He received an envelope in the mail containing white powder; it turned out to be cornstarch. “You and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families,” declared one emailer. Along with other climate experts, Mann was featured in an anti-Semitic post on the white supremacist website Stormfront—an ominous foreshadowing of 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>“I could easily brush off many of the attacks,” Mann would later write in his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, which discusses the right’s assault on his research. “But to the extent that the industry-funded disinformation machine was taking direct aim not just at me—my livelihood, my reputation, my safety—but even my family, I was becoming incensed.”]]</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>4/5/20 i broke html code on main (text capt) Gloudeman endit</div><div>28 red 8/14</div><div>culmination of book/b-52?</div><div>capt 1218</div><div>420 3 grey box; end real honesty, bak no color (still red 4/20)</div><div></div><div>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy</div><div>
</div><div>wikipedia quite good:</div><div></div><div>November 19, 2009, an unknown hacker published a cache of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. It was meant to be the hack that brought down climate science. But it made the research — and researchers — stronger than ever.</div><div>
</div><div>10 years on, this five-part series looks back at the key players that manufactured the scandal that came to be known as 'Climategate':</div><div>
</div><div>READ MORE</div><div></div><div>part 1:&nbsp; https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/11/18/introducing-climategate-10</div><div>
</div><div>On November 19, 2009, an unknown hacker published a cache of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. It was meant to be the hack that brought down climate science. But it made the research — and researchers — stronger than ever.</div><div>
</div><div>10 years on, this five-part series looks back at the key players that manufactured the scandal that came to be known as 'Climategate':</div><div>
</div><div>Series — Climategate @ 10</div><div>
</div><div>Here Are 3 Climategate Myths That Have Not Aged Well</div><div>Science writer Dana Nuccitelli outlines three areas where the science has improved significantly, making a mockery of some myths sparked by Climategate.</div><div>
</div><div>Where Are the Ring-Leaders of the Manufactured Climategate Scandal Now?</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>DeSmog has tracked those responsible for spinning Climategate into an international media moment — some are now advisors to top government officials, others have very much faded to the fringes.</div><div>
</div><div>How the Climategate Email Hack Laid the Foundations for the Fake News Era</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>DeSmog UK's first editor, Brendan Montague, gives a personal account of investigating climate science deniers up-close during the time of Climategate, and how their legacy endures.</div><div>
</div><div>Interview: Climategate Felt Like a Disaster, But Climate Science Is Now Stronger Than Ever</div><div>American academic Prof Robert Brulle reflects on how Climagate affected the research community, and how it rebuilt to become stronger 10 years on.</div><div>
</div><div>DeSmog Was Created to Combat Climategate-Style Misinformation. We’re Still Going</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>DeSmog was created in 2006, three years before Climategate. Executive director Brendan DeMelle reflects on our modest role in puncturing the hot air around the Climategate scandal, and continued efforts to combat misinformation on climate change.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>ref</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/11/18/ring-leaders-manufactured-climategate-scandal</div><div>
</div><div>Ten years ago, leading climate scientists at the University of East Anglia had a mass of email correspondence stolen from their computers and broadcast around the world, in what became known as ‘Climategate’.</div><div>Climate science deniers pounced on the leaked emails as supposed proof that scientists were manipulating data and creating panic about climate change out of nothing.</div><div>
</div><div>The email release was deliberately timed to sow doubt ahead of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, which ended in disappointment when countries failed to come to an agreement on curbing emissions. Saudi Arabia’s lead climate negotiator at the talks even claimed that the correspondence showed there was “no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change”.</div><div>
</div><div>Multiple inquiries were conducted and no evidence of scientific malpractice was found — though the scientists in question received some criticism for not being completely transparent around their data and methodologies.</div><div>
</div><div>Public trust in climate science was shaken, with a series of scientists' quotes stripped of context and used to cast aspersions on their integrity.</div><div>
</div><div>While the identity of the hackers is still unknown, there was a very public effort by long-time climate science deniers, particularly in the UK and US, to make the most of the controversy and weaken trust in the science.</div><div>
</div><div>Some have gone on to become prominent advisors to those in government. Others have been forced to the fringes of the blogosphere.</div><div>
</div><div>So, who were Climategate’s ringleaders, and where are they now?</div><div>
</div><div>UK</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Introducing Climategate @ 10</div><div>DeSmog Was Created to Combat Climategate-Style Misinformation. We’re Still Going</div><div>Here Are 3 Climategate Myths That Have Not Aged Well</div><div>Interview: Climategate Felt Like a Disaster, But Climate Science Is Now Stronger Than Ever</div><div>How the Climategate Email Hack Laid the Foundations for the Fake News Era</div><div>James Delingpole</div><div>
</div><div>Christopher Booker</div><div>
</div><div>Graham Stringer</div><div>
</div><div>Nigel Lawson</div><div>
</div><div>Andrew Montford</div><div>
</div><div>Roger Tattersall</div><div>
</div><div>US and Canada</div><div>
</div><div>Anthony Watts</div><div>
</div><div>Patrick J Michaels</div><div>
</div><div>Steve McIntyre & Ross McKitrick</div><div>
</div><div>Myron Ebell</div><div>
</div><div>UK</div><div>James Delingpole</div><div>James Delingpole was one of the first journalists to write about the hacked emails and was credited with coining the term “Climategate”, though he has since admitted he came across it in the comments section of a climate sceptic blog.</div><div>
</div><div>In an article for the British newspaper The Telegraph, for which he was blogging, he said the emails had caused the “conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth” to be “suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed”.</div><div>
</div><div>He predicted the episode would deal a “blow to the AGW lobby's credibility from which it is never likely to recover”, calling it a “Berlin Wall moment” for climate sceptics in a post on his website.</div><div>
</div><div>In the intervening years, Delingpole has continued to claim that there is “no convincing evidence” that the climate is warming “in ways which are dangerous or unprecedented”.</div><div>
</div><div>He has also been a vocal opponent of wind energy in the UK and was involved in a plan in 2012 to push the issue up the political agenda by standing against the Conservative MP Chris Heaton-Harris — himself a prominent critic of renewable energy.</div><div>
</div><div>Since 2014, Delingpole has been executive editor of the London branch of the alt-right website Breitbart and regularly writes for the Spectator magazine, where he recently described his reporting on Climategate as his “finest hour”.</div><div>
</div><div>[pix]</div><div>
</div><div>Christopher Booker</div><div>Christopher Booker passed away in July 2019. For decades he was one of the UK’s most prominent climate science deniers, writing regular columns for The Telegraph.</div><div>
</div><div>Booker saw the emails as evidence of a great conspiracy among climate scientists, calling it the “greatest scientific scandal of our age”. He said the accused scientists were “trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction — to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming”.</div><div>
</div><div>Just a month before Climategate, Booker had published a book called The Great Global Warming Disaster, which has been dubbed a “definitive guide for sceptics”.</div><div>
</div><div>The following month, Booker accused the then head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of making a “fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies,” representing a conflict of interest with his IPCC position. After an independent audit found this to be untrue, the newspaper was forced to apologise and retract the article.</div><div>
</div><div>Booker continued to write columns casting doubt on the threat of climate change for a decade after Climategate, last year describing the idea the UK’s summer heatwave was linked to climate change as “hot air” in an article for the Daily Mail. “We shall continue to have abnormally hot summers from time to time, just as we did in 1976 and 1846, way back before global warming was invented,” he concluded.</div><div>
</div><div>He also wrote a report for the UK’s principal climate science denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) that characterised the scientific consensus on climate change as “groupthink”. An article based on the report was published by CapX, a news and opinion site run by the Thatcherite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which is based in offices next door to the GWPF on Tufton Street, in Westminster, London.</div><div>
</div><div>Graham Stringer</div><div>Labour MP Graham Stringer was a member of the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee at the time and was part of an investigation into the hacked emails launched by the committee the following year.</div><div>
</div><div>Highly sceptical of the climate scientists, Stringer pushed for a more critical final government report on the incident and later wrote that the “work done at [the University of East Anglia’s] Climatic Research Unit barely qualified as science”.</div><div>
</div><div>The inquiry found that “accusations of dishonesty against CRU” were unfounded but acknowledged that climate scientists needed to “become more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies”.</div><div>
</div><div>Stringer has since been a leading supporter of Brexit in the Labour party, serving on the board of the official Vote Leave campaign and subsequently backing the Leave Means Leave pressure group, co-founded by Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice.</div><div>
</div><div>He joined the board of the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, in 2015.</div><div>
</div><div>Nigel Lawson</div><div>Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Nigel Lawson, had just founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) when the scientists' emails were released and quickly called for a public inquiry.</div><div>
</div><div>He said in a statement that the integrity of climate science had been “called into question” and the reputation of British science “seriously tarnished” by the email hack. Lawson gave evidence to the parliamentary investigation launched the following year, alongside GWPF director Benny Peiser.</div><div>
</div><div>Since then, the GWPF has continued to cast doubt on the threat of climate change and lobby against action to cut emissions.</div><div>
</div><div>Lawson, who stepped down as Chairman of the group at the start of this year but remains its Honorary President, has frequently been the subject of complaints to the BBC for misleading statements about climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>He has also played a leading role in the Brexit campaign, chairing the official Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 EU referendum.</div><div>
</div><div>Andrew Montford</div><div>Andrew Montford, a writer and retired accountant, was commissioned by the Global Warming Policy Foundation to conduct an inquiry of their own into Climategate. The output was 'GWPF Report 1'.</div><div>
</div><div>Montford was paid £3,000 for his services and the GWPF released the results in September, 2010. He has been Deputy Director of the group since 2017.</div><div>
</div><div>Three enquiries in the UK, one by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, one an independent panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh, and an independent review led by Sir Muir Russell, had all exonerated the scientists of any scientific misconduct before the GWPF conducted its enquiry.</div><div>
</div><div>According to Montford's own report, the other three inquiries were “rushed, cursory, and largely unpersuasive.” Although two known climate science deniers had been involved — Labour MP Graham Stringer and engineering professor Michael Kelly — Montford criticised the inquiries' lack of climate “sceptics” on their panels.</div><div>
</div><div>Discussing his report, he admitted he was “partisan in this argument” but argued it should not, however, be dismissed.</div><div>
</div><div>Since Climategate, Montford has written reports claiming children are being brainwashed about climate change in schools and that a recent David Attenborough documentary was an “eight-part, multi-million pound fundraiser” for the environmental organisation WWF.</div><div>
</div><div>[pix]</div><div>
</div><div>Roger Tattersall</div><div>Roger Tattersall is the author of the blog Tallbloke’s Talkshop and was one of the first four blogs to receive a link to the hacked emails.</div><div>
</div><div>Tattersall has referred to the mysterious person(s) who released the stolen East Anglia emails as “our old friend FOIA,” although he claims he doesn't know the hacker's identity.</div><div>
</div><div>According to his blog, police seized some of his computers in 2011 but he was not considered a suspect by the following year.</div><div>
</div><div>Anthony Watts later lauded Tattersall’s blog for being “The first blogger to break the Climategate2 story”, a second wave of email releases in 2011.</div><div>
</div><div>Like many others involved in Climategate, Tattersall has since been heavily involved in campaigning for Brexit, working as Assistant Director of Vote Leave, as well as for Grassroots Out and Leave Means Leave.</div><div>
</div><div>He was a prospective parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party for the 2015 election and a “West Yorkshire Organiser” for The Brexit Party earlier this year.</div><div>
</div><div>He is also currently Chief Executive of a fringe group called Clexit (Climate Exit), formed shortly after the UK’s decision to leave the EU and whose founding statement reads: “The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.”</div><div>
</div><div>US and Canada</div><div>Anthony Watts</div><div>Anthony Watts is a retired TV meteorologist who founded the popular sceptics’ blog Watts Up With That (WUWT), where he was among the first to publish extracts of the emails. He is also behind surfacestations.org, a website questioning the validity of the surface temperature record.</div><div>
</div><div>Since the initial release of emails in November 2009, WUWT has published no less than 385 posts on Climategate, including coverage of the so-called “Climategate 2.0” where additional emails retained from the first hacking were later released.</div><div>
</div><div>Watts was involved in a document leak of his own in 2012. His name cropped up in a leaked fundraising strategy from the fossil fuel–funded think tank the Heartland Institute, which outlined how it pledged to raise $88,000 for a new website for Watts.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2019, Watts officially joined the Heartland Institute as a senior fellow.</div><div>
</div><div>[pix]</div><div>
</div><div>Patrick J. Michaels</div><div>Patrick Michaels was a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute at the time of the email release and appeared on both Fox News and CNN to discuss Climategate in the following days.</div><div>
</div><div>He was quoted as saying: “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.”</div><div>
</div><div>The Cato Institute later boasted that Michaels had appeared in the media more than 150 times since the initial release of emails and “has quickly become the most recognized face decrying the obstructionism of global warming alarmists.”</div><div>
</div><div>The think tank has been closely-tied to the Koch family since it was founded by Charles Koch in 1977 and has received over $20 million over the years from related foundations.</div><div>
</div><div>Michaels later became director of the Cato Institute’s “Center for the Study of Science” but left earlier this year following disagreement over the think tank’s focus. Cato subsequently closed the center.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2010, Michaels faced his own controversy when a trove of documents from a 2007 court case revealed he had significant ties to big energy interests, as Mother Jones reported, “ties that he's worked hard to keep secret.”</div><div>
</div><div>Michaels is currently a Senior Fellow at the fossil fuel–funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and recently joined the CO2 Coalition, a group that emerged out of the now-defunct George C. Marshall Institute and headed by prominent climate science denier William Happer.</div><div>
</div><div>Steve McIntyre & Ross McKitrick</div><div>Steve McIntyre is the founder of Climate Audit, another of the initial websites to receive a link to the hacked emails. McIntyre’s background is in the mining industry, having worked as an officer or director of numerous companies.</div><div>
</div><div>Ross McKitrick is a close colleague of McIntyre, and an economics professor in Guelph, Ontario, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.</div><div>
</div><div>Before the leak, McIntyre had spent years filing or coordinating dozens of Freedom of Information requests to climate scientists at East Anglia, with the pace escalating significantly in the months leading up to the leak.</div><div>
</div><div>McIntyre and McKitrick have regularly co-authored papers and were given an award by the Competitive Enterprise Institute for their work on Climategate.</div><div>
</div><div>Watts wrote at the time:</div><div>
</div><div>“Much of Climategate involves research initially called into doubt by the analysis of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. The scientists involved in the scandal saw McIntyre and McKitrick as major threats to global warming orthodoxy and to their own credibility. Consequently, they are mentioned more than 150 times in the ClimateGate e-mails.”</div><div>
</div><div>Both McIntyre and McKitrick have spoken at Heartland Institute conferences since Climategate. In a Heartland podcast earlier this year hosted by Anthony Watts, McKitrick claimed that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could provide a net benefit to agriculture.</div><div>
</div><div>Myron Ebell</div><div>Myron Ebell is Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the fossil fuel–funded Competitive Enterprise Institute and was one of the most prominent voices in the media discussing Climategate.</div><div>
</div><div>In a statement on Climategate, Ebell said:</div><div>
</div><div>“It is clear that some of the ‘world’s leading climate scientists,’ as they are always described, are more dedicated to promoting the alarmist political agenda than in scientific research. Some of the emails that I have read are blatant displays of personal pettiness, unethical conniving, and twisting the science to support their political position.“</div><div>
</div><div>He later appeared on Fox News to debate climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, whose emails were among those hacked.</div><div>
</div><div>In the interview, Ebell claimed the scientists were “cooking the data … And cooking is a technical term which means manipulating and falsifying the data.”</div><div>
</div><div>“These people have already been revealed as not having any honor. Now they’re being revealed as not having a sense of shame,” he said.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2016, Ebell led Donald Trump’s transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency. He held a press conference in London in 2017, hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, in which he said Brexit was an “opportunity” to shed environmental regulations. He continues to chair the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of organisations “that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies” and have been credited with helping to persuade Trump to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>ref 2 desmog</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/11/18/how-climategate-laid-foundations-fake-news-era</div><div>
</div><div>lord Lawson stepped to the curb hailing a taxi. We had both been at an event in a swish Fleet Street hotel discussing illegal phone hacking by journalists. I had followed him out onto the pavement and asked whether the hacking of scientists' emails from the servers of the British university had been unethical — as well as criminal. “It was a whistleblower,” he scowled. The black taxi took off, leaving me in a cloud of diesel.</div><div>Another Lord, though of a different stripe, Lord Monckton, I have met many times. The one that comes to mind is when he was the star turn during a fringe event of climate deniers near the Vatican in April 2015. I began by asking whether he, as a Catholic, believed the Pope could in fact be fallible when pronouncing climate change the challenge of our age. Before I knew where we were, the faux peer was accusing Barack Obama of being the centre of a global Communist-Fascist conspiracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Dr S Fred Singer I interviewed at a Heartland Institute conference in Las Vegas, the United States, back in 2014. He spoke quietly and softly, explaining his role in recruiting Lawson, the former British chancellor, to the climate denial cause. This mattered because Singer is the grandfather of the denial of climate science, and has been associated with both tobacco and oil companies.</div><div>
</div><div>These three men were influential in turning Climategate into an international scandal 10 years ago now.</div><div>
</div><div>Creating a storm</div><div>
</div><div>The illegal hacking of thousands of private emails between climate scientists, both at the University of East Anglia and elsewhere, and their publication in November 2009 was supposed to be the smoking gun which proved that hundreds of highly respected, indentured university scientists working around the world had conspired together to exaggerate the risks from climate breakdown.</div><div>
</div><div>The target of the hack attack had been Pennsylvania State University Professor Michael Mann, the author of the first ‘Hockey Stick’ graph which showed a dramatic uptick in average global temperatures following hundreds of years of a fairly stable climate. Professor Phil Jones was collateral damage: accused of academic dishonesty, hauled in front of a powerful Parliamentary committee to answer these trumped up charges, his life’s work unfairly called into question. He considered suicide.</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate should have been a storm in a teacup. The emails revealed nothing new. A few choice phrases were taken out of context, twisted, and presented as damning evidence. It was Lord Lawson who turned it into a crisis for climate science.</div><div>
</div><div>He launched the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in Parliament just in time to make best use of the faux scandal, toured the newspaper offices using his reputation as Thatcher’s one time chancellor to persuade editors to take the event seriously, and called on his Tory friends to open their cheque-books to fund his opaque think tank.</div><div>
</div><div>The GWPF scored some initial successes. Lawson is said to have persuaded his former friend, Lionel Barber, until recently the editor of the Financial Times, to take the Climategate fiasco seriously. This in turn likely influenced the Guardian in its decision to run day after day of coverage of the hacked emails, and its reporters’ fruitless attempt to find the hacker.</div><div>
</div><div>Lawson was also influential in the decision of the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons to launch its investigation — trapping Professor Jones under the cameras and the hot lights to answer evidently preposterous allegations. Lawson, even during a hearing which he had been influential in being opened, refused to say who was funding his new thinktank.</div><div>
</div><div>Manufacturing denial</div><div>Alongside Lawson, Singer and Monckton were also there from the very beginning and had significant roles to play in the development of the GWPF.</div><div>
</div><div>Singer was among the first climate deniers in the world, indeed when he entered the fray most climate scientists were aware of the complexity and contingency in the research. It was firmly established that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused heating, and that the amount pumped out through the use of fossil fuels was inextricably rising. But issues like the sensitivity of the atmosphere to change and how quickly this would change was still hotly debated.</div><div>
</div><div>Singer worked with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (now Atlas Network) in the United States. The foundation was primarily concerned with promoting free market, neoliberal economics. Friedrich von Hayek was the intellectual inspiration. He argued that any regulation would distort the market, leading to hardship.</div><div>
</div><div>This ideology was very much in the ascendancy around the world: Lord Lawson has been its “chief architect” in the UK and as chancellor had torn apart the regime of financial regulations. But as well as causing economic collapse in many of the economies where it was tested, neoliberalism now faced the challenge posed by climate science — which would inevitably lead to calls to stop (or regulate, or tax) fossil fuel use.</div><div>
</div><div>[pix clatham hse]</div><div>
</div><div>The Atlas Foundation turned to Singer for help. The physicist had previously worked with the tobacco industry deliberately creating smoke and mirrors around the increasing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. The foundation received money from the oil industry, including Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, and was instrumental in founding the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in the UK. It was a trustee of the IEA — David Henderson — who first approached Lord Lawson at an event hosted by the London School of Economics and persuaded him to take up the cause of climate denial.</div><div>
</div><div>Lord Monckton also had a part to play. A viscount, Monckton was born into money, but despite his rather eccentric denials, actually missed out on becoming a member of the House of Lords when hereditary peers were abolished. The viscount worked for a very short period for Thatcher’s policy unit. He later lost £1m in prize money when he launched a puzzle betting no-one could crack it. They could.</div><div>
</div><div>Monckton became something of a hero to the climate denier community when he published a two-page rant in the Sunday Telegraph claiming that he alone had exposed the fatal flaw of the science of climate change. The rather eccentric ramblings had originally been drafted as a report for a private investor (with an historic interest in fracking). He was also instrumental in formulating talking points from the Climategate scandal for climate science deniers across the world.</div><div>
</div><div>[pix congress?!]</div><div>
</div><div>Monckton — if you believe his side of the story — advised Lawson to establish the GWPF and take up his new climate denier cause — attacking science rather than policy. He also claimed to have recommended Dr Benny Peiser — who wrote his dissertation on whether people are more athletically active in the summer — as the head of the charity. Peiser denied this version of events, desperate to distance Lawson and the think tank from the discredited and conspiracy-prone Monckton.</div><div>
</div><div>Political game</div><div>Lawson once boasted that he was responsible for what he (modestly) called Lawson’s Law: he advised the Tory party not to fight elections based on what the electorate actually cared about, but instead to persuade the electorate to care about what the Tory party could win an election on.</div><div>
</div><div>Lawson did not advise fake news, but it encouraged a distortion of reality that has seriously undermined our politics. It opened the floodgates.</div><div>
</div><div>Along the way, the GWPF has gotten into bed with the wildest of right-wing neoliberal think tanks, becoming intimately entwined with those responsible for serious spin and corporate lobbying around Brexit.</div><div>
</div><div>Lawson himself was instrumental in the Vote Leave campaign (before applying for residency in France). He was happy to appeal to reactionary populism to settle scores within the Tory party.</div><div>
</div><div>One consequence of this is that Nigel Farage long ago adopted the tactics of his namesake. Farage has dabbled in climate denial. He has gone further in stirring up populism. He is the master of scapegoating. And he is forever throwing “dead cats” into the political arena, keeping us constantly focused on our relationship with the EU. And in doing so, his Brexit Party — a party riddled with a Lawsonian brand of climate science denial — came close to destroying Lawson’s Tory party while continuing to push the UK towards the hardest of Brexits.</div><div>
</div><div>Moving on</div><div>Lawson, Monckton, and Singer have all quietly fallen off the radar. But their legacy, honed through the manufactured scandal of Climategate, lives on.</div><div>
</div><div>Lawson made himself chairman of the GWPF for life, but age has — with the same inevitability as climate breakdown — taken its toll and he has retired from climate politics to his beautiful mansion in the south of France. The GWPF lost the argument. It is now ineffective, losing support, and should soon be defunct. Singer has long retired from his think tank. Monckton is still attacking the Pope, but to no effect.</div><div>
</div><div>From climate denial and the fakest of fake news, to corporate lobbying and media spin — you reap what you sow.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>climategate basis for going after cli sci after. eg mann and Hughes (overpeck just at same uni az?)</div><div>
</div><div>https://nexusmedianews.com/the-desperate-but-effective-attempts-to-silence-climate-scientists-9e293887c3b2</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx [pix</div><div>
</div><div>People play dirty when they can’t win by playing fair. This is, more or less, the story of climate change denial in the United States.</div><div>Scientists overwhelmingly agree that humans are altering the climate, reaping changes with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climate deniers can’t dispute the data. They can’t win on facts. Instead, they impugn the credibility of scientists, a tactic which has proved both ugly and effective.</div><div>Right-wing groups are using open records laws to obtain scientists’ emails, and then misrepresenting the content of those emails to question the integrity of researchers and cast doubt on their findings, all of which has a chilling effect on scientific inquiry. But scientists have earned powerful allies in the fight to protect their research — including, by a strange set of circumstances, the Trump administration.[pruitt got burned, so wants no one to look at HIS emails]</div><div>
</div><div>“Climategate” led to a wave of harassment.</div><div>
</div><div>The current spate of invasive records requests back to “Climategate,” a 2009 controversy that erupted when a hacker obtained more than 1,000 emails sent and received by climatologists at East Anglia university in the United Kingdom. Parts of some emails, taken out of context, suggested scientists had manipulated data to exaggerate the warming trend.</div><div>Climate deniers harped on the leaks to paint climate scientists as ideologically motivated and dishonest. Though an official inquiry into the matter exonerated scientists, the damage was already done. Their calls for universities to investigate climate scientists prompted institutional probes that hampered research efforts. Today, conservative advocacy groups point to “Climategate” when making open records requests.</div><div>“I think anyone who looks at the whole ‘Climategate’ manufactured controversy understands now that it’s bogus, but that’s the rationale that they’ve used,” said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit working to protect researchers threatened by legal attacks.</div><div>The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E), a conservative think tank with ties to coal and oil companies, cited “Climategate” as the impetus for its “transparency project.” In 2011, the group sued to obtain more than 10,000 emails written or received by Michael Mann, a researcher at the University of Virginia and one of the scientists implicated in “Climategate.” The Virginia Supreme Court sided with Mann, who lamented the “coordinated assault against the scientific community by powerful vested interests.”</div><div>
</div><div>Michael Mann. Source: Karl Withakay</div><div>That same year, E&E requested more than a decade of emails from University of Arizona climate scientists Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes, another researcher ensnared by “Climategate.” E&E’s legal brief alleged there is a “climate scientific-technological elite” which has “behaved badly” in the past, a reference to “Climategate.” In a gesture of surprising candor, E&E acknowledged that it was searching for emails to “embarrass both Professors Hughes and Overpeck,” whom it characterized as “academic climate alarmists.” That suit continues to this day.</div><div>The University of Arizona case volleyed back and forth between the trial court and the appellate court, which recently determined the trial court had failed to consider a statute that protects “unpublished research data, manuscripts, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers” and other documents produced by researchers at Arizona public universities.</div><div>Now the case will go back to the trial court, which will reevaluate the records request in light of this statute. The ruling is a pyrrhic victory for researchers and the university, who must dedicate even more time and money to fighting off E&E. “That’s basically as good as we could have hoped for,” Kurtz said. Even when scientists win, they lose.</div><div>
</div><div>Jonathan Overpeck. Source: University of Arizona</div><div>The lawsuit has taken a hefty toll on Overpeck and Hughes. Overpeck said he spent six weeks of his sabbatical sorting through 90,000 pages of emails, explaining the case was a “grave distraction” from his work and family. Hughes spent an entire summer collecting emails, failed to attend to his work and lost a research grant as a result.</div><div>These injuries are temporary. More worrisome is the long-term effect that records requests have on research. Hughes noted that, due to his involvement in the case, other scientists have been reluctant to email him. While Hughes is nearing the end of this career, he said that, were he a young man, he would “consider a different line of work or another institution.”</div><div>Even if E&E loses in the trial court — and it most likely will — the group will have nonetheless succeeded in bullying climate scientists. This, rather transparently, was the point. If E&E had concerns about the empirical rigor of climate research, it could have scrutinized the findings of specific studies. Instead of interrogating the final product, it went after the hastily scribed emails exchanged between colleagues.</div><div>
</div><div>Malcolm Hughes. Source: University of Arizona</div><div>
</div><div>“I have taught, researched and administered in academia for more than 40 years and have not seen a time in which freedom of inquiry has been more needed, or more imperiled than it is now,” Hughes wrote in a letter to University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan when E&E was working to obtain Mann’s emails. “Nothing is more likely to quash the creativity of America’s scientists than the ever-present ear of a hostile listener intent on finding, at all costs, the appearance of malfeasance. Nothing is more calculated to discourage research into topics that may challenge power interests.”</div><div>Today, some states are enacting policies to protect scientists. Rhode Island and North Dakota recently passed laws guarding academic freedom. The Rhode Island statute specifically shields “drafts, notes, impressions, memoranda, working papers and work products” from open records requests. Kurtz hopes more states follow suit.</div><div>Climate scientists have an unlikely ally in the Trump administration.</div><div>At the federal level, the issue becomes more complicated. The legal protections that guard the emails of federally-funded climate scientists also shield government employees, including those working for the president. As a result, climate scientists have an unlikely ally in the Trump administration.</div><div>In 2015, the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch made a FOIA request to obtain the emails of climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Judicial Watch has a history of harassing opponents with records requests — most notably Hillary Clinton. Its president, Tom Fitton, claimed the NOAA documents requested would show “the Obama administration put politics before science to advance global warming alarmism.”</div><div>“This case is interesting because it was actually started under the Obama administration, but the Trump administration continued it, I think, because the Trump administration recognizes that it’s important to maintain these open-records protections,” Climate Science Legal Defense Fund’s Kurtz said.</div><div>There is little reason to believe that President Trump is interested in protecting researchers. His EPA transition team included lawyers David Schnare and Christopher Horner, both of whom have a history of harassing climate scientists with open-records requests.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Rather, the Trump administration is committed to secrecy.</div><div>EPA chief Scott Pruitt offers a prime example. Pruitt, who recently installed a $25,000 soundproof booth in his office, has been sparing in his use of email, partly as a response to a 2014 open-records request that revealed his close ties with the fossil fuel industry. “The Trump administration, I don’t think, is eager to be turning things over under open-record laws,” Kurtz said.[but implied above he was defending sci?!]</div><div>
</div><div>[pix&nbsp; Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2015. Source: Gage Skidmore]</div><div>
</div><div>The rationale for protecting scientists’ emails from public disclosure is simple. FOIA was enacted to make government more transparent, but it also threatened to discourage open conversations among federal employees. Judges have interpreted the law to exclude these conversations from records requests — what’s known as deliberative process privilege.</div><div>
</div><div>“The deliberative process privilege was designed to allow agency employees to have freedom to communicate with each other and toss around ideas and engage in devil’s advocate debates and what-if arguments and really feel like they can be candid with each other,” Kurtz said. “In addition, there’s the rationale that people might toss out ideas that are later determined to be bad ideas and never implemented, and if you produce all those emails, it’s really going to confuse the public.”</div><div>The NOAA suit was settled in August. “The trial court judge agreed that the emails in the NOAA case were exactly the sort of emails that this deliberative process privilege was designed to protect,” Kurtz said. Judicial Watch declined to appeal to the ruling.</div><div>As with the University of Arizona case, the damage was already done. If Judicial Watch had concerns about the empirical rigor of the NOAA study, it could have scrutinized the data, the method or the results — all of which were publicly available. But, the group didn’t want to debate the merits of the science. Its goal was more specific.</div><div>
</div><div>Invasive records requests undermine scientific inquiry.</div><div>
</div><div>A 2015 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that researchers in numerous fields — public health, environmental science, genetic engineering — face attacks from groups on both sides of the ideological spectrum. The report explains that “individuals and well-heeled special interests across the political spectrum are increasingly using broad open records requests to attack and harass scientists.” It warned that such tactics can “can curb the ability of researchers to pursue their work, chill their speech and discourage them from tackling contentious topics.”</div><div>
</div><div>With climate change, there is evidence that this is already happening. A 2015 study found that climate scientists frequently downplay the gravity of their findings in response to harassment. Authors wrote that, “ in response to constant, and sometimes toxic, public challenges, scientists have over-emphasized scientific uncertainty, and have inadvertently allowed contrarian claims to affect how they themselves speak, and perhaps even think, about their own research.” This erodes public understanding of science.</div><div>
</div><div>“We all lose when scientists self-censor due to continued harassment. We have a poorer understanding of the science and are less able to make good personal and policy decisions,” said Michael Halpern, head of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Scientists will be more likely to keep their heads down and refuse to publicly engage or ask contentious research questions if they don’t feel that their peers who are attacked are adequately protected.”</div><div>How then do scientists balance privacy with transparency? Where is the line between confidentiality and obfuscation?</div><div>
</div><div>The Stand Up for Science Rally in Boston. Source: Josh Landis]</div><div>
</div><div>“We think it’s totally appropriate to FOIA for funding information and conflict of interest information,” Kurtz said. “When you’re getting into research emails and candid communication, I think that’s really harmful.” She added, “Short of something where you have actual evidence of criminal fraud, I think those things should be protected.”</div><div>FOIA is designed to give a window into the policymaking process, but science is already transparent. “When you’re doing a peer-reviewed study, your peers are looking at your research and giving you feedback on it, and they are determining whether or not it is appropriate for publication,” said Kurtz. Scientists must publish their data, their methods, their results, and they must disclose their source of funding .</div><div>“That sort of transparency is actually what you need to replicate the research, evaluate the research,” said Kurtz. “That is not happening in the policymaking field where FOIA was originally designed to operate.”</div><div>
</div><div>Lauren Kurtz. Source: Nexus Media</div><div>
</div><div>Because science is transparent, it is also self-correcting. Researchers can interrogate, criticize and improve upon each others’ work. In 2013, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts made headlines when he found a number errors in an influential study authored by two Harvard economists. The paper showed that economic growth slows down in countries with high national debt, and it was used to justify austerity measures following the Great Recession. Herndon, 28, published a paper which called attention to the errors and refuted its conclusions about national debt.</div><div>
</div><div>This is how research works. Researchers evaluate and attempt to replicate the findings of their peers. They have every incentive to prove each other wrong. Herndon’s work earned him the acclaim of serious economists, weeks of fawning press coverage and a star turn on The Colbert Report. Any person who could do the same for climate research would be similarly celebrated.</div><div>
</div><div>If E&E, Judicial Watch or any other groups were to find and publicize flaws in peer-reviewed climate research, they would be doing a public service. But, overwhelmingly, the data show that humans are driving the warming trend. So instead, right-wing groups go after emails, looking to defame scientists.</div><div>“Scientific transparency is obviously important,” Kurtz said. “What we want to preclude is scientists having to live in a fish bowl.”</div><div>Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture. You can follow him @deaton_jeremy.</div><div></div><div>hosted climategate stolen emails?</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/climategate-wikileaks-russia-trump-hacking/</div><div>
</div><div>many lnx graf docs</div><div>
</div><div>7 Years Before Russia Hacked the Election, Someone Did the Same Thing to Climate Scientists</div><div>
</div><div>“Why does this story sound so darned familiar?”</div><div>REBECCA LEBER AND AJ VICENSJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ISSUE</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>The Heads of State</div><div>One Saturday morning in June, two days after the president had announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, Michael Mann was tweeting about Donald Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>Mann, a Penn State professor who is one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, was thinking about the daily barrage of revelations surrounding Russia’s efforts to help Trump win the previous year’s election. The hacked Democratic documents posted on WikiLeaks. The media craze over private emails that had been ripped out of context. Smear campaigns circulating on social media.</div><div>
</div><div>“#Russia #Wikileaks #HackedEmails #Sabotaged #ClimateAgreements,” tweeted Mann. “Why does this story sound so darned familiar?”</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>Seven years earlier, Trump was riffing on a very different set of hacked emails. The real estate mogul had called into Fox News after a blizzard to declare that climate change was a hoax. Trump claimed that “one of the leaders of global warming” had recently admitted in a private email that years of scientific research were nothing but “a con.”</div><div>
</div><div>Trump was referring to the 2009 Climategate scandal, in which emails from climate scientists were hacked and disseminated across the internet. Climate change deniers claimed the messages showed scientists engaging in misconduct and fabricating a warming pattern that didn’t really exist. Multiple investigations ultimately exonerated the researchers, but not before a media firestorm undercut public confidence in the science—just as world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, to attempt to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.</div><div>
</div><div>In hindsight, the Climategate hack, clearly timed to disrupt the Copenhagen negotiations, looks like a precursor to the hack that helped shape the outcome of the 2016 election. That’s how John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman whose stolen emails were posted on WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the campaign, sees it. The parallels go beyond the hacks themselves. “I think it was the intentionality of influencing the public debate,” he says.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Stolen Emails. Wikileaks. White Supremacists. Donald Trump. It All Happened in 2009.&nbsp; The Heads of State</div><div>
</div><div>At its core, Climategate was a story about emails—some admittedly embarrassing or poorly phrased—that were dumped online with the intent of altering a crucial global event. WikiLeaks republished the scientists’ emails. Talk radio and Fox News had a field day. Politicians soon followed. Mainstream reporters amplified out-of-context quotes. And the victims of the hack—especially Mann and the University of East Anglia’s Phil Jones—were not prepared for the deluge of investigations, personal attacks, and even death threats that followed.</div><div>
</div><div>At the time, some observers openly wondered whether Russia might have orchestrated the Climategate hack. Investigators and other experts haven’t found much to support that hypothesis—the true culprit remains a mystery. Mann himself has pointed to the incident’s “curious connections” to Russia and WikiLeaks, but he, too, notes there’s no specific evidence that Moscow was to blame. Still, Mann sees other ways in which the episode was similar to what Hillary Clinton experienced in 2016. Both hacks, he notes, were “intended to impact the global political scene in a significant manner.”</div><div>
</div><div>Podesta, a leading advocate of climate action during the Obama years, describes Climategate as an early example of hackers conspiring “to take the fruits of illegal behavior, weaponize them, then use them in a political context.” And though the emails contained no evidence of scientific misconduct, Podesta notes, climate change deniers successfully used them to “change public perception and increase skepticism about the need for action at a pivotal moment.”</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate began in the fall of 2009, when someone accessed thousands of emails and other documents stored on a backup server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit—a prestigious institution in Norwich, England, that is one of the leading centers of global warming research. It wasn’t just CRU employees who were caught up in the hack; their communications with dozens of scientists around the world, including Mann, were stolen as well.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 17 of that year, links to a zip file containing the stolen material—labeled “FOIA.zip”—began appearing in the comments sections of blogs run by climate change skeptics. The file name had a clear meaning: Skeptics had been engaged in a long-running battle with the university to gain access to scientists’ raw data and communications using the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act. The file itself was stored on a server in Russia, though that server space could have been used by anyone in the world.</div><div>
</div><div>The hacker also broke into RealClimate—a website run by a group of climate scientists—and drafted a post promoting the emails. NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt found the hacker’s post before it was published; it still sits in RealClimate‘s content management system today.</div><div>
</div><div>Within days, WikiLeaks published the emails. Its founder, Julian Assange, told PBS that the university had been trying “to suppress information from the Freedom of Information Act.” (At the time, Assange was considered an advocate of radical transparency. After WikiLeaks’ role in publishing Democratic documents hacked by the Russians and corresponding with the Trump campaign, his motives seem far more suspect.)</div><div>
</div><div>The emails in no way altered the well-established fact that humans are changing the climate. Still, skeptics zeroed in on a 1999 message sent by CRU’s Jones, in which he mentioned Mann’s research and also used the phrase “hide the decline.” Given that Mann was best known for the “hockey stick” chart showing the dramatic increase in global temperatures, the wording sounded nefarious. But it turned out that Jones wasn’t describing an attempt to conceal a decline in temperatures. (The world was warming rapidly, after all.) Instead, he was referring to a scientific method for dealing with complications in tree-ring data.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Michael Mann’s groundbreaking “hockey stick” chart—named after the steep rise in global temperatures it depicts—has been validated by numerous independent studies since its publication two decades ago. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change</div><div>A series of independent inquiries would later conclude that while the University of East Anglia had improperly dodged open records requests, none of the scientists had engaged in any type of academic misconduct or fabrication. But that wasn’t the story taking shape on the news networks and in major papers.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 20, a New York Times front-page story opened by noting that skeptics “say [the emails] show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.” The Washington Post quoted climate skeptic Myron Ebell—who would later run Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team—as saying the emails exposed an “alarmist political agenda.” The Post even ran an op-ed by Sarah Palin, who claimed that scientists had “manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures.”</div><div>
</div><div>Television coverage was even worse. NBC told viewers that “those who doubt that man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate say these emails…show climate scientists massaging data.” ABC inaccurately claimed that “one of the most damning email exchanges credits Mann with a trick to hide the decline in temperatures.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mann quickly became a central target for climate change deniers. Right-wing groups and Republican politicians called for the federal government to revoke his research funding and for his university to investigate him. He received an envelope in the mail containing white powder; it turned out to be cornstarch. “You and your colleagues who have promoted this scandal ought to be shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families,” declared one emailer. Along with other climate experts, Mann was featured in an anti-Semitic post on the white supremacist website Stormfront—an ominous foreshadowing of 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>“I could easily brush off many of the attacks,” Mann would later write in his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, which discusses the right’s assault on his research. “But to the extent that the industry-funded disinformation machine was taking direct aim not just at me—my livelihood, my reputation, my safety—but even my family, I was becoming incensed.”</div><div>
</div><div>Mann was cleared of wrongdoing by multiple subsequent investigations, including by Penn State. But the personal attacks would continue for years. In a 2012 blog post for the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, Rand Simberg called the university investigation a “whitewash” and compared Mann to Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State assistant football coach convicted of sexually abusing children. “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Simberg, “except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.” (CEI later removed that comparison from the post. Mann is suing CEI and Simberg over the incident.)</div><div>
</div><div>Other climate scientists experienced similar harassment. Jones, who was the target of much of the media scrutiny and online abuse, was eventually cleared of wrongdoing by his university and has since returned to work. He doesn’t want to speculate on who was behind the hack. “I’ve tried to move on from that,” he told Mother Jones.</div><div>
</div><div>After three weeks of relentless Climategate coverage, the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, which was intended to lay the groundwork for an international agreement to slash emissions, began. It was supposed to be an inflection point, in which the world would move past debating long-settled science and take serious steps to solve the problem. In the lead-up to the talks, even Trump signed on to a full-page ad in the Times calling on President Barack Obama and other leaders to take bold action to combat climate change. Instead, the negotiations broke down—a diplomatic failure that set climate action back years.</div><div>
</div><div>For Julian Gregory, the Norfolk, England, detective in charge of investigating the hack, the timing was obvious. The Climategate emails “were selectively taken and portrayed in a way…intended to undermine the scientists and therefore the validity of their science,” he later told Climatewire, after a second batch of stolen emails was released shortly before another round of climate talks. “The conclusion you are led to is that it was done with the intention of influencing the outcome of those conferences.”</div><div>
</div><div>The hack probably wasn’t the primary reason the Copenhagen talks collapsed. Even before the emails surfaced, there were warning signs that diplomats could be headed for an impasse. Former US officials who participated say they don’t remember Climategate coming up during negotiations. Instead, the Obama administration and other governments simply hadn’t done enough to bridge the divides between the United States, China, and the developing world.</div><div>
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</div><div>But the scandal provided a convenient talking point for those seeking to block climate action. Days before the conference began, Mohammad al-Sabban, the lead negotiator from oil-rich Saudi Arabia, told the BBC that the emails would have a “huge impact” on the talks. “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he said. James Inhofe, the Senate’s leading climate denier, traveled to Copenhagen, where he told throngs of reporters that Climategate was proof of what he’d been saying all along: Global warming was a hoax.</div><div>
</div><div>The most obvious fallout was in the United States, where the emails played an outsize role in the media’s coverage of climate change. According to a study by Matthew Nisbet, then a professor at American University, more than 20 percent of the news and opinion stories about climate change published by five major outlets in December 2009 mentioned the hacked emails.</div><div>
</div><div>Perhaps even more significantly, the scandal seemed to have a big impact on US public opinion, helping climate change denial and obstructionism become even more entrenched on the right. After Climategate, notes Podesta, “you see attitudinal change [in] people’s willingness to believe the scientific community that climate change is happening.” It’s no coincidence that Trump publicly reversed his own views on the issue just three months later, when he joked that Al Gore’s Nobel Prize should be rescinded and cited the stolen emails. He’s been an outspoken denier ever since.</div><div>
</div><div>Public trust in the science was already on the decline in the months before the emails came to light. But according to a study by researchers at Yale and George Mason University, Climategate appears to have “deepened and perhaps solidified” Americans’ growing skepticism. That was especially true on the right. Fully 80 percent of conservatives who followed the scandal said they had less trust in scientists as a result. Seventy-three percent said it made them more certain that global warming wasn’t happening. A whopping 69 percent of all respondents who followed the story, and 94 percent of conservatives, agreed with the statement that “scientists changed their results to make global warming appear worse than it is”—an allegation later proved to be unequivocally false.</div><div>
</div><div>Another study found a similar effect among a particularly influential group of media figures, noting that Climategate had “eroded global warming belief certainty among a large minority of TV meteorologists, at least temporarily.”</div><div>
</div><div>Sound familiar? Russian intelligence agents followed a strikingly similar blueprint in 2016 after they hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Podesta’s personal Gmail account.</div><div>
</div><div>“If you were a Russian operative [and] pitching influence ops for the DNC, and somebody’s like, ‘Eh, I don’t know about that,’ literally you just turn around and go, ‘Look at how well it worked [with Climategate],'” says Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert and former analyst at the National Security Agency. “I wouldn’t necessarily say one influenced the other, but certainly it’s good proof that that’s a technique that works.”</div><div>
</div><div>To access Podesta’s emails, the hackers used a targeted phishing attack that led his office to inadvertently turn over his login credentials. The DNC was hacked by two groups associated with Russian intelligence—one starting in 2015 and another in 2016—also via targeted phishing attacks. Tens of thousands of emails were eventually made public, along with Democratic fundraising reports and other planning materials. Batches of the stolen documents were given to individual news outlets, while other chunks were published directly to the blog of Guccifer 2.0—an online persona thought to be a front for Russian intelligence.</div><div>
</div><div>By far the most damage was done via WikiLeaks, which published the DNC emails days before the Democratic National Convention. And when the Trump campaign was thrown into chaos after the Washington Post unearthed a 2005 video of Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks began publishing the Podesta emails less than an hour later. WikiLeaks then rolled out new batches of emails on a near-daily basis in the month leading up to the election. Once again, the timing was clearly designed for maximum impact.</div><div>
</div><div>Mann had been compared to a child molester; Podesta was actually accused of child molestation.</div><div>
</div><div>The emails exposed Democrats’ dirty laundry and fueled the impression that the DNC had helped Clinton defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders in the hotly contested Democratic primary. They also revealed excerpts from paid speeches that Clinton had given to big banks—transcripts that she had refused to release earlier and that seemed to contradict her public rhetoric. “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders,” Clinton said in one excerpt that was repeatedly highlighted by Trump. Another email revealed that Clinton had assured union officials that she would defend fracking—a disclosure that angered some environmentalists.</div><div>
</div><div>But as with Climategate, what made the 2016 Russian hacks particularly successful was the obsessive—and often inaccurate—coverage of the emails in the media. “The hacking is only one half of the story,” Podesta says. “It’s a media story, too, because it’s the voyeurism of reading the emails, whether there is much serious in them or not, that is captivating to the media. [It] throws them into high relief, sensationalizes little bits of them. And then at the end of the day when people go back and look at the whole story, they say, ‘Well, what was that about?'”</div><div>
</div><div>Political jargon was misinterpreted, and innocuous phrases were presented out of context. Years-old private emails were dumped into the public sphere. Benign interactions between reporters and their sources were twisted to imply collusion between the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media. In one particularly absurd example highlighted by the liberal group Media Matters for America, Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives breathlessly reported that Podesta had “admitted” that Clinton hated “everyday Americans.” Podesta had actually meant that Clinton hated the phrase “everyday Americans”—a slogan that her campaign frequently used at the time.</div><div>
</div><div>The 2016 hacks had devastating personal consequences for their targets. Mann had been compared to a child molester; Podesta was actually accused of child molestation by conspiracy theorists who declared they had detected code words in his emails designed to conceal a child sex ring supposedly operating out of a DC pizzeria. Every piece of the so-called Pizzagate scandal was a lie, but that didn’t stop restaurant staffers from receiving hundreds of death threats. In December 2016, a North Carolina man who claimed to be investigating Pizzagate fired an assault rifle inside the restaurant. Luckily, no one was injured.</div><div>
</div><div>We still know very little about “Mr. FOIA”—the online persona who claimed to be behind Climategate. His own words suggest he was a lone individual with no government or corporate backing. (Guccifer 2.0 also claimed to have no connection to Russian intelligence, an assertion that US intelligence agencies say is false.)</div><div>
</div><div>“It was me or nobody, now or never,” wrote Mr. FOIA. “The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”</div><div>“It was me or nobody, now or never,” Mr. FOIA wrote in 2013. “Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future. The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”</div><div>
</div><div>A November 2009 memo from the University of East Anglia’s IT department, obtained through a public information request, tells us more about the hack itself. This probably wasn’t phishing, like Podesta experienced. Instead the hacker seems to have obtained the files by breaking into the university’s backup servers through a compromised account—CRU’s servers were illegally accessed at least three times in September and October 2009 using stolen or cracked passwords. Once inside, the attacker was able to retrieve the files.</div><div>
</div><div>Steve Lord, a British cybersecurity expert who reviewed the university memo on the incident, told Mother Jones that the methods used to steal the climate emails, at least according to materials provided by the university, showed “no real sophistication.”</div><div>
</div><div>“It’s not a particularly complicated setup,” said Lord. “It’s not clear how they got in, but once they’re in, from the information we do have, this is not rocket science.” (You can read the university memo below.)</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Mr. FOIA has reemerged twice since 2009. In November 2011—just days before the start of another UN climate conference—a new batch of more than 5,000 emails, part of the original set stolen from CRU, was, as before, posted on a Russian server and uploaded to the comments sections of several prominent climate skeptics’ blogs.</div><div>
</div><div>Theories still abound about who Mr. FOIA was. “The hypothesis, unfortunately, remains today where it started,” Gregory, the local detective, told the BBC in 2012 as the statute of limitations on the crime ran out and investigators dropped the case. “It ranges from a lone individual through to commercial or governmental interests…It could have been anyone on that spectrum. We can’t say.” The Norfolk police declined to discuss the investigation with Mother Jones, and Gregory, who has since left the force, didn’t return requests for comment.</div><div>
</div><div>The US Justice Department appears to have gotten involved after the second email leak in 2011, though it’s unclear what became of that inquiry. The DOJ, the FBI, and the National Crime Agency, the United Kingdom’s top law enforcement body, would not comment on the existence of investigations.</div><div>
</div><div>In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, Gregory said his inquiry spanned “most continents”—which likely means computer proxy servers around the world were used to mask the hacker’s true identity. The perpetrator, Gregory said, tried to “leave a false trail” to throw off investigators.</div><div>
</div><div>Some have speculated that Russia or another petrostate was behind the hack—an idea that gained new currency in the wake of the 2016 election. Vladimir Putin, after all, has periodically flirted with climate change denial, and Russia—which recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading crude oil producer—is highly dependent on fossil fuel extraction.</div><div>
</div><div>But Gregory told the BBC that he’d found no specific information indicating that a government was behind the hack. Other experts agree: With the evidence at hand, it would be “a stretch” to point the finger at Russian hackers, says Lord.</div><div>
</div><div>Another theory, popular among climate change skeptics, was that a University of East Anglia insider, frustrated by scientists’ resistance to freedom-of-information requests, released the documents and made it look like an outsider had taken them. But according to Gregory, investigators were confident this wasn’t the case.</div><div>
</div><div>In March 2013, when Mr. FOIA released a third tranche of hacked documents and announced himself in a note published on climate-skeptic blogs, he mocked the idea that the hack had been funded by energy industry groups. “I wasn’t aware of the arrangement but warmly welcome their decision to support my project,” Mr. FOIA wrote, adding that he’d opened a bitcoin wallet to accept online donations. The wallet remains active, and nine payments have been made to the account over the past five years. The value, as of mid-November, was roughly $37,400.</div><div>
</div><div>“That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil,” Mr. FOIA wrote. “The Republicans didn’t plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.”</div><div>
</div><div>It wasn’t until December 2015 that the Obama administration was finally able to piece together a global climate agreement in Paris. Podesta, who had briefly joined the Obama White House the previous year, helped lay the groundwork for the deal. It was immediately denounced by much of the Republican presidential field. One of those critics, of course, was Trump, who on the campaign trail called US involvement in the Paris talks “ridiculous” and promised to pull out of the deal.</div><div>
</div><div>Just seven months after Russian hackers helped him win the presidency, Trump began to follow through on his pledge.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>guard uk no lnx graf&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>ussian email hackers keep playing us for fools</div><div>The 2016 US presidential election wasn’t the first case of a successful email hacking faux scandal</div><div>
</div><div>Dana Nuccitelli</div><div>
</div><div>Thu 22 Dec 2016 06.00 EST Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 12.04 EST</div><div>
</div><div>A batch of stolen emails was released to the public, with evidence pointing towards Russian hackers. The media ran through the formerly private correspondence with a fine-toothed comb, looking for dirt. Although little if any damning information was found, public trust in the hacking victims was severely eroded. The volume of media coverage created the perception that where there’s smoke, there must be fire, and a general presumption of guilt resulted.</div><div>
</div><div>The year was 2009, and the victims were climate scientists working for and communicating with the University of East Anglia. The story was repeated in 2016 with the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee.</div><div>
</div><div>The faux scandal known as “Climategate”</div><div>After 1,000 of climate scientists’ private emails were stolen and published online, snippets of text were taken out of context and misrepresented to falsely accuse the scientists of scandal, conspiracy, collusion, falsification, and illegal activities. Climate deniers and biased media outlets whipped up such froth over these misrepresentations that various organizations launched nine separate investigations to identify any possible scientific wrongdoing uncovered by the emails. They found none.</div><div>
</div><div>Nevertheless, “Climategate” caused temporary erosion in public trust of climate scientists. Like most such news events, people quickly forgot and the effect soon faded; however, the stolen emails were made public just a month before the Copenhagen international climate summit. The well-timed release of the hacked emails provided a distraction that helped sink the negotiations, which were generally viewed as a failure. A serious international climate agreement was delayed for another six years.</div><div>
</div><div>Clinton’s campaign was similarly sunk</div><div>Similarly, the stolen emails released by Wikileaks did not identify any damning revelations about Hillary Clinton. The leaks had the desired effect – Clinton’s emails received three times more nightly news network coverage than all policy issues combined.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Coverage of policy issues vs. Hillary Clinton’s emails on the broadcast evening news shows.</div><div>
</div><div>Gallup consistently found that Clinton’s emails were dominating the news Americans were receiving about her. The constant flood of overwhelming media coverage of the emails created the perception that Hillary Clinton was somehow ‘just as bad’ as Donald Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>Although Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of over 2% and close to 3 million votes, the email effect helped Trump win the election.</div><div>
</div><div>On both email hacking stories, the media blew it</div><div>As President Obama said at his year-end press conference last Friday:</div><div>
</div><div>This was not some elaborate complicated espionage scheme. They hacked into some Democratic party emails that contained pretty routine stuff, some of it embarrassing or uncomfortable, because I suspect that if any of us got our emails hacked into, there might be some things that we wouldn’t want suddenly appearing on the front page of a newspaper or telecast even if there wasn’t anything particularly illegal or controversial about it. And then it just took off. And that concerns me. And it should concern all of us.</div><div>
</div><div>The exact same could be said of the hacked Climategate emails. The contents of the emails were so benign that those trying to attack climate scientists were forced to take statements out of context. For example, a sentence using the word “trick” as in “technique” was distorted and claimed to mean the scientists were nefariously trying to trick people. And the distortions worked. The media treated the hacked emails like a scandal, and the scientists who were its victims were treated like criminals. Even Jon Stewart jumped on the faux scandal bandwagon.</div><div>
</div><div>Reading hacked emails is like eavesdropping</div><div>
</div><div>At the American Geophysical Union conference last week, attorney Michael Mandig, who represents Dr. Malcolm Hughes and other climate scientists on behalf of the University of Arizona, put his finger on the problem:</div><div>
</div><div>Having general, open access to a researcher’s email is the functional equivalent of eavesdropping.</div><div>
</div><div>Those trying to block climate policy by any means necessary have resorted to trying to make scientists’ private emails public, via either hacking or frivolous Freedom of Information Act requests. But there’s no reason to electronically eavesdrop on private discussions between scientists. As Dr. Hughes noted:</div><div>
</div><div>Email has enabled collaboration without geographical limits in science to an extraordinary degree. Treating scientists’ emails as public records, subject to twisting by anti-science ideologues, chills the vital expression of competing, and changing, views on which science depends.</div><div>
</div><div>Science is a competition of ideas, and scientists are critical of each others’ work. Informal discussions between scientists, whether over the telephone or in hallways or via email, depend on privacy to allow the free and frank exchange of ideas.</div><div>
</div><div>As President Obama noted, everyone says things in private emails that we wouldn’t want aired in public. Climategate and the 2016 presidential election provided perfect examples – despite no incriminating content, the media treated both events like scandals, and public perception of climate scientists and Hillary Clinton were damaged as a result.</div><div>
</div><div>Russia keeps beating us</div><div>
</div><div>For the climate scientists who lived through Climategate, the Wikileaks email scandal crated a sense of déjà vu. In both cases, the Russian petrostate may have been the perpetrator of the illegal email hacks, and emerged as the winner of the faux scandals, while the rest of us lost.</div><div>
</div><div>By helping elect Donald Trump, Russia now has a friendly American leadership replacing an outgoing administration that sought to punish their invasion of Ukraine and bombing in Syria. Russian operatives covertly interfered with the American election to aid Trump’s campaign, and Americans responded by electing Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate. Russian agents may also have been behind the Climategate email hack (although the perpetrators were never identified), and again they achieved their intended goal of shaking public trust in their victims, and disrupting the Copenhagen conference.</div><div>
</div><div>Russia is manipulating us through these email hacks, and Americans keep falling for it. The president-elect is already denying the evidence presented by his own intelligence agencies, and many Americans seem to believe anything he says. Despite his international aggression, Olympic doping scandal, and interference with the presidential election, Republicans have a far more favorable view of Putin than of their own current President.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Will Jordan</div><div>(@williamjordann)</div><div>Here is Republicans and Democrats on Vladimir Putin since July 2014. pic.twitter.com/s4I6FY5cbt</div><div>
</div><div>December 14, 2016</div><div>Germans are worried that Russian hackers will try to influence their elections next. After all, they achieved their goals with the Climategate and American election hacking. Until we stop letting the email hackers play us for fools, these Russian cyber-attacks will undoubtedly continue.</div><div></div><div>mann bk:</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>belated, see hard copy notes</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>mann bk: de F Christy complained to U va (--> USAToday Op-ed)</div><div>made bones on diff between satellite ad surface temps (--> meme) based on calc error</div><div>he would only share part of his CODE; wegman said he could not share his b/c classified (navy intel)</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>ch 12: 2007 big year: inc truth,</div><div>
</div><div>IPCC ARA 4, Nobel</div><div>even Luntz 180 after 2002 memo</div><div>
</div><div>ARA ~ pillars of deniers</div><div>
</div><div>but 2008 Nature jrnl artl misrepped, --> GW stopped meme --> Geo Will Wapo op ed; superFreakonomics 2009</div><div>
</div><div>Jrnl G res defreitas, carter amd ---</div><div>M&M PNAS</div><div>
</div><div>ch 13</div><div>
</div><div>cnn weatherman chad meyers --> inhofe</div><div>
</div><div>dobbs 180 BACK!</div><div>
</div><div>apr 17 2009 lisa J endangerment 9buildson 2007 scotus) initial --> 12/7 final ~ CoC, cei, coal)</div><div>oct 09 ce and inhofe forced extend comment period b/c of data destruction (nope)</div><div>
</div><div>Singer and happer try to roll Am Phys Soc (Chron Higher Edm, w/ Cohen Exxon?</div><div>
</div><div>Sci Lie meme; Briffa:&nbsp; McI --> McK M&M --> blogs --> rw press</div><div>
</div><div>FOIA lbj 1966; McI ~ SANTER and NOAA 11/08 extents to EMAILs</div><div>
</div><div>DREISSEN: "FRAUD" Fall 09; in Post Chronicle and Town Hall (cites Carlin sci bs)&nbsp; Mann says strategy in Luntz 2002 strat msg memo; sci --> rich and powerfil, or gov --> powerful.&nbsp; Dreissen sez 89B$ in gov't res $</div><div>
</div><div>Phil JONES CRU threat with misconduct, // Wang</div><div>
</div><div>univ(s?) have to respond to charges, even if clearly bogos (p 205)</div><div>
</div><div>ploy: a sci sez can't reproduce results --> accusation/implication (McCulloch makes error)</div><div>---</div><div>ch 14 climategate</div><div>
</div><div>11/17/09 bs pr sez "random" but targeted scrape of names: MM santer, briffa, trenberth, jones</div><div>
</div><div>1st www link by McI (hack from N Am via turkey), then saudi (used at Cop 15) --> USSR server</div><div>
</div><div>"smoking gun" ebell --> meme ~ AGW</div><div>alo pat ichaels "gate-keeper" final nail in coffin)</div><div>
</div><div>--> inhohe igloo bs, Palin WaPo</div><div>
</div><div>Overpeck</div><div>
</div><div>Jones suggests deleting email as precaution against recent FOIS's ? 11/20-6</div><div>
</div><div>--> Horner call for investigatuons Fox, punked NYT, wapo, UK Guard!</div><div>
</div><div>CNN >CBS (latter later trued to compensate0</div><div>
</div><div>Guterl newsweek discover mag</div><div>Some correction by jrnl but little and late; ABC got better.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>UK Parl cleared Jones CRU</div><div>as did Penn MM; NSG OIG</div><div>parl? found minir problems U East Anglia</div><div>CBS, CNN even Fox and pitt news-trib but WSJ stuck with Whitewash</div><div>
</div><div>[carlin, cei June 09 --> Beck</div><div>
</div><div>COOCH: bither, homophobe, ~ACA (un-Const) ~ EPA GHG sci unsound</div><div>
</div><div>went after all MM records UVa 99-05, fraud statute --> CID (CEI foia had failed)</div><div>
</div><div>complied, but then asked for more? ~ state gop rep, Rep Moran D Vqa, wapo, aclu, aaup, FIRE, may 5 UVa faculty</div><div>
</div><div>12/09 Mashey and Deep Climate bloger ~ WEGMAN rtept (USA today)</div><div>found 1/3 plag and distored from Badly's well knon textbook!</div><div>Irony is that wegman lied to congress, which is what he tried and failed to prove about MM!</div><div>
</div><div>stole? McL fig(s?)</div><div>apr 2010 formal invest at GMU</div><div>MM support by Don Kennefy syanford pres?, nye, ehrlich may 10 250 sci, NAS 11 nobels, open ltr to Sci mag</div><div>markey house sci suppression</div><div>UCS natruere jrnl ~ cooch. AMS, UCAR, AAAS</div><div>
</div><div>2010 campaign chest beating on ~ sci, but when failed --> EPA endangerment</div><div>aug 2010 judge sez cooch fishing, but he kept trying. 11/11</div><div>
</div><div>epilogue: climategate did not caise Cop15 fail, and may be pos tip pt</div><div>
</div><div>Lessons:</div><div>.. sci is in s street fight"</div><div>seth borensten AP</div><div></div><div></div><div>Hulme, professor of climate and culture at King’s College London, condemned fellow scientists for “harassing” Lennart Bengtsson, and gave warning that climate science had become too political.</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Bengtsson resigned this week from the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate sceptic think-tank, after being subjected to what he described as McCarthy-style pressure from fellow academics.</div><div>Professor Hulme, who helped to lead the team that produced</div><div>report to ant-greenie watch, this ironic:</div><div>The journal says the Bengtsson paper was rejected on academic grounds.&nbsp; It would be interesting to see the actual reviewer reports to see just what those "academic" grounds were.&nbsp; I'll have a bet that they were very shallow.&nbsp; But given compulsive Warmist secrecy,&nbsp; I doubt that we will ever see that.&nbsp; "Hiding" things is essential to their modus operandi</div><div>
</div><div>Climate scientists who vilified a colleague for advising a think-tank are “blind to their own biases”, according to a former senior member of the UN’s climate change advisory body.</div><div>
</div><div>Mike Hulme, professor of climate and culture at King’s College London, condemned fellow scientists for “harassing” Lennart Bengtsson, and gave warning that climate science had become too political.</div><div>
</div><div>Professor Bengtsson resigned this week from the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a climate sceptic think-tank, after being subjected to what he described as McCarthy-style pressure from fellow academics.</div><div>Professor Hulme, who helped to lead the team that produced the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2001 report, last night broke ranks within the climate science community to defend Professor Bengtsson.</div><div>
</div><div>He condemned climate scientists who “believe it’s their role to pass public judgment on whether a scientific colleague should offer advice to political, public or a campaigning organisations and to harass that scientist until they ‘fall into line’.”</div><div>
</div><div>He added that the episode said much about how politicised climate science had become and “how some scientists remain blind to their own biases”.</div><div>
</div><div>An academic journal yesterday defended its decision to reject a paper co-authored by Professor Bengtsson and four other leading climate scientists. The paper suggested that the climate might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than had been claimed by the IPCC in its report last September. An anonymous reviewer for Environmental Research Letters recommended rejecting the paper and described it as “harmful” because climate sceptics could use it to argue their case.</div><div>
</div><div>Nicola Gulley, editorial director at IOP Publishing, which publishes the online journal, said that the rejection was based solely on editorial standards. “The referees selected to review this paper were of the highest calibre and are respected members of the international science community,” she said. IOP declined to name the reviewer.</div><div>
</div><div>Joanna Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said that external pressure on climate scientists had polarised the debate over global warming into “us and them” camps. “It is regrettable that perceived political stances on the climate issue are apparently so affecting academic activity,” she said.</div><div>
</div><div>In a statement last night issued via the University of Reading, where he is a research fellow, Professor Bengtsson said: “I am worried by a wider trend that science is gradually being influenced by political views. Policy decisions need to be based on solid fact.”</div><div>
</div><div>SOURCE</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>esquire on morano march 2010</div><div>http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/esquire-mag-does-the-full-marc-morano-climategate-story/</div><div>
</div><div>This Man Wants to Convince You Global Warming Is a Hoax</div><div>Marc Morano broke the Swift Boat story and effectively stalled John Kerry’s presidential run. Now he is working against an even bigger enemy: belief in climate change. Somehow, he seems to be winning.</div><div>
</div><div>By John H. Richardson</div><div>
</div><div>--</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.esquire.com/features/marc-morano-0410</div><div>
</div><div>This Man Wants to Convince You Global Warming Is a Hoax</div><div>Marc Morano broke the Swift Boat story and effectively stalled John Kerry's presidential run. Now he is working against an even bigger enemy: belief in climate change. Somehow, he seems to be winning.</div><div>By John H. Richardson</div><div>Marc Morano</div><div>
</div><div>Mackenzie Stroh</div><div>
</div><div>Early on the morning of November 17, Gavin Schmidt sat down at his computer and entered his password. It didn't work. Strange, he thought. He tried a few other accounts and none of them worked, either. Now he was alarmed. As a leading climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute in Manhattan, he’d been hacked before. He was used to e-mails from people who disapproved of his work, threatening e-mails that detailed the romantic life he was going to have in prison. So he knew what to do: He logged in via the Unix shell command.</div><div>
</div><div>A second later, the computer logged him off — and locked him out. Someone was in there, fighting him in real time. Schmidt sent an emergency message to his Web server:</div><div>
</div><div>"WE ARE BEING HACKED RIGHT NOW."</div><div>
</div><div>When they started the system up again, hours later, Schmidt found a forged Web page and a link to a file holding thousands of what looked like private e-mails written by some leading climatologists who study global warming. In addition to being a massive theft, it was a dark joke. Because the Goddard Institute is the professional home of James Hansen, the scientist famous for first sounding the alarm on rising temperatures back in 1988, and these particular e-mails had been compiled as part of a bitter Freedom of Information fight launched by contrarians who insist that global warming is a hoax, the hacker was posting the e-mails as a malicious tweak. He came in via a misconfigured proxy server in Turkey that was on a list of the proxy servers people use if they want to hide their tracks.</div><div>
</div><div>But the hacker had moved on. He'd been working on this for weeks, maybe longer, risking prison on charges of industrial espionage. A few hours later, he posted this note on a blog called The Air Vent:</div><div>
</div><div>"We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.</div><div>
</div><div>"This is a limited time offer, download now."</div><div>
</div><div>Two days later, Marc Morano is riding up the Pacific Coast Highway in the back of a rental car, a big cheerful guy with five o'clock shadow that makes him look like Barney Rubble. He was eleven when his older brother got him a job on the Reagan campaign placing sound bites with radio stations, which eventually led to a job with Rush Limbaugh and three years as communications director for Senator James Inhofe, where he made the words Global warming is a hoax world famous.Now he's forty-one and he's enjoying the downtime between political speeches, catching glimpses of the California ocean — on these lecture tours, he just runs and runs and runs until all he wants is a quiet place to drink a beer and smoke a cigar.</div><div>
</div><div>But a call comes in from Anthony Watts, a retired TV weatherman who runs one of the leading contrarian blogs, and he has astonishing news about some e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. There's explosive stuff there — in one, a scientist actually rejoices over a contrarian's death. How's that for scientific detachment? Another says he's using a trick to "hide the decline" in temperature. A trick!</div><div>
</div><div>It's exactly what the contrarians have been saying for years. The leading global-warming scientists are scamming the world. Billions of dollars in green energy and CO2 restrictions and it all comes down to their reputations and their grant money.</div><div>
</div><div>So Watts is posting a note on his Web site: "The details on this are still sketchy, we'll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown..."</div><div>
</div><div>"Many many" files is right. There are thousands of them, nearly a million words total. Fortunately, the hacker took the time to draw up an annotated list. Watts is posting some of the juiciest.</div><div>
</div><div>The timing is perfect. The United Nations climate conference starts in Copenhagen in three weeks. The activists are pushing for a 40 percent cut in CO2 emissions within ten years, a revolutionary number. The eyes of the world are open wide and suddenly here's this tremendous gift: Climate-gate, they'll call it. With any luck, it will be just like the story that put Morano on the map, the one he wrote in a hurry late on a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2004 that was supposed to be the beginning of a vacation. He was working at the time for the right-wing CNS News service, and his boss wanted a pound of flesh before he left, as bosses do, so he made some calls and a contact suggested he call a guy named John O'Neill down in Texas. A few minutes later O'Neill was on the phone, sounding surprised. Yeah, he was leading a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, hundreds of them, all ready to declare that John Kerry was unfit to be commander in chief. Yeah, nineteen of them had actually served with Kerry. They even had his commanding officer, who said he'd had thorn pricks that were worse than some of Kerry's wounds.</div><div>
</div><div>Morano knew it was big. He stayed late, digging through clips and calling Kerry's office for comment. "You asked for a pound of flesh," he told his editor. "I may have given you several."</div><div>
</div><div>The story ran on Monday under the headline "KERRY UNFIT TO BE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF," SAY FORMER MILITARY COLLEAGUES, when Morano was down in North Carolina, at Nag's Head with his two baby girls. It blew up into international news, turning the Swift Boaters' press conference into a mob scene, the beginning of the end for Kerry, who simply didn't understand what he was up against. It didn't matter that the claims of the Swift Boaters would later be documented to be lavishly financed lies; the actual truth was a lumbering dinosaur in the face of a blitzkrieg. Morano followed it with stories like KERRY'S MEETING WITH COMMUNISTS VIOLATED U. S. LAW and FBI FILES SHOW KERRY MET WITH COMMUNISTS MORE THAN ONCE.</div><div>
</div><div>But that was when he still had some institutional support behind him. Now he's all alone in a hotel room with a laptop, a phone, and a BlackBerry, and his only weapon is a Web site calledClimateDepot.com.</div><div>
</div><div>Listen and learn, pilgrim. This is how the information wars are fought in the age of the Internet, when an isolated outside voice can swing the debate and change the world. The story starts with Hansen's congressional testimony back in '88: "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now." Within a few years, the fossil-fuel industry was fighting back with films like The Greening of Planet Earth, which said that more CO2 would actually be good for farmers. Big Oil and Big Coal funded sympathetic think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute and also outright front groups with names like Friends of Science and the Global Climate Coalition, all of which came up with an endless stream of arguments for why global warming wasn't happening and even if it was, nothing should be done about it. Some of their criticisms were valid, like questioning the more extreme predictions for ocean-level rise or the dubious link to hurricanes, and they were certainly right to bring up the cost-benefit analysis of cap-and-trade. But as the science piled up, each bit of evidence more convincing than the last, more and more people were starting to believe that global warming was real.</div><div>
</div><div>The first turning point was 1997, when the nations of the world agreed to limit their CO2emissions at the Kyoto Protocol. A year later, the American Petroleum Institute hired a conservative PR expert named Steve Milloy to develop a "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." They had to tell a better story and tell it fast. They had to change the narrative. Milloy ran a Web site called Junk Science, joined in time by Climate Audit and Ice Cap and a thousand others, all hammering the same message — ignore global warming. There was even an evangelical-Christian faction, led by something called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Then, in 2006, Al Gore killed them with An Inconvenient Truth. On one side you had a Nobel-prize-winning vice-president, the world's leading scientists, a Hollywood cheering section, and a growing public consensus. On the other, a handful of legitimate scientists and a small but noisy group of amateurs, ideologues, and cranks. At the peak of the consensus, 84 percent of Americans thought global warming was a threat. The only thing they agreed on more was the existence of God.</div><div>
</div><div>Then Morano got hired as the communications director for Jim Inhofe, the dyspeptic senator from Oklahoma. Setting to work, he began compiling so many inflammatory stories and documents on Inhofe's Web site, Newsweek said he was "more like a wire service than a spokesman." He began to use the Web in pugnacious new ways, like printing the e-mail addresses of reporters and scientists and inviting readers to pester them. All this made Inhofe's office the global center of the resistance, but it also infuriated people. "Morano is unquotable and uncitable," said one influential climate blog. "Besides his penchant for smear, he just makes stuff up." Another investigated his e-mail list. A scientist threatened him with a libel suit. Eventually other Republicans started telling Inhofe to fire him — he was unprofessional, they said. He appealed to Inhofe's worst instincts.</div><div>
</div><div>Morano took those as compliments.</div><div>
</div><div>[PixMorano Limbaugh]</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Now he sits at the anonymous desk in his California hotel room and taps away on his Web site, which is funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing billionaire who also financed the investigation into Bill Clinton's sex life. Morano starts searching and surfing, setting up Google alerts to aggregate stories to his in-box, grabbing scraps of information wherever he can find them, adding headlines and lining them up on his front page. Click on the headline Real Files or Fake and it takes you to a Web site called the Blackboard, where a blogger named Lucia mentions e-mails "between various bloggers and climate science illuminati" but isn't sure whether they're some sort of scam. May sully the reputations of a number of working scientists leads to a story on Examiner.com New York by a writer named Thomas Fuller, who refuses to go into detail because the e-mails are private and would almost certainly "prove embarrassing to those concerned, especially if ... published in snippets and without context." If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignore leads to a giddy post at the National Review Online: "The blue-dress moment may have arrived!"</div><div>
</div><div>Morano has fun with it too, using goofy illustrations like a cartoon hand hammering a nail into a coffin and a Scooby Doo villain getting his mask pulled off. People tell him this is too childish for a publication that affects global policy, but it's part of his vision for his Web site — climate entertainment, he calls it.</div><div>
</div><div>As the words leave his fingers and become electric ones and zeros in the information cloud, other people start responding. One of the first is James Delingpole of London's Daily Telegraph: "If you own any shares in alternative-energy companies I should start dumping them NOW." Morano's Google alerts pick up the new tidbit and he slaps on another headline and adds it to his Web page. Then other people pick up his stuff and he writes about that and someone else writes about that until it's all swirling around like a digital dust devil in a Michael Crichton novel. Soon Morano's caution begins to fade:</div><div>
</div><div>If they are real and not fake, he writes, this is absolute dynamite, and will destroy the credibility of the alarmist cause.</div><div>
</div><div>Physicist on alleged behavior of CRU scientists: "These people should be put in jail as soon as possible."</div><div>
</div><div>A scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.</div><div>
</div><div>By dawn, he's done fifteen or twenty headlines and the American media is starting to wake up. New posts are popping up everywhere. "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud," says Patrick Michaels, a contrarian climatologist at the Cato Institute. "The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century," says syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. "Proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in modern science," says Andrew Bolt of the Australia Herald-Sun.</div><div>
</div><div>And finally the big kahuna, el Rushbo himself. This is on his afternoon radio show, maybe eight hours after Morano finally conks out on his pillow. "Something fascinating has happened," Limbaugh begins, giving his listeners a few hints about a "substantial fraud" at the highest levels of the global-warming scare machine and then referring them to Morano's site. "All the details are there. It's a great place to keep up on the global-warming debate. He's probably single-handedly, in a civilian sense, the guy — other than me, of course — doing a better job of ringing the bells alarming people of what's going on here."</div><div>
</div><div>So many people rush to Morano's site they overwhelm the servers and the site crashes.</div><div>
</div><div>Two weeks later, the e-mail story has exploded into a global scandal. The director of the Climate Research Unit stepped down pending investigations. There's fury even in a mainstream publication like The Atlantic: "The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me," writes senior editor Clive Crook. "The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering."</div><div>
</div><div>Slowly, most journalists and politicians are coming to the conclusion that the e-mails don't really change the basic science. The vast majority of them were routine exchanges of data. A few revealed soft spots in the science or doubts that the scientists weren't expressing in public. Others discussed how to deal with skeptics, some displaying a hostility to contrarians that seemed surprising to people who haven't followed the growing nastiness of the fight against global-warming science, which has come to resemble the fights over abortion and evolution. But while they were petty and bitchy, what the documents didn't do was paint a picture of conspiracy and fraud among climate scientists. Still, the polls have been going in the other direction — now only 57 percent of Americans believe the planet is warming, and only 36 percent believe humans have anything to do with it, slightly less than the 37 percent who believe in haunted houses.</div><div>
</div><div>In his home office in northern Virginia, Morano grabs that and writes a headline. More Americans believe in haunted houses than man-made global warming.</div><div>
</div><div>This was the baby's room, so it still has baby-blue walls and Pooh and Eeyore decorations. Downstairs there are paintings of wildflowers and English gardens and a framed sampler on the wall to remind him that Every Day Is a Gift. But on his computer screen, the headlines keep piling up like bricks in Tetris. It's all unraveling now ... Botch after botch after botch ... Are they insane? ... GOP turning up heat over e-mail scandal ... accuses warming establishment of "Scientific McCarthyism" ...</div><div>
</div><div>Then the banner headline stretching across the page:</div><div>
</div><div>SAVE THE PLANET! DON'T BREATHE OUT! DOES OBAMA HAVE THE "FORMAL POWER" TO REGULATE EVEN THE BREATHING OF EACH CITIZEN?</div><div>
</div><div>You have to laugh at that one. It's such a gross distortion that it's hard to see how anyone could believe it — always the method Morano loves best, using the laugh value of satire to displace the truth requirements of journalism.</div><div>
</div><div>"Did you see me on the BBC Friday night?" he says. "Andrew Watson called me an a-hole! That got picked up by Drudge and CBS, and I did an interview with an Arab channel — and did you see CNN? CNN referred to the climate conference as a 'temple for believers.' CNN!"</div><div>
</div><div>The way he tells the story, he was destined for this task. Obsessed with the weather from an early age — at ten, he had a weather kit with a barometric-pressure gauge and cloud diagrams — he'd get angry at the local weathermen for their shoddy work, which he tracked in a little datebook. He was "very much an emperor's-no-clothes kind of guy," one friend agrees. Plus he had five older brothers and sisters and a criminal-defense attorney for a father, acquired a degree in political science, read Milton Friedman, listened to Reagan's speeches and Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and did a stint as a door-to-door salesman for a gutter-cleaning service, where he learned to make his pitch before the door slammed in his face.</div><div>
</div><div>But his other big influence was his brother Carl, who started taking him to kung fu and horror movies when he was six — Enter the Dragon, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he saw it all. So he became the video guy in high school and made promotional clips for the college Republicans. Then a friend named Joe Mancuso suggested they try doing freelance TV news, so Mancuso bought a TV camera and Morano did the interviews and they tried to sell the footage. They were getting nowhere until Morano got a great idea at the Republican Convention of 1992 — he asked politicians what they thought of the new Rush Limbaugh TV show, then sold the footage to the new Rush Limbaugh TV show.</div><div>
</div><div>And so "Our Man in Washington" was born. Working for Limbaugh on a $200-a-week retainer, Morano would wear a trench coat and a fedora and he'd pretend to sneak into political events. He'd pop out of a trash can or get a bellhop to wheel him into a conference on a luggage cart. He'd get diagrams of hotels and stalk the restrooms, because people always have to go to the bathroom. It was all very Naked Gun, very low-rent. And he'd take his clips up to New York to get advice from his older brother, who was producing campy midnight movies like The Toxic Avenger for Troma Entertainment. You have to punch them up, Carl always said. They have to be morebang bang bang.</div><div>
</div><div>Morano had dreams of going the comedy route then — political comedy, like Limbaugh. Instead, he's got a strategy session in Congress tomorrow and meetings with the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation and interviews and debates and e-mail blasts to send, plus he's got to get his passport. On Thursday he flies to Copenhagen for the climate conference.</div><div>
</div><div>That's when all this peaks. Trillions of dollars are at stake, poor countries are demanding reparations, environmentalists are ready for a showdown. Nearly sixteen thousand officials and observers are scheduled to attend, not to mention Al Gore, Barack Obama, and up to a hundred thousand protesters.</div><div>
</div><div>Morano's mission is to stop this — all of it — dead.</div><div>
</div><div>He arrives in Copenhagen without his luggage, a tired man in a green golf shirt. His first event is a speech at a conservative foundation a few miles from his hotel. The city is completely jammed, every hotel in a fifty-mile radius filled, eco-art everywhere — a giant glowing globe that symbolizes our endangered planet, the Statue of Liberty belching smoke, red lights strung at twenty-one feet to show how high the oceans could rise if Greenland melts. Even the bus-stop ads say "A Bottle of Hope," which apparently has something to do with Coca-Cola's corporate greening initiative. There are so many bicycles, most people don't even bother to lock them.</div><div>
</div><div>Morano gets out of his cab outside a modern building with a glass door, rolling the black leather bag that holds his portable office. Inside, he climbs three stories to a suite decorated with larger-than-life portraits of Ronald Reagan. Down the hall there's a conference room with a lectern and twenty rows of folding chairs. About thirty clean-cut college kids are drinking sodas and bottled water, plus a handful of nerdy-looking older men and one or two of those conservative dominatrix types.</div><div>
</div><div>And suddenly it's old-home week. Here's the famous Steve Milloy, who turns out to be a youthful guy with a bulldog chest and an air of permanent irony. "He's the godfather," Morano says.</div><div>
</div><div>Milloy laughs: hahahaha. He has a very distinctive laugh, flat and braying. "We've got an event tomorrow," he says. "We're constructing a wall, the Copenhagen Wall, like the Berlin Wall that divided the free from the slave."</div><div>
</div><div>The idea is a ten-foot cardboard wall with a picture of a modern city on one side and a primitive one on the other. To illustrate the injustice of rich nations telling poor ones to control their carbon emissions, the college kids are going to spray-paint CO2 = Life across it, Hahahahaha.</div><div>
</div><div>Morano spots Lord Christopher Monckton, another famous contrarian. He has googly eyes like Marty Feldman and a plummy English accent straight out of Monty Python. He claims to have been a science advisor to Margaret Thatcher, although environmentalists hotly dispute this.</div><div>
</div><div>"I heard you got heckled yesterday," Morano says.</div><div>
</div><div>"Yes, Hitler Youth," Monckton answers. He was giving a speech at an event sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, an event just like this one, when a dozen young Americans rose up and began chanting, "Clean energy makes jobs." He called them Hitler Youth and they got terribly upset. "They said, 'We have the right to free speech,' and I said, 'Yes, but not in our meeting.' "</div><div>
</div><div>"Hahahahaha."</div><div>
</div><div>And here's Tom Harris, a thin bearded man who runs the International Climate Science Coalition. He's circulating a petition that demands "OBSERVABLE EVIDENCE" of climate change, a sentiment that has exploded since Climate-gate, he says. "Suddenly I'm getting twenty responses a day, scientists saying, 'Sign me up, sign me up.' They're worried their whole profession will be disgraced."</div><div>
</div><div>There's more of them — Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who is planning to protest by dressing up as a polar bear who is not endangered; Cal Beisner, who runs the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation; Craig Rucker of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. They stand around making contrarian small talk, which includes a lot of speculation about the identity of the e-mail hacker — the Saudi intelligence service is a popular suspect — and an endless stream of "I told you so" moments. "Did you hear James Hansen on Letterman?" Morano asks. "He basically said 'bad judgment' — they used 'bad judgment.' "</div><div>
</div><div>"Hide it better next time," Harris says.</div><div>
</div><div>"And they're also not doing an investigation."</div><div>
</div><div>"There's a lot of hardcore evidence of corruption."</div><div>
</div><div>Milloy talks about the theme of his latest book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do To Stop Them. They want to tell us what to eat, where to live, how many kids to have, how soft our toilet paper will be. Obama wants to put smart meters on every house so he can control our electricity. "You can't say you're a socialist but you can say you're an environmentalist and have the same goals — it's too bad Joe Stalin missed this one."</div><div>
</div><div>Morano seems uncomfortable with this line of argument. "I would still argue environmentalism is not his big issue."</div><div>
</div><div>"Well, every time he opens his mouth he says something stupid."</div><div>
</div><div>Morano doesn't encourage him, but Milloy can't help expanding on this fruitful theme. "He was a community organizer. Their whole agenda is international socialism."</div><div>
</div><div>Morano drifts over to Monckton, who is telling a story about a trip to the University of Rochester. "I was there to give a speech on the application of probabilistic computronics to the identification and quantification of phase transitions and bifurcations in a chaotic object, as one does... ."</div><div>
</div><div>But Morano is distracted by a waving hand. "I'm on," he says. "It's showtime."</div><div>
</div><div>This is what Morano has been training for his whole life. After "Our Man in Washington" fizzled out, he became the go-to guy for stories in which the king has no clothes, first at a 60 Minutes wannabe called American Investigator and then at CNS News. He specialized in exposés of animals-rights activists, rain-forest warriors, and holier-than-thou Hollywood do-gooders. A classic Morano story was adding up how much the movie stars spent on planes to visit some sustainable ecovillage in Africa.[// entine]</div><div>
</div><div>He started getting juicy leaks. First it was Kerry. Then word came from deep within the Bush administration that NASA was having terrible problems with James Hansen, the famous global-warming whistle-blower, who was refusing "to follow protocol when it came to granting media interviews." That blew up into a huge story too.</div><div>
</div><div>Then someone told him to check out Congressman John Murtha's past, and Morano spent a week in western Pennsylvania going through old newspaper files. He resurrected stories about Murtha's role in the ABSCAM scandal and the "controversy" over his two Purple Hearts, which added up to nothing but rumors spread by political opponents.</div><div>
</div><div>He was being honed. If you look at him in video from American Investigator, he was skinny and nervous and glassy-eyed. Now, as he stands at the lectern at the front of the room, he's a professional, smooth and confident. He has the advantage of an absolutely clear purpose, running down the plays like a guerrilla leader planning an attack on an enemy village. "Don't quote the skeptics," he begins. "Use the words of their fellow scientists."</div><div>
</div><div>He pushes a key on his laptop and a slide appears on the screen behind him: COPENHAGEN CLIMATE CHANGE TALKS MUST FAIL.</div><div>
</div><div>"Let's play a little game. Who said this? Was it Sarah Palin? Was it Senator Inhofe?"</div><div>
</div><div>A familiar voice calls out: "James Hansen, hahahahaha."</div><div>
</div><div>"James Hansen! James Hansen said this conference must fail! So if anyone asks you this week, How can you be against this? say, We stand shoulder to shoulder with NASA's James Hansen!"</div><div>
</div><div>Morano stands at the podium grinning. The joke, of course, is that Hansen opposed the conference because it didn't go nearly far enough to solve the problem, which is the opposite of Morano's distorted meaning.</div><div>
</div><div>He triggers another slide. It's a prominent scientist saying the Climate-gate scientists should be barred from the United Nations climate process. "This is not a skeptic," he crows. "This is a UN scientist!"</div><div>
</div><div>Next is a leading British science journalist saying that most of his environmentalist friends have gone into denial about Climate-gate, hoping the crisis will go away.</div><div>
</div><div>"Again, you don't have to quote a skeptic. Use their words."</div><div>
</div><div>His brother Carl laughs about it. "When he touts these scientists and I say, 'You're just picking and choosing the stuff that fits your agenda,' he just starts to skirt around it."</div><div>
</div><div>Morano is always genial, and he's careful not to go too far — one reporter who tussles with him mentions his "lawyerly precision." What Inhofe actually said was that "catastrophic global warming is a hoax," for example. But he knows that the details aren't as important as the story, and there's no better story than greedy politicians grinding the free man under their boot heels. The senator who called cap-and-trade the "most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time"? That's all you need to know. This is an ideology. Al Gore saying the U. S. climate bill will help bring about "global governance"? This isn't about science! It's about controlling humans.</div><div>
</div><div>But it's always clear that he'd rather have fun. This is his genius, especially in a world given to screaming caps and paranoid detail. It's another way he's changing the narrative, showing that one side has a sense of humor. He recites the "Al Gore Earth Prayer."</div><div>
</div><div>Al Gore, who art in thy fully offset private jet,</div><div>
</div><div>forgive us our emissions....</div><div>
</div><div>The next day, they fan out and work the media. That's how this war is waged, in column inches and nightly news clips. Milloy does his Wall, Monckton gives a speech, McAleer puts on his polar-bear suit, and Rucker leads his college students around with megaphones and counterprotest protest signs that say, "CO2 Is Good," filming their interactions with the humorless greens — at one point, a green tears at one of their signs, accidentally pushing one of them to the ground. The contrarians are thrilled.</div><div>
</div><div>Morano's got the big media break, a debate on Sky News with a stuffy British professor named Mark Maslin. They shoot it near the Parliament building, where a big protest is gathering. Maslin's in a studio in London, under a blue light that makes his face look like Spam. Morano's standing on a sunny street, wearing a crisp blue shirt and yellow tie and a black coat draped comfortably around his shoulders. He presses on his earpieces to shut out the noise of the crowd and leads with the Hansen quote.</div><div>
</div><div>The nerve of quoting James Hansen, Maslin sputters.</div><div>
</div><div>They bat statistics back and forth until Morano says that climate models "violate seventy-one out of the eighty-nine principles of forecasting, according to the experts."</div><div>
</div><div>Maslin seems almost amused. "I have to say, this is a wonderful bit of spin."</div><div>
</div><div>Anyway, Morano says, sea levels are not rising. To prove it he quotes a study by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute that actually says sea levels rose nearly eight inches in the last century. This obvious mistake leads Maslin into his fatal error, which is patronizing Marc Morano. He begins his lecture in the patient, harried voice of a kindergarten teacher in a special-ed class: "If you look at the IPCC report, five thousand leading climate scientists — " Morano's eyebrows go up. "Five thousand?"</div><div>
</div><div>This time Morano knows the right number — it's actually closer to thirty-eight hundred.</div><div>
</div><div>"Look at the evidence," Maslin pleads. "Temperatures have been rising for the last 150 years, this decade the warmest ever recorded, sea ice has been retreating, you can take a supertanker from the Atlantic to the Pacific for the first time in human history. Why do you not believe the science? Why suddenly are scientists lying to you?"</div><div>
</div><div>But Morano won't let the five thousand go. Despite his own howler about the sea levels, he hammers away. "You can't get away with this, Professor," he says. "Climate-gate has shown it! You need to apologize and retract that immediately!"</div><div>
</div><div>Maslin curls his lip in disgust. "Absolute rubbish. I have been having this debate for the last twenty years, the key is that every intelligent person ..."</div><div>
</div><div>Morano's eyebrows go up. "Oh, intelligent people."</div><div>
</div><div>Maslin keeps trying, telling him he's spinning, that he's wrong on the science, but Morano charges forward with righteous fire. "Matt, check out the claim of five thousand UN scientists — that is a bald-faced ... error. The professor needs to retract it. And interestingly, a few days ago you said four thousand. Why not just say a hundred thousand?"</div><div>
</div><div>It's a slaughter.</div><div>
</div><div>So that's how it's done, Morano says later. He's the turd in the punch bowl, that's all he is and all he can be. But that might be enough. If they can use the echo chamber to reach enough people, they can confuse them enough to change the narrative. It's asymmetrical warfare updated for the age of the Internet.</div><div>
</div><div>Just look around. The streets are streaming with thousands and thousands of people. Correct that: The streets are streaming with The People. They go by in endless Les Misérables columns of denim and defiance, shivering and carrying signs that say "There Is No Planet B" and "Climate Justice Now!" The sky goes dark and the streetlights come on and things get festive in the artificial light, with giant puppets and men wearing snorkels and men dressed as chick-ens, buses with loudspeakers instead of engines pushed along by human arms, bicycles and families with children, sixty thousand human souls marching toward the conference center.</div><div>
</div><div>And here are the contrarians, a tiny speck of opposition. Craig Rucker is standing in front of the Copenhagen Wall watching the crowd flow past. "You got to hand it to these folks," he muses. "We'd never get this many people turned out."</div><div>
</div><div>Steve Milloy cackles. "God must love idiots, because he made so many of them — hahahaha."</div><div>
</div><div>The contrarians get excited when the real radicals start marching by. "Look, it's the anarchists," one cries out. The anarchists go past in a float festooned with signs — FUCK GREEN CAPITALISM, WE WANT COMMUNISM, and RESISTANCE AGAINST THE CLIMATE GAMES OF THE RICH — and a ripple of satisfaction shivers through the contrarians. Communists! That's what it's all about, baby!</div><div>
</div><div>The only drawback is it's so damn cold. "Where is global warming when you need it, hahahaha."</div><div>
</div><div>But inside the convention center, it's warm and lit by high fluorescent lights that give off a technocratic glow, and Morano is walking through a vast room filled with trade booths from all the various companies and NGOs. He has no interest in the crowds outside. He's looking for the media room.</div><div>
</div><div>There it is — a vast open space the size of a football field, with rows and rows of long desks equipped with data lines and power outlets.</div><div>
</div><div>As he walks in, someone points him out — that's Marc Morano, the Swift Boater who did the story on John Kerry.</div><div>
</div><div>The funny part is, he's not even supposed to be here. He doesn't have press credentials. But he finds a quiet spot to sit down, opens his rolling briefcase and takes out the tools of his trade, and a few minutes later a radio station calls and makes him legit. It's immoral to tell Africans they can't use electricity, he says. Al Gore uses more electricity in a week than twenty-eight million Ugandans use in a year! It's all just white wealthy Westerners telling 1.6 billion people,predominantly of color, how to manage their economy. It's a new form of colonialism!</div><div>
</div><div>As he speaks, an older man with gray hair watches him in increasing disgust. "Who are you with? What are you doing here?"</div><div>
</div><div>"I'm doing an interview with Fox News."</div><div>
</div><div>"Faux News? Oh, that explains it."</div><div>
</div><div>"I guess no dissent is allowed here," Morano says.</div><div>
</div><div>A few minutes later, security comes over and asks to see his badge. The old man must have ratted him out.</div><div>
</div><div>You know how this story ends. The climate conference is going to fall apart. They don't agree on emissions targets or reparations or global regulations.</div><div>
</div><div>And Morano comes out on top of the world. Newsweek calls him "King of the Skeptics," Rolling Stone calls him the "Drudge of Denial." He goes back to the office with the baby-blue walls and Winnie the Pooh trim, and every time he checks his BlackBerry, he seems to find another story about him. He even comes out of the bathroom staring at the BlackBerry: "He can be imagined as the love child of Matt Drudge and Karl Rove."</div><div>
</div><div>He looks up, a bit abashed. "That's not very nice," he says.</div><div>
</div><div>But his beautiful wife is there to defend him. "Marc's not afraid to go head-to-head," she says.</div><div>
</div><div>She looks at him fondly while he changes the baby's diaper.</div><div>
</div><div>All of this is up ahead clear as day, even as the security guards in Copenhagen flank Morano and walk him out the media-room door. There are thousands and thousands of people out there protesting in the cold, but he's the one changing the narrative. That's why the idea of climate entertainment is so brilliant, because the other side is all about apocalypse. He's tapped into a new spirit in modern conservatism, the rebellious snarkiness that links Glenn Beck and the Fox network to James O'Keefe, the undercover filmmaker who made the ACORN "pimp" video. It's a style closer to puckish agitprop than journalism, which makes accuracy much less important than laughs. When Obama asks, "Why don't we have a European-style health plan?" and Fox cuts away before he explains why we don't, it's the same as Morano misrepresenting Hansen. Only a stuffed-shirt egghead elitist would complain. And the great ocean liner of public opinion turns.</div><div>
</div><div>Craig Rucker really says it best, coming into that Danish restaurant with that big grizzled grin on the night of the protest, when everybody is exhausted from walking miles and miles back into town. "We're in The New York Times! This is a record! Never have I seen such a spartan crowd get such elaborate press!"</div><div>
</div><div>One more interview before the night winds down. But first he needs a bar where he can smoke a cigar and decompress.</div><div>
</div><div>But smoking, of course, is illegal in this socialist paradise.</div><div>
</div><div>He wanders up and down the frigid streets. They say you can smoke in some of the "dirty bars" near the train station, but even the transvestites turn him away. But then, up ahead, shimmering in the distance ...</div><div>
</div><div>"That's the new international symbol of freedom — an ashtray."</div><div>
</div><div>Inside the bar, everything is red and noisy. Morano takes a Tupperware container out of his rolling briefcase and orders a Christmas beer. He takes a cigar out of the container — two cigars, actually. Let there be laughter and the sharing of pleasure, that's his motto. And soon he's working the cigar, the beer, the BlackBerry, and a phone pretty much simultaneously, helping the contrarians plot a raiding party against the Greenpeace ship anchored on the river. "Hey Craig, Fox wants to know when we're doing that thing... . Hey Lena, Fox News is calling about the event tomorrow... ."</div><div>
</div><div>They're going to sneak aboard and hang a banner off the port side that says "Ship of Lies" —that's funny, right? "It's going to be a great visual," he says.</div><div>
</div><div>He listens for a moment, then nods his head. "Preferably, we're looking for blood or other personal injury."</div><div>
</div><div>Then the phone rings again. It's his interview calling. "Is the music too loud?" Morano barks. "I'm talking to you from one of the only places in Copenhagen where you can smoke!"</div><div>
</div><div>Yes, the Climate-gate story is huge, he says, a game changer, like the Death Star at the end ofStar Wars. Politicians are running for cover! Their movement collapsing in disgrace! He has the zest of a child documenting the mistakes of the grown-ups in his little notebook of vindication.</div><div>
</div><div>Finally he puts down the phone and goes back to his cigar. The power drive seeps out of him in a pneumatic sigh and he settles back into the red leather booth, taking a sip of the beer he's been ignoring. He seems happy. He talks about the new house he's going to buy now that the kids are bigger and he's making money. He wants it to be in the country — in the mountains maybe, with trees all around, a place where he can fish off his own dock. That would be ideal, your feet in the water and nothing in sight but trees. The truth is, Marc Morano really loves nature.</div><div>
</div><div>He smokes his cigar down to the butt.</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.esquire.com/features/marc-morano-0410</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>2x?</div><div>
</div><div>The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science</div><div>How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link.</div><div>By Chris Mooney</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate: What Really Happened?</div><div>How climate science became the target of "the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known."</div><div>By Kate s&nbsp; http://www.motherjones.com/special-reports/2011/04/fact-free-nation</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy</div><div>
</div><div>wikipedia quite good:</div><div>
</div><div>The Climatic Research Unit email controversy (also known as "Climategate")[2][3] began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at theClimatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker.[4][5] Several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change, an unknown individual or group breached CRU's server and copied thousands of emails and computer files to various locations on the Internet.</div><div>
</div><div>The story was first broken by climate change critics on their blogs,[6] with columnist James Delingpole popularising the term "Climategate" to describe the controversy.[7] Climate change critics and others denying the significance of human caused climate change argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy, in which they alleged that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics.[8][9] The accusations were rejected by the CRU, who said that the emails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas.[10][11]</div><div>
</div><div>The mainstream media picked up the story as negotiations over climate change mitigation began in Copenhagen on 7 December.[12] Because of the timing, scientists, policy makers, and public relations experts said that the release of emails was a smear campaign intended to undermine the climate conference.[13] In response to the controversy, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released statements supporting the scientific consensus that the Earth's mean surface temperature had been rising for decades, with the AAAS concluding "based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway...it is a growing threat to society."[14]</div><div>
</div><div>Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.[15] However, the reports called on the scientists to avoid any such allegations in the future by taking steps to regain public confidence in their work, for example by opening up access to their supporting data, processing methods and software, and by promptly honouring freedom of information requests.[16] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations.[17]</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>1 Timeline of the initial incident</div><div>2 Content of the documents</div><div>3 Responses</div><div>3.1 University of East Anglia</div><div>3.2 Climatologists</div><div>3.3 Scientific organisations</div><div>3.4 UK Met Office</div><div>3.5 Other responses</div><div>4 Inquiries and reports</div><div>4.1 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee</div><div>4.2 Science Assessment Panel</div><div>4.3 Pennsylvania State University</div><div>4.4 Independent Climate Change Email Review</div><div>4.5 United States Environmental Protection Agency report</div><div>4.6 Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Commerce</div><div>4.7 National Science Foundation</div><div>5 Media coverage</div><div>6 Public opinion and political fallout</div><div>7 Further release, 2011</div><div>8 See also</div><div>9 References</div><div>10 External links</div><div>Timeline of the initial incident[edit]</div><div>The incident began when a server used by the Climatic Research Unit was breached in "a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack",[5] and 160 MB of data[8] were obtained including more than 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents.[18] The University of East Anglia stated that the server from which the data were taken was not one that could be accessed easily, and that the data could not have been released inadvertently.[19] Norfolk Police later added that the offenders used methods that are common in unlawful internet activity, designed to obstruct later enquiries.[5] The breach was first discovered on 17 November 2009 after the server of the RealClimate website was also hacked and a copy of the stolen data was uploaded there.[20] RealClimate's Gavin Schmidtsaid that he had information that the files had been obtained through "a hack into [CRU's] backup mail server."[21] At about the same time, a short comment appeared on Stephen McIntyre'sClimate Audit website saying that "A miracle has happened."[22]</div><div>
</div><div>On 19 November an archive file containing the data was uploaded to a server in Tomsk, Russia,[23] and then copied to numerous locations across the Internet.[8] An anonymous post from a Saudi Arabian IP address[24] to the climate-sceptic blog The Air Vent[20] described the material as "a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents", adding that climate science is "too important to be kept under wraps".[25] That same day, Stephen McIntyre of Climate Auditwas forwarded an internal email sent to UEA staff warning that "climate change sceptics" had obtained a "large volume of files and emails". Charles Rotter, moderator of the climate-sceptic blog Watts Up With That, which had been the first to get a link and download the files, gave a copy to his flatmate Steve Mosher. Mosher received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening and replied: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow." Shortly afterwards, the emails began to be widely publicised on climate-sceptic blogs and subsequently in the mainstream media.[22]</div><div>
</div><div>The Norfolk police subsequently confirmed that they were "investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia" with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime unit,[23] the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the National Domestic Extremism Team (NDET).[26] Commenting on the involvement of the NDET, a spokesman said: "At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations." However, the police cautioned that "major investigations of this nature are of necessity very detailed and as a consequence can take time to reach a conclusion."[27] On 18 July 2012, the Norfolk police finally decided to close its investigation because they did not have a "realistic prospect of identifying the offender or offenders and launching criminal proceedings within the time constraints imposed by law". They also said that the attack had been carried out "remotely via the internet" and that there was "no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime".[5]</div><div>
</div><div>Content of the documents[edit]</div><div>For more details on this topic, see Climatic Research Unit documents.</div><div>The material comprised more than 1,000 emails, 2,000 documents, as well as commented source code, pertaining to climate change research covering a period from 1996 until 2009.[28]According to an analysis in The Guardian, the vast majority of the emails related to four climatologists: Phil Jones, the head of the CRU; Keith Briffa, a CRU climatologist specialising in tree ring analysis; Tim Osborn, a climate modeller at CRU; and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The four were either recipients or senders of all but 66 of the 1,073 emails, with most of the remainder of the emails being sent from mailing lists. A few other emails were sent by, or to, other staff at the CRU. Jones, Briffa, Osborn and Hulme had written high-profile scientific papers on climate change that had been cited in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[21]</div><div>
</div><div>Most of the emails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate research, such as data analysis and details of scientific conferences.[29] The Guardian's analysis of the emails suggests that the hacker had filtered them. Four scientists were targeted and a concordance plot shows that the words "data", "climate", "paper", "research", "temperature" and "model" were predominant.[21] The controversy has focused on a small number of emails[29] with 'climate sceptic' websites picking out particular phrases, such as one in which Kevin Trenberth said, "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t".[20] This was actually part of a discussion on the need for better monitoring of the energy flows involved in short-term climate variability,[30] but was grossly mischaracterised by critics.[31][32]</div><div>
</div><div>Many commentators quoted one email in which Phil Jones said he had used "Mike's Nature trick" in a 1999 graph for the World Meteorological Organization "to hide the decline" in proxy temperatures derived from tree ring analyses when measured temperatures were actually rising. This 'decline' referred to the well-discussed tree ring divergence problem, but these two phrases were taken out of context by climate change sceptics, including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, as though they referred to some decline in measured global temperatures, even though they were written when temperatures were at a record high.[32] John Tierney, writing in the New York Times in November 2009, said that the claims by sceptics of "hoax" or "fraud" were incorrect, but that the graph on the cover of a report for policy makers and journalists did not show these non-experts where proxy measurements changed to measured temperatures.[33] The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context 'trick' was normal scientific or mathematical jargon for a neat way of handling data, in this case a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion.[34][35] The EPA notes that in fact, the evidence shows that the research community was fully aware of these issues and that no one was hiding or concealing them.[36]</div><div>
</div><div>Responses[edit]</div><div>Former Republican House Science Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert called the attacks a "manufactured distraction", and the dispute was described as a "highly orchestrated" and manufactured controversy by Newsweek and The New York Times. Concerns about the media's role in promoting early allegations while also minimising later coverage exonerating the scientists were raised by journalists and policy experts. Historian Spencer R. Weart of the American Institute of Physics said the incident was unprecedented in the history of science, having "never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance."[37] The United States National Academy of Sciences expressed concern and condemned what they called "political assaults on scientists and climate scientists in particular".[38]</div><div>
</div><div>In the United Kingdom and United States, there were calls for official inquiries into issues raised by the documents. The British Conservative politician Lord Lawson said, "The integrity of the scientific evidence ... has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay." Bob Wardof the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics said that there had to be a rigorous investigation into the substance of the email messages once appropriate action has been taken over the hacking, to clear the impression of impropriety given by the selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages.[39] United States Senator Jim Inhofe, who had previously stated that global warming was "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,"[40] also planned to demand an inquiry.[41] In a debate in theUnited States House of Representatives on 2 December 2009, Republicans read out extracts from eight of the emails and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner said "These e-mails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit". In response, the president's science adviser John Holdren said that the science was proper, and the emails only concerned a fraction of the research. Government scientist Jane Lubchenco said that the emails "do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus" that the Earth is warming, largely due to human actions.[42]</div><div>
</div><div>Climate change sceptics gained wide publicity in blogs and news media,[32] making allegations that the hacked emails showed evidence that climate scientists manipulated data.[8] A few other commentators such as Roger A. Pielke[43] said that the evidence supported claims that dissenting scientific papers had been suppressed.[44] The Wall Street Journal reported the emails revealed apparent efforts to ensure the IPCC included their own views and excluded others, and that the scientists withheld scientific data.[45]</div><div>
</div><div>An editorial in Nature stated that "A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories." It said that emails showed harassment of researchers, with multipleFreedom of Information requests to the Climatic Research Unit, but release of information had been hampered by national government restrictions on releasing the meteorological data researchers had been using. Nature considered that emails had not shown anything that undermined the scientific case on human caused global warming, or raised any substantive reasons for concern about the researchers' own papers.[46] The Telegraph reported that academics and climate change researchers dismissed the allegations, saying that nothing in the emails proved wrongdoing.[47]Independent reviews by FactCheck and the Associated Press said that the emails did not affect evidence that man-made global warming is a real threat, and said that emails were being misrepresented to support unfounded claims of scientific misconduct. The AP said that the "[e]-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data."[48][49] In this context, John Tierney of the New York Times wrote: "these researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause."[33]</div><div>
</div><div>Climate scientists at the CRU and elsewhere received numerous threatening and abusive emails in the wake of the initial incidents.[50][51] Norfolk Police interviewed Phil Jones about death threats made against him following the release of the emails;[52] Jones later said that the police told him these "didn’t fulfil the criteria for death threats."[53] Death threats against two scientists also are under investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.[50] Climate scientists in Australia have reported receiving threatening emails including references to where they live and warnings to "be careful" about how some people might react to their scientific findings.[54] In July 2012, Michael Mann said that the episode had caused him to "endure countless verbal attacks upon my professional reputation, my honesty, my integrity, even my life and liberty."[55]</div><div>
</div><div>University of East Anglia[edit]</div><div>The University of East Anglia was notified of the security breach on 17 November 2009, but when the story was published in the press on 20 November they had no statement ready.[56] On 24 November, Trevor Davies, the University of East Anglia pro-vice-chancellor with responsibility for research, rejected calls for Jones' resignation or firing: "We see no reason for Professor Jones to resign and, indeed, we would not accept his resignation. He is a valued and important scientist." The university announced it would conduct an independent review into issues including Freedom of Information requests to the Climatic Research Unit: it would "address the issue of data security, an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests, and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed."[57]</div><div>
</div><div>The university announced on 1 December that Phil Jones was to stand aside as director of the Unit until the completion of the review.[58][59] Two days later, the university announced that Sir Muir Russell would chair the inquiry, which would be known as the Independent Climate Change Email Review, and would "examine email exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data". The review would also scrutinise the CRU's policies and practices for "acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review, and disseminating data and research findings" and "their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice". In addition, the investigation would review CRU's compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests and also "make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds."[60] The Independent Climate Change Email Review report was published on 7 July 2010.[61]</div><div>
</div><div>On 22 March 2010 the university announced the composition of an independent Science Assessment Panel to reassess key CRU papers which have already been peer reviewed and published in journals. The panel did not seek to evaluate the science itself, but rather whether "the conclusions [reached by the CRU] represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data." The university consulted with the Royal Society in establishing the panel. It was chaired by Lord Oxburgh and its membership consisted of Professor Huw Davies of ETH Zurich, Professor Kerry Emanual at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Lisa Graumlich of the University of Arizona, Professor David Hand of Imperial College London, and Professors Herbert Huppert and Michael Kelly of the University of Cambridge. It started its work in March 2010 and released its report on 14 April 2010. During its inquiry, the panel examined eleven representative CRU publications, selected with advice from the Royal Society, that spanned a period of over 20 years, as well as other CRU research materials. It also spent fifteen person days at the UEA carrying out interviews with scientists.[62]</div><div>
</div><div>Climatologists[edit]</div><div>Among the scientists whose emails were disclosed, the CRU's researchers said in a statement that the emails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas.Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, said that sceptics were "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious",[18] and called the entire incident a careful, "high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem."[63] Kevin E. Trenberth of theNational Center for Atmospheric Research said that he was appalled at the release of the emails but thought that it might backfire against climate sceptics, as the messages would show "the integrity of scientists."[20] He also said that climate change sceptics had selectively quoted words and phrases out of context, and that the timing suggested an attempt to undermine talks at the December 2009 Copenhagen global climate summit.[64] Tom Wigley, a former director of the CRU and now head of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, condemned the threats that he and other colleagues had received as "truly stomach-turning", and commented: "None of it affects the science one iota. Accusations of data distortion or faking are baseless. I can rebut and explain all of the apparently incriminating e-mails that I have looked at, but it is going to be very time consuming to do so."[50] In relation to the harassment that he and his colleagues were experiencing, he said: "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. So this is a worse manifestation but it's happened before so it's not that surprising."[65]</div><div>
</div><div>Other prominent climate scientists, such as Richard Somerville, called the incident a smear campaign.[66] David Reay of the University of Edinburgh said that the CRU "is just one of many climate-research institutes that provide the underlying scientific basis for climate policy at national and international levels. The conspiracy theorists may be having a field day, but if they really knew academia they would also know that every published paper and data set is continually put through the wringer by other independent research groups. The information that makes it into the IPCC reports is some of the most rigorously tested and debated in any area of science."[50] Stephen Schneider compared the political attacks on climate scientists to the witch-hunts ofMcCarthyism.[67]</div><div>
</div><div>James Hansen said that the controversy has "no effect on the science" and that while some of the emails reflect poor judgment, the evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.[68]</div><div>
</div><div>One of the IPCC's lead authors, Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, expressed concern at the precedent established by this incident: "[T]his is a criminal act of vandalism and of harassment of a group of scientists that are only going about their business doing science. It represents a whole new escalation in the war on climate scientists who are only trying to get at the truth... What next? Deliberate monkeying with data on servers? Insertion of bugs into climate models?"[69] Another IPCC lead author, David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, reported receiving hate emails in the wake of the incident and said that he believed there was "an organised campaign to discredit individual climate scientists". Andrew Pitman of the University of New South Walescommented: "The major problem is that scientists have to be able to communicate their science without fear or favour and there seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign designed to intimidate some scientists."[54]</div><div>
</div><div>In response to the incident, 1,700 British scientists signed a joint statement circulated by the UK Met Office declaring their "utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities."[70]</div><div>
</div><div>Patrick J. Michaels who was criticised in the emails and who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming, said "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud". He said that some emails showed an effort to block the release of data for independent review, and that some messages discussed discrediting him by stating that he knew his research was wrong in his doctoral dissertation, "This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people's reputations in very serious ways."[20]</div><div>
</div><div>Judith Curry wrote that in her opinion "there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and 'tribalism' in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process." She hoped that the affair would change the approach of scientists to providing their data to the public, and their response to criticisms of their work. She had herself learned to be careful about what to put in emails when a "disgruntled employee" made a freedom of information request. Mann described these comments as "somewhat naive" considering that in recent years scientists had become much more open with their data. He said that sceptics "will always complain about something else, want something more. Eventually, as we see, they've found a way to get access to private communications between scientists."[63]</div><div>
</div><div>Hans von Storch, who also concurs with the mainstream view on global warming,[71] said that the University of East Anglia (UEA) had "violated a fundamental principle of science" by refusing to share data with other researchers. "They play science as a power game," he said.[72] On 24 November 2009 the university had stated that 95% of the raw station data was accessible via theGlobal Historical Climatology Network, and had been for several years. They were already working with the Met Office to obtain permissions to release the remaining raw data.[73]</div><div>
</div><div>Scientific organisations[</div><div>The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I issued statements that the assessment process, involving hundreds of scientists worldwide, is designed to be transparent and to prevent any individual or small group from manipulating the process. The statement said that the "internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges".[74][75]</div><div>
</div><div>The American Meteorological Society stated that the incident did not affect the society's position on climate change. They pointed to the breadth of evidence for human influence on climate, stating:</div><div>
</div><div>For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true—which is not yet clearly the case—the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.</div><div>—[76]</div><div>The American Geophysical Union issued a statement that they found "it offensive that these emails were obtained by illegal cyber attacks and they are being exploited to distort the scientific debate about the urgent issue of climate change." They reaffirmed their 2007 position statement on climate change "based on the large body of scientific evidence that Earth's climate is warming and that human activity is a contributing factor. Nothing in the University of East Anglia hacked e-mails represents a significant challenge to that body of scientific evidence."[77]</div><div>
</div><div>The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reaffirmed its position on global warming and "expressed grave concerns that the illegal release of private emails stolen from the University of East Anglia should not cause policy-makers and the public to become confused about the scientific basis of global climate change. Scientific integrity demands robust, independent peer review, however, and AAAS therefore emphasised that investigations are appropriate whenever significant questions are raised regarding the transparency and rigour of the scientific method, the peer-review process, or the responsibility of individual scientists. The responsible institutions are mounting such investigations." Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the AAAS and executive publisher of the journal Science, said "AAAS takes issues of scientific integrity very seriously. It is fair and appropriate to pursue answers to any allegations of impropriety. It’s important to remember, though, that the reality of climate change is based on a century of robust and well-validated science."[78]</div><div>
</div><div>UK Met Office[edit]</div><div>On 23 November 2009, a spokesman for the Met Office, the UK's national weather service, which works with the CRU in providing global temperature information, said there was no need for an inquiry. "The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it. We have every confidence in the science and the various datasets we use. The peer-review process is as robust as it could possibly be."[39]</div><div>
</div><div>On 5 December 2009, however, the Met Office indicated its intention to re-examine 160 years of temperature data in the light of concerns that public confidence in the science had been damaged by the controversy over the emails.[79] The Met Office would also publish online the temperature records for over 1,000 worldwide weather stations.[80][81] It remained confident that its analysis would be shown to be correct[79] and that the data would show a temperature rise over the past 150 years.[80][82]</div><div>
</div><div>Other responses[edit]</div><div>Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC in December 2009 that he considered the affair to be "a serious issue and we will look into it in detail."[83] He later clarified that the IPCC would review the incident to identify lessons to be learned, and he rejected suggestions that the IPCC itself should carry out an investigation.</div><div>
</div><div>In a series of emails sent through a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) listserv, apparently forwarded outside the group by an unknown person, scientists discussing the "Climategate" fallout considered launching advertising campaigns, widening their public presence, pushing the NAS to take a more active role in explaining climate science and creating a nonprofit to serve as a voice for the scientific community.[84]</div><div>
</div><div>Inquiries and reports[edit]</div><div>Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.[15] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged by the end of the investigations.[17] However, the reports urged the scientists to avoid any such allegations in the future, and to regain public confidencefollowing this media storm, with "more efforts than ever to make available all their supporting data - right down to the computer codes they use - to allow their findings to be properly verified". Climate scientists and organisations pledged to improve scientific research and collaboration with other researchers by improving data management and opening up access to data, and to honour any freedom of information requests that relate to climate science.[16]</div><div>
</div><div>House of Commons Science and Technology Committee[edit]</div><div>On 22 January 2010, the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee announced it would conduct an inquiry into the affair, examining the implications of the disclosure for the integrity of scientific research, reviewing the scope of the independent Muir Russell review announced by the UEA, and reviewing the independence of international climate data sets.[85] The committee invited written submissions from interested parties, and published 55 submissions that it had received by 10 February. They included submissions from the University of East Anglia, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Met Office, several other professional bodies, prominent scientists, some climate change sceptics, several MEPs and other interested parties.[86] An oral evidence session was held on 1 March 2010.[87]</div><div>
</div><div>The Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry reported on 31 March 2010 that it had found that "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact". The emails and claims raised in the controversy did not challenge the scientific consensus that "global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity". The MPs had seen no evidence to support claims that Jones had tampered with data or interfered with the peer-review process.[88]</div><div>
</div><div>The committee criticised a "culture of non-disclosure at CRU" and a general lack of transparency in climate science where scientific papers had usually not included all the data and code used in reconstructions. It said that "even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified." The report added that "scientists could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by aggressively publishing all their data instead of worrying about how to stonewall their critics." The committee criticised the university for the way that freedom of information requests were handled, and for failing to give adequate support to the scientists to deal with such requests.[89]</div><div>
</div><div>The committee chairman Phil Willis said that the "standard practice" in climate science generally of not routinely releasing all raw data and computer codes "needs to change and it needs to change quickly". Jones had admitted sending "awful emails"; Willis commented that "[Jones] probably wishes that emails were never invented," but "apart from that we do believe that Prof. Jones has in many ways been scapegoated as a result of what really was a frustration on his part that people were asking for information purely to undermine his research."[34] In Willis' view this did not excuse any failure to deal properly with FOI Act requests, but the committee accepted that Jones had released all the data that he could.[34] It stated: "There is no reason why Professor Jones should not resume his post. He was certainly not co-operative with those seeking to get data, but that was true of all the climate scientists".[90]</div><div>
</div><div>The committee was careful to point out that its report had been written after a single day of oral testimony and would not be as in-depth as other inquiries.[88]</div><div>
</div><div>Science Assessment Panel[edit]</div><div>The report of the independent Science Assessment Panel was published on 14 April 2010 and concluded that the panel had seen "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit." It found that the CRU's work had been "carried out with integrity" and had used "fair and satisfactory" methods. The CRU was found to be "objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda." Instead, "their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible."[62]</div><div>
</div><div>The panel commented that it was "very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians." It found that although the CRU had not made inappropriate use of statistical methods, some of the methods used may not have been the best for the purpose, though it said that "it is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results." It suggested that the CRU could have done more to document and archive its work, data and algorithms and stated that the scientists were "ill prepared" for the amount of public attention generated by their work, commenting that "as with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal." The media and other scientific organisations were criticised for having "sometimes neglected" to reflect the uncertainties, doubts and assumptions of the work done by the CRU. The UK Government's policy of charging for access to scientific data was described as "inconsistent with policies of open access to data promoted elsewhere." The panel was also stated that "Although we deplore the tone of much of the criticism that has been directed at CRU, we believe that this questioning of the methods and data used in dendroclimatology will ultimately have a beneficial effect and improve working practices." It found that some of the criticism had been "selective and uncharitable" and critics had displayed "a lack of awareness" of the difficulties of research in this area.[62]</div><div>
</div><div>Speaking at a press conference to announce the report, the panel's chair, Lord Oxburgh, stated that his team had found "absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever" and that "whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly." He said that many of the criticisms and allegations of scientific misconduct had been made by people "who do not like the implications of some of the conclusions" reached by the CRU's scientists. The repeated FOI requests made by climate change sceptic Steve McIntyre and others "could have amounted to a campaign of harassment" and the issue of how FOI laws should be applied in an academic context remained unresolved.[91] Another panel member, Professor David Hand, commended the CRU for being explicit about the inherent uncertainties in its research data, commenting that "there is no evidence of anything underhand – the opposite, if anything, they have brought out into the open the uncertainties with what they are dealing with."[92]</div><div>
</div><div>The UEA's vice-chancellor, Edward Acton, welcomed the panel's findings. Describing its report as "hugely positive", he stated that "it is especially important that, despite a deluge of allegations and smears against the CRU, this independent group of utterly reputable scientists have concluded that there was no evidence of any scientific malpractice."[93] He criticised the way that the emails had been misrepresented, saying that "UEA has already put on record its deep regret and anger that the theft of emails from the University, and the blatant misrepresentation of their contents as revealed both in this report and the previous one by the Science and Technology Select Committee, damaged the reputation of UK climate science."[94] The UEA issued a statement in which it accepted that "things might have been done better." It said that improvements had already been undertaken by the CRU and others in the climate science community and that the University would "continue to ensure that these imperatives are maintained."[95]</div><div>
</div><div>It later emerged that the Science Assessment Panel was not assessing the quality but instead the integrity of the CRU's science. Phil Willis described this a "sleight of hand" and was not what the Parliamentary Committee he had chaired had been led to believe. There were also questions about the selection of publications examined by the panel.[96] Lord Oxburgh said that Acton had been wrong to tell the Science and Technology Select Committee in March that his inquiry would look into the science itself. "I think that was inaccurate," Oxburgh said. "This had to be done rapidly. This was their concern. They really wanted something within a month. There was no way our panel could evaluate the science."[97]</div><div>
</div><div>Pennsylvania State University[edit]</div><div>Pennsylvania State University announced in December 2009 it would review the work of Michael Mann, in particular looking at anything that had not already been addressed in an earlier review by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences which had found some faults with his methodology but agreed with the results.[98][99][100] In response, Mann said he would welcome the review.[100] The inquiry committee determined on 3 February 2010 that there was no credible evidence Mann suppressed or falsified data, destroyed emails, information and/or data related to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, or misused privileged or confidential information. The committee did not make a definitive finding on the final point of inquiry — "whether Dr. Mann seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities". The committee said that the earlier NAS inquiry had found "that Dr. Mann’s science did fall well within the bounds of accepted practice", but in light of the newly available information this question of conduct was to be investigated by a second panel of five prominent Penn State scientists from other scientific disciplines.[35][101]</div><div>
</div><div>The second Investigatory Committee reported on 4 June 2010 that it had "determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community." Regarding his sharing unpublished manuscripts with colleagues on the assumption of implied consent, it considered such sharing to be "careless and inappropriate" without following the best practice of getting express consent from the authors in advance, though expert opinion on this varied. It said that his success in proposing research and obtaining funding for it, commenting that this "clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing research." Mann's extensive recognitions within the research community demonstrated that "his scientific work, especially the conduct of his research, has from the beginning of his career been judged to be outstanding by a broad spectrum of scientists." It agreed unanimously that "there is no substance" to the allegations against Mann.[102][103]</div><div>
</div><div>Mann said he regretted not objecting to a suggestion from Jones in a 29 May 2008 message that he destroy emails. "I wish in retrospect I had told him, 'Hey, you shouldn't even be thinking about this,'" Mann said in March 2010. "I didn't think it was an appropriate request." Mann's response to Jones at the time was that he would pass on the request to another scientist. "The important thing is, I didn't delete any emails. And I don't think [Jones] did either."[104]</div><div>
</div><div>Independent Climate Change Email Review[edit]</div><div>First announced in December 2009, a British investigation commissioned by the UEA and chaired by Sir Muir Russell, published its final report in July 2010.[105] The commission cleared the scientists and dismissed allegations that they manipulated their data. The "rigour and honesty" of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit were found not to be in doubt.[106] The panel found that they did not subvert the peer review process to censor criticism as alleged, and that the key data needed to reproduce their findings was freely available to any "competent" researcher.[107]</div><div>
</div><div>The panel did rebuke the CRU for their reluctance to release computer files, and found that a graph produced in 1999 was "misleading," though not deliberately so as necessary caveats had been included in the accompanying text.[108] It found evidence that emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them, though the panel did not ask anyone at CRU whether they had actually done this.[109]</div><div>
</div><div>At the conclusion of the inquiry, Jones was reinstated with the newly created post of Director of Research.[106][107][110]</div><div>
</div><div>United States Environmental Protection Agency report[edit]</div><div>The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had issued an "endangerment finding" in 2009 in preparation for climate regulations on excessive greenhouse gases. Petitions to reconsider this were raised by the states of Virginia and Texas, conservative activists and business groups including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the coal company Peabody Energy, making claims that the CRU emails undermined the science.[111]</div><div>
</div><div>The EPA examined every email and concluded that there was no merit to the claims in the petitions, which "routinely misunderstood the scientific issues", reached "faulty scientific conclusions", "resorted to hyperbole", and "often cherry-pick language that creates the suggestion or appearance of impropriety, without looking deeper into the issues."[112] In a statement issued on 29 July 2010, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said the petitions were based "on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy" and provided "no evidence to undermine our determination. Excess greenhouse gases are a threat to our health and welfare."[113]</div><div>
</div><div>The EPA issued a detailed report on issues raised by petitioners and responses, together with a fact sheet,[114] and a "myths versus facts" page stating that "Petitioners say that emails disclosed from CRU provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate data. The media coverage after the emails were released was based on email statements quoted out of context and on unsubstantiated theories of conspiracy. The CRU emails do not show either that the science is flawed or that the scientific process has been compromised. EPA carefully reviewed the CRU emails and found no indication of improper data manipulation or misrepresentation of results."[115]</div><div>
</div><div>Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Commerce[edit]</div><div>In May 2010 Senator Jim Inhofe requested the Inspector General of the United States Department of Commerce to conduct an independent review of how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had dealt with the emails, and whether the emails showed any wrongdoing.[116] The report, issued on 18 February 2011,[117] cleared the researchers and "did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures". It noted that NOAA reviewed its climate change data as standard procedure, not in response to the controversy. One email included a cartoon image showing Infofe and others marooned on a melting ice floe, NOAA had taken this up as a conduct issue. In response to questions raised, NOAA stated that its scientists had followed legal advice on FOIA requests for information which belonged to the IPCC and was made available by that panel. In two instances funding had been awarded to CRU,[116] NOAA stated that it was reviewing these cases and so far understood that the funds supported climate forecasting workshops in 2002 and 2003 assisting the governments of three countries.[118]</div><div>
</div><div>National Science Foundation[edit]</div><div>The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the National Science Foundation closed an investigation on 15 August 2011 that exonerated Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University of charges of scientific misconduct.[119] It found no evidence of research misconduct, and confirmed the results of earlier inquiries.[120] The OIG reviewed the findings of the July 2010 Penn State panel, took further evidence from the university and Mann, and interviewed Mann. The OIP findings confirmed the university panel's conclusions which cleared Mann of any wrongdoing, and it stated "Lacking any evidence of research misconduct, as defined under the NSF Research Misconduct Regulation, we are closing the investigation with no further action."[121]</div><div>
</div><div>Media coverage[edit]</div><div>See also: Media coverage of climate change</div><div>The initial story about the hacking originated in the blogosphere,[6] with columnist James Delingpole picking up the term "Climategate" from an anonymous blogger on Watts Up With That?, a blog created by climate sceptic Anthony Watts. The site was one of three blogs that received links to the leaked documents on 17 November 2009. Delingpole first used the word "Climategate" in the title of his 20 November article for The Telegraph: "Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?" A week later, his co-worker, Christopher Booker, gave Delingpole credit for coining the term.[7] Following the release of documents in the blogosphere, unproven allegations and personal attacks against scientists increased and made their way into the traditional media. Physicist Mark Boslough of the University of New Mexico noted that many of the attacks on scientists came from "bloggers, editorial writers, Fox News pundits, and radio talk show hosts who have called them liars and vilified them as frauds". According to Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book Unscientific America (2010), the accusations originated in right wing media and blogs, "especially on outlets like Fox News." Journalist Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian reported that according to an analysis by Media Matters, "Fox had tried to delegitimise the work of climate scientists in its coverage of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia" and had "displayed a pattern of trying to skew coverage in favour of the fringe minority which doubts the existence of climate change".[12]</div><div>
</div><div>The intense media coverage of the documents stolen from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia created public confusion about the scientific consensus on climate change, leading several publications to comment on the propagation of the controversy in the media in the wake of a series of investigations that cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing. In an editorial, the New York Times described the coverage as a "manufactured controversy," and expressed hope that the investigations clearing the scientists "will receive as much circulation as the original, diversionary controversies".[122] Writing for Newsweek, journalist Sharon Begley called the controversy a "highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal", noting that the public was unlikely to change their mind. Regardless of the reports exonerating the scientists, Begley noted that "one of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, 'No, we were wrong about X,' most people still believe X."[123]</div><div>
</div><div>Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and science historian Naomi Oreskes said that the "attacks on climate science that were made ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit were 'organised' to undermine efforts to tackle global warming and mirror the earlier tactics of the tobacco industry".[124] Noting the media circusthat occurred when the story first broke, Oreskes and Erik Conway writing about climate change denial, said that following the investigations "the vindication of the climate scientists has received very little coverage at all. Vindication is not as sexy as accusation, and many people are still suspicious. After all, some of those emails, taken out of context, sounded damning. But what they show is that climate scientists are frustrated, because for two decades they have been under attack."[125]</div><div>
</div><div>Bill Royce, head of the European practice on energy, environment and climate change at the United States communications firm Burson-Marsteller, also described the incident as an organised effort to discredit climate science. He said it was not a single scandal, but "a sustained and coordinated campaign" aimed at undermining the credibility of the science. Disproportionate reporting of the original story, "widely amplified by climate deniers", meant that the reports that cleared the scientists received far less coverage than the original allegations, he said.[126] Journalist Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review criticised newspapers and magazines for failing to give prominent coverage to the findings of the review panels, and said that "readers need to understand that while there is plenty of room to improve the research and communications process, its fundamental tenets remain as solid as ever."[127] CNN media critic Howard Kurtz expressed similar sentiments.[128]</div><div>
</div><div>Public opinion and political fallout[edit]</div><div>Jon Krosnick, professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford University, said scientists were overreacting. Referring to his own poll results of the American public, he said "It's another funny instance of scientists ignoring science." Krosnick found that "Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the public that scientists do, and those numbers haven't changed much in a decade. We don't see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) emails. It's too inside baseball."[129]</div><div>
</div><div>The Christian Science Monitor, in an article titled "Climate scientists exonerated in 'climategate' but public trust damaged," stated, "While public opinion had steadily moved away from belief in man-made global warming before the leaked CRU emails, that trend has only accelerated."[130] Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times, argued that this, along with all other incidents which called into question the scientific consensus on climate change, was "a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media."[131] But UK journalist Fred Pearce called the slow response of climate scientists "a case study in how not to respond to a crisis" and "a Public Relations disaster".[132]</div><div>
</div><div>A. A. Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale University Project on Climate Change, and colleagues found in 2010 that:</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate had a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists. The loss of trust in scientists, however, was primarily among individuals with a strongly individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology. Nonetheless, Americans overall continue to trust scientists more than other sources of information about global warming.</div><div>—[6]</div><div>In late 2011, Steven F. Hayward wrote that "Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively." [133]</div><div>
</div><div>Further release, 2011[edit]</div><div>On 22 November 2011, a second set of approximately 5,000 emails, apparently hacked from University of East Anglia servers at the same time as those in the 2009 release, was posted on a Russian server with links distributed to the message boards on several climate sceptic web sites.[134] A message accompanying the emails quoted selective passages from them, highlighting many of the same issues raised following the original incident. Juliette Jowit and Leo Hickman of The Guardian said the new release was "an apparent attempt to undermine public support for international action to tackle climate change" with the start of the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled in Durban, South Africa, a week later.[134][135] Nature described the further release as a "poor sequel", and claimed that "it is hard for anyone except the most committed conspiracy theorist to see much of interest in the content of the released e-mails, even taken out of context".[136]</div><div>
</div><div>See also[edit]</div><div>Portal icon<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Global warming portal</div><div>Portal icon<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Environment portal</div><div>Climatic Research Unit</div><div>Freedom of Information requests to the Climatic Research Unit</div><div>Global warming conspiracy theory</div><div>Global warming controversy</div><div>Hockey stick controversy</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>fallout:</div><div>The Chamber of Commerce vs. Climate Science</div><div>
</div><div>The business lobby's challenge to carbon regulations probably won't convince a court of law. The court of public opinion is another matter.</div><div>
</div><div>—By Kate Sheppard</div><div>
</div><div>| Mon Mar. 1, 2010</div><div>
</div><div>LAWSUIT</div><div>
</div><div>William Kovacs, the US Chamber of Commerce's vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs, last year famously called for a "Scopes monkey trialof the 21st century" on climate change. Kovacs was referencing the lightning-rod 1925 court case that made it illegal to teach anything other than divine creation in Tennessee public schools—and he wanted a similar public hearing in which climate science would be put on the stand. The remark drew plenty of bad press, and Kovacs soon recanted his "inappropriate" analogy. But it looks like the chamber is angling for that monkey trial after all, by way of a lawsuit it's filed against the Environmental Protection Agency that could be the first wave of a big-business assault on greenhouse gas regulations.</div><div>
</div><div>At issue is a scientific finding issued by the EPA last year concluding that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health, due to the lower air quality, extreme weather events, and heat waves caused by rising temperatures. The chamber announced its intent to sue the EPA last month in an attempt to have the endangerment finding, as it's known, tossed out. The big-business lobby has been joined by a collection of trade groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the National Mining Association; free-market think tanks such as FreedomWorks and the Competitive Enterprise Institute; and the attorneys general of Texas, Alabama, and Virginia.</div><div>
</div><div>Legally, the chamber and its allies don't have much of a case. In the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court found that greenhouse gases could be covered under the Clean Air Act if they are determined to threaten human health. Their ruling required the EPA to investigate whether carbon emissions did in fact pose a health risk. After the agency's scientists reached that conclusion, the EPA was automatically required to regulate the sources of greenhouse gases—otherwise the agency would be breaking the law. And because the EPA's directive is based on a scientific assessment, not a policy preference, it will be extremely hard to overturn, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. "These petitions are a real long-shot," he said. "The appellate courts tend to give a large degree of deference to the technical judgments of expert agencies, especially when they are based like this one is on voluminous studies." In addition, the EPA won't actually enforce regulations on the biggest emitters, like power plants and refineries, until 2011. That means the plaintiffs can't prove they've suffered any harm from the EPA's decision, said John Pendergrass, senior attorney at the Environmental Law Institute, who described the lawsuits challenging the endangerment finding as "premature."</div><div>
</div><div>So if the odds of this gambit succeeding are so low, then why is the chamber gearing up for a costly lost cause? The goal of the suit "is political obfuscation," argues Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. That is, the chamber's critics believe that the business lobby group hopes to once again muddy the public understanding of climate change by seeking a high-profile forum in which it can argue that the science isn't settled. "This is part of a media and political strategy. It's not a legal strategy," said David Bookbinder, chief climate counsel at Sierra Club, which has intervened in support of the EPA, along with several other environmental groups and 16 states, many of them litigants in the case that originally prompted the agency's action.</div><div>
</div><div>The EPA's opponents couldn't have chosen a better time to argue that the science of global warming is still up for debate, thanks to the recent "ClimateGate" emails scandal, and the revelation that an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report contained flawed data. In reality, the emails released in the so-called ClimateGate flap showed climate scientists behaving unprofessionally over dissenting views, but nothing in the messages discounted the underlying science of climate change, which has been reaffirmed by thousands of peer-reviewed studies from scientists around the world. And although the IPCC's errors have raised questions about the timing and severity of specific anticipated climate events, they have not altered the overwhelming body of evidence and widespread scientific consensus that the planet is warming due to the burning of fossil fuels. Nevertheless, a number of the legal challenges to the EPA seek to exploit these controversies for maximum PR advantage.</div><div>
</div><div>Texas Gov. Rick Perry, for instance, claimed in a press conference announcing his state's suit that the finding is "based on the tainted data of an agenda-driven international panel." Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II accused the agency of introducing "job-destroying regulations based on unverifiable and unrepeatable so-called science." And the challenge from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, and other free-market groups alleges that the hacked emails scandal "has severely undermined EPA's alleged justification for regulating carbon dioxide."</div><div>
</div><div>For its part, the chamber claims that it's not attacking the EPA's scientific assessment. Yet its announcement of the lawsuit did just that—charging that the agency failed to perform "careful analysis of all available data and options" before releasing the "flawed" finding. And in its public comments submitted in advance of the release of the endangerment finding last year, the chamber also disputed the science of climate change, suggesting, among other things, that rising temperatures might actually be beneficial for humans, and that any resulting problems could be addressed by the increased use of air conditioners.</div><div>
</div><div>The barrage of lawsuits against the EPA comes as an increasing number of lawmakers in Congress from both parties are moving to attempt to block the agency from cracking down on greenhouse gas emissions. Leading the charge is&nbsp; Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who, with the help of industry lobbyists, has filed a resolution of disapproval that, if signed into law, would nullify the endangerment finding. This rarely used parliamentary maneuver already has 40 cosponsors, including Democratic Sens. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), and Mary Landrieu (La.). A bipartisan trio of representatives introduced the same measure in the House in late February.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>Climategate Investigation Closed—With No Closure</div><div>—By Kate Sheppard</div><div>
</div><div>| Wed Jul. 18, 2012 9:20 AM PDT</div><div>The police in Norfolk, England, announced on Wednesday that they have ended their investigation into the theft of a bunch of emails from climate scientists at the Climate Research Centre at the University of East Anglia in 2009—with no actual conclusion. That means we might never know who was behind what led to Climategate, an ongoing smear campaign against climate science and scientists....</div><div>http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/07/uk-police-close-climategate-investigation</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>jmayer nyt:</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.</div><div>
</div><div>When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told me that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.”</div><div>
</div><div>Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. But five independent inquiries have since exonerated the researchers, and nothing was found in their e-mails or data to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>The immediate impact on public opinion was dramatic. A poll by Yale and George Mason University [31] (GMU) found that in November 2008, 71 percent of respondents agreed that the planet is warming (PDF). Five weeks after Climategate, only 57 percent believed it. The emails, said a Yale report [32] (PDF), had "a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists."</div><div></div><div>issa trial http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/darrell_issas_oversight_gameplan.php#more</div><div>attempt to revive 11/11</div><div>http://www.grist.org/list#item-2011-11-23-critical-list-turkeys-to-be-pardoned-bill-oreily-can-totally-get</div><div>
</div><div>DURBAN</div><div>
</div><div>By Jess Zimmerman</div><div>
</div><div>22 Nov 2011&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The hackers who originally leaked the so-called "Climategate" emails (perhaps more accurately called the "Big Fuss Over Nothing" emails) have released a new batch of stolen communication from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Now that those involved in "Climategate" have been cleared of all suspicion by multiple independent investigations, climate scientists are in danger of actually getting a chance to do some climate science, and we can't have that! Better lob another giant distraction!</div><div>
</div><div>The last time this happened, two years ago, deniers combed through the documents to find words like "trick" and "hide," then presented those lines completely out of context. Since communicating science is more complicated than making shit up, explanations of how the emails were being misinterpreted monopolized a lot of resources right before a U.N. climate summit. With another summit coming up, the miscreants are clearly hoping for a repeat performance.</div><div>
</div><div>They're unlikely to get it, says Joe Romm, because this batch is even weaker sauce than the first one:</div><div>
</div><div>These are the “second string” emails. The Varsity team couldn’t derail the science so it’s really hard to see how the Junior Varsity team could. In other words, if multiple independent investigations showed that climate science was unscathed by the original batch of emails — which must have been the ones the deniers thought were the best they had — then what precisely are the chances these even weaker second-stringers are going to beat the climate science team? After all, the climate science team has gotten considerably stronger in recent years.</div><div>It doesn't seem totally clear that these are the chaff from the first time around, as Romm says, though they're clearly not new. And determined deniers would be able to cherry-pick supposedly incriminating quotes from anything, even if all 5,000 new emails were just about grocery lists. ("HIDDEN Valley, huh? Just what are you hiding about the valley?") They're already starting to salivate over the presence of words like "uncertainty," which -- like the other Climategate buzzwords -- has a particular scientific meaning.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Chris Horner, Washington Examiner:</div><div>
</div><div>I have seen apparent proof that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), Criminal Division, is working with United Kingdom police to pursue the leaker of the 2009 and 2011 “Climategate” emails.</div><div>
</div><div>I have learned that last week DOJ sent a search-and-seizure letter to the host of three climate-change “skeptic” blogs. Last night, UK police raided a blogger’s home and removed computers and equipment.</div><div>
</div><div>The leaked records derailed "cap-and-trade” legislation in the U.S. and, internationally, as well as talks for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The emails and computer code were produced with taxpayer funds and held on taxpayer-owned computers both in the US and the UK, and all were subject to the UK Freedom of Information Act, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and state FOIA laws.[REALLY? VERIFY?</div><div>
</div><div>Read more at the Washington Examiner.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>mojo</div><div>
</div><div>climategate:</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.motherjones.com/print/106101</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate: What Really Happened?</div><div>How climate science became the target of "the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known."</div><div>
</div><div>By Kate Sheppard | Thu Apr. 21, 2011 3:00 AM PDT</div><div>
</div><div>Update! Read our coverage of Climategate 2.0. [1]</div><div>
</div><div>Read also: Chris Mooney on the science of why we don't believe science. [2]</div><div>
</div><div>IT'S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a "fucking terrorist," "killer," or "one-world-government socialist." It's even harder when you meet Michael Mann [3], a balding 45-year-old climate scientist who speaks haltingly and has a habit of nervously clearing his throat. And when you realize that the reason for all the hostility is a 12-year-old chart, it seems more than a little surreal.</div><div>
</div><div>Back in 1999, Mann—then a newly minted Ph.D. [4] (PDF)—and a pair of colleagues constructed a chart that plotted historical climate data, spanning from 1000 to 1980. Because recorded temperatures only begin in the late 19th century, Mann and his team largely relied on so-called proxy records—measurements of tree rings, coral, and ice cores whose variations illustrate temperature changes over the years. The graph showed that after nearly 900 years of relatively stable temperatures, there was a sharp uptick starting in the 20th century.</div><div>
</div><div>You may have seen a version of the graph, known as the "hockey stick," in the film An Inconvenient Truth [5]—the rise in carbon dioxide levels* is so steep, Al Gore [6] uses a mechanical ladder [7] to reach the most recent readings. The graph was featured prominently in a seminal 2001 report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [8] (IPCC) that concluded, for its first time, that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate."</div><div>
</div><div>The film and the IPCC report made the chart famous, but Mann's version [9] (PDF) appeared in the journal Geophysical Research Letters [10]. There, he and his colleagues explained the complex methodology, and the uncertainties, involved in their study; but let's face it, phrases like "multiproxy data network" and "extensive cross-validation experiments" are lost on most of us. "This," Mann says with an upward swoop of the arm, "the public understands." The chart tells "a very simple story."Click to see [11]Watch our video on how we fact-checked the hockey stick graph [11].</div><div>
</div><div>In fact, some complained that it was too simple, glossing over [12] uncertainties in historical climate readings in order to make a more dramatic point [13]. Yet numerous other reconstructions of historical temperature records made since Mann's graph have also shown a dramatic uptick in the 20th century, and a 2006 assessment from the National Academy of Sciences concluded [14] (PDF) that while Mann's methodology wasn't perfect, the story the chart told was accurate.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet global warming skeptics have made the graph exhibit A in their cause. Congressional hearings [15] have focused on it, and it has been the impetus for multiple [16] critical [17] books [18] and blog posts. Skeptics have dismissed the graph [19] as "little more than paleo-phrenology" and claimed that "Mann-made warming is real [20], while man-made warming remains at best a theory, more likely a hypothesis."</div><div>
</div><div>And Mann himself has become a target. Virginia's crusading Republican attorney general [21] has suggested that he may have committed research "fraud." The 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference [22] had a booth where attendees could throw eggs at his picture. There was a flood of hate mail, much of it containing death threats: "Your work is finished. YOU ARE GOING TO HANG SOON!"</div><div>
</div><div>"Climate science has basically been at the receiving end of the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known—that's the bottom line," Mann told me when I visited him at his Penn State office last November. Near his desk, Mann keeps an actual hockey stick, signed by Middlebury College's championship hockey team to show the school's support for his work.</div><div>
</div><div>Things really heated up for Mann in late 2009, when more than 1,000 emails from him and other climate scientists were lifted from a server at the Climatic Research Unit [23] (CRU) of the UK's University of East Anglia, the world's leading research institution focused on climate change. The emails offered a window into the climate-science bunker, with a view of Mann and his fellow researchers growing increasingly defensive. One scientist wrote [24] that he was "tempted to beat the crap out of" a skeptic at the libertarian Cato Institute. Another joked that the way to deal with skeptics was "continuing to publish quality work in quality journals (or calling in a Mafia hit)." Scientists suggested that they would rather destroy data than provide them to their critics. They also discussed using "tricks" in their research, debated how to frame uncertainties in some of their data, and attempted to control access to peer-reviewed journals.</div><div>
</div><div>Click here to see our timeline of the Climategate scandal. [25]Click here to see our timeline of the Climategate scandal [26].</div><div>
</div><div>Within days, the heist—soon dubbed "Climategate [27]"—was all over the news. Glenn Beck called it [28] a "potentially major scandal"; Fox News crowed [29] that the emails "undercut the whole scientific claim for man's impact on global warming." Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) decried [30] (PDF) them as evidence of "scientific fascism."</div><div>
</div><div>The immediate impact on public opinion was dramatic. A poll by Yale and George Mason University [31] (GMU) found that in November 2008, 71 percent of respondents agreed that the planet is warming (PDF). Five weeks after Climategate, only 57 percent believed it. The emails, said a Yale report [32] (PDF), had "a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists."</div><div>
</div><div>IF A SINGLE PERSON CAN BE credited with setting the stage for Climategate, it's Stephen McIntyre, the retired mining consultant behind the popular skeptic blog Climate Audit [33]. Over the past decade, McIntyre has built a reputation for finding methodological errors—some real, some perceived—in climate studies. The Wall Street Journal heralded McIntyre [34] as "global warming's most dangerous apostate."</div><div>
</div><div>Indeed, McIntyre has made goading scientists—particularly Mann—close to a full-time job. Like Mann, McIntyre is genial in interviews, but on his blog, his tone toward the scientists targeted by his audits ranges from inquisitive to openly hostile.</div><div>
</div><div>The 63-year-old squash enthusiast from Toronto made his money in mining. He has also consulted for the Canadian oil and gas exploration company CGX Energy [35]. He says his mining ties don't affect his views on climate change and insists that his prolific blogging on the topic has not benefited him financially—rather, it's taken time away from more profitable business.</div><div>
</div><div>* Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that the graph featured in the film showed temperature rise. It actually shows rise in CO2 levels. We regret the error.</div><div>
</div><div>McIntyre belongs to the school of skeptics known as "lukewarmers"—those who believe the planet is warming and humans are playing a role (see our Field Guide to Climate Change Skeptics [36]), but don't think this is as much of a problem as it has been made out to be.</div><div>
</div><div>"I'm not particularly comfortable with either side of the US debate," McIntyre told me. "There are obviously competent and intelligent people that view it as a serious problem. That doesn't mean that they're right, but it's not a hoax." Nor does he oppose government regulations on principle, as do some of the free-market think tanks that regularly invite him to DC for speaking engagements. "I'm a Canadian," says McIntyre. "I think governments can do things."</div><div>
</div><div>Click here to see our field guide to climate change skeptics. [36]Click here to see our field guide to climate change skeptics [36].</div><div>
</div><div>McIntyre's entre' into the climate debate came with a paper he coauthored with economist Ross McKitrick that critiqued an earlier version of Mann's [37] (PDF) hockey-stick graph. The paper was published in the November 2003 issue of Energy and Environment [38]. It's a publication known for providing a platform to skeptics—which is why, among the trove of hacked emails, there's one from Mann urging [39] colleagues to "dismiss this as [a] stunt, appearing in a so-called 'journal' which is already known to have defied standard practices of peer-review." Mann predicted that "the usual suspects are going to try to peddle this crap."</div><div>
</div><div>Sure enough, McIntyre and McKitrick were soon invited to Washington for a briefing [40] (PDF) arranged by the George C. Marshall Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), both free-market think tanks that have been heavily funded by ExxonMobil and other oil interests. They were also asked to meet with Sen. James Inhofe [41] (R-Okla.), who has called climate change [42] "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."</div><div>
</div><div>The targets of McIntyre's audits were less enthralled. "I wouldn't send him anything," Mann emailed CRU head Phil Jones [43] in February 2004. "I have no idea what he's up to, but you can be sure it falls into the 'no good' category...There is no reason to give them any data, in my opinion, and I think we do so at our own peril!"</div><div>
</div><div>In February 2005, McIntyre and McKitrick published [44] (PDF) another critique of the hockey-stick chart in the more-respected Geophysical Research Letters. They argued, essentially, that the chart underestimates the uncertainties about historical temperatures and relies on proxy data that they believe are "no more informative about the distant past than a table of random numbers."</div><div>
</div><div>McIntyre isn't alone in his skepticism about proxy data—in fact, it's at the heart of the climate debate. Recorded temperature measurements only go back about 160 years [45], so scientists use data from tree rings, ice cores, and coral [46] to reconstruct what the climate was like [47] before that. For two millennia, those data sets align to show swings of about one degree Fahrenheit in either direction. But then, in the 1960s, some tree-ring data diverge [48] (PDF) and suggest declining temperatures—even as actual temperatures show a dramatic rise. No one knows quite why this is; some researchers suggest the trees may actually be showing the stress from human activities. This divergence is one reason that many skeptics argue against using temperature reconstructions in climate change research.</div><div>
</div><div>McIntyre's paper made headlines. A few days after publication, he was featured in a front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal that pitted [49] (PDF) his hockey-stick critique against the whole of global warming science, saying he had "helped to reopen the debate."</div><div>
</div><div>Few scientists will ever get that kind of coverage for their life's work, let alone for a single article on someone else's research. But McIntyre's critique came at a time when those seeking to block action on climate change were on the defensive—many had been pilloried for their ties to industry (PDF [50]) and right-wing think tanks, and public opinion was turning toward action on climate change. At this pivotal moment, reopening the debate was just what the skeptics, and their industry backers, needed. McIntyre and McKitrick were flown to Washington for another briefing with the Marshall Institute and CEI [51] (PDF).</div><div>
</div><div>Congressional conservatives swung into action. Rep. "Smokey" Joe Barton [52] (R-Texas), then the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, launched a formal inquiry into the work of Mann and other climate scientists in June 2005. As part of the inquiry, Barton—who believes acting on global warming is "absolute nonsense [53]" and said in a hearing that "when it's hot, we find shade [54]"—enlisted George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman [55] to produce a report on the hockey stick. (In doing so, Barton eschewed [56] (PDF) the more traditional route of requesting [57] (PDF) a report from the National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences.)</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The Hockey Game</div><div>600 years of temperature data can't be wrong. Or can it?</div><div>
</div><div>MICHAEL MANN'S hockey-stick graph shows average temperatures over the past 1,000 years based on "proxy data" reconstructions from tree rings, ice cores, sediment, coral, and some instrumental data. The last 600 years of Mann's proxy data are shown below in blue. Actual temperatures, starting in the 1850s, are shown in red. (The darker trend lines are based on 40-year averages.) Both sets of data show a sharp temperature spike after the Industrial Revolution and a slight dip in the 1960s followed by a continued rise in recorded temperatures. Other climatologists have done their own studies of historic climate variations, and there is much debate over the fact that some of those studies—specifically those focusing on certain sets of tree-ring data—suggest that modern temperatures are continuing to decline.</div><div>
</div><div>The Hockey Game</div><div>
</div><div>In a slideshow meant to highlight GMU's investigations for Congress (PDF [58]), a Wegman staffer noted that Barton's office warned Wegman's group to expect criticism and told them to have "thick skins." Barton's staff also provided the group with reams of reading material—particularly troubling, considering that none of the statisticians, she said, had "any real expertise in paleoclimate reconstruction." Wegman's group also consulted McIntyre in its evaluation of Mann's study, but it never reached out to Mann.</div><div>
</div><div>When it was released in July 2006, the Wegman report [59] (PDF) essentially agreed with McIntyre, citing statistical problems with the hockey stick and accusing climate scientists of uncritically reinforcing each other's work. Years later, Barton [60] and other skeptics [61] still tout the document as proof that the hockey stick is broken (even though GMU is currently investigating allegations that Wegman [62] may have lifted portions of the report from a previously published book).</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, about five months after Barton commissioned Wegman for the report, the House Committee on Science asked [63] (PDF) the National Academy of Sciences to prepare a formal report on the hockey stick. The review concluded [64] (PDF) that while some uncertainties "have been underestimated," there was nevertheless "an array of evidence" supporting the main conclusion of Mann's work.</div><div>
</div><div> Clarification: The original Wall Street Journal article referred to a report by researcher Hans von Storch, not McIntyre’s specifically: "Reports such as [von Storch's] helped to reopen the debate, even to outsiders."</div><div>
</div><div>The fights over the hockey stick eventually faded from the headlines, but the data war raged on. McIntyre turned his attention to pursuing the data that climate scientists had drawn from to conclude that the planet is drastically warming. He was particularly interested in East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, keepers of one of the most complete sets of temperature records in the world. He asked the unit for raw data, but was rebuffed. "If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone," CRU head Phil Jones wrote to Mann [65] in February 2005. He believed that if McIntyre found an error, no matter how minor, the skeptics would have a field day.</div><div>
</div><div>Jones' fears were not off-base. In August 2007, McIntyre discovered an error [66] in NASA's calculation of how the average temperature for a given year varies from the historical average: US temperatures between 2000 and 2006 had been reported [67] (PDF) as roughly a sixth of a degree higher than they actually were. Separately, NASA found during its regular [68] updating that 1934 had pulled slightly ahead of 1998 as the hottest year on record to that point (2005 and 2010 [69] have since superseded them). The story was all over the right-wing talk circuit. "The man-made global warming is inside NASA," Rush Limbaugh declared [70]. "The man-made global warming is in the scientific community with false data."</div><div>
</div><div>McIntyre and others kept at it. In 2008, he sought raw data and email correspondence from Benjamin Santer [71], a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [72]. Santer refused, arguing that the data were already publicly available. In a letter to a fellow scientist he vented that [73] the time-consuming request was part of "a calculated strategy to divert my attention and focus away from research." He called McIntyre "the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science," continuing, "We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an 'audit' by Steven [sic] McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues."</div><div>
</div><div>In September 2009, RealClimate [74], a blog launched by Mann and other scientists to fight back against skeptics, weighed in. Several of the blog's contributors drafted a public statement [75] about what they saw as a pattern: "An unverified accusation of malfeasance is made based on nothing, and it is instantly 'telegraphed' across the denial-o-sphere while being embellished along the way to apply to anything 'hockey-stick' shaped and any and all scientists, even those not even tangentially related. The usual suspects become hysterical with glee that finally the 'hoax' has been revealed and congratulations are handed out all round...Net effect on lay people? Confusion. Net effect on science? Zip."</div><div>Emails show scientists lashing out against McIntyre as a "bozo" and "a playground bully." "I think it was a mistake for them to in effect adopt a fatwa against Climate Audit," says McIntyre.</div><div>
</div><div>So how much of a nuisance was McIntyre? Consider his attempts to procure the crucial global temperature data sets that are jointly held by the CRU and the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre [76]. McIntyre dogged the CRU for access to them for years, a campaign that escalated over the course of 2009. The CRU repeatedly turned down these requests, arguing that granting them would violate agreements over data its partners had collected. Then, in June 2009, McIntyre found out that the CRU had provided the very information he had been requesting to a scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology [77]. In response, McIntyre penned [78] an angry screed on Climate Audit. In just the last week of July 2009, CRU received [79] 58 FOIA requests from McIntyre and others [80] (PDF) affiliated with Climate Audit. CRU head Phil Jones argued that responding to these requests was creating an unmanageable burden.</div><div>
</div><div>Emails from this period show the scientists lashing out against McIntyre. He is referred to as a "bozo [81]" and "a playground bully [82]." McIntyre clearly gets a rise out of irking scientists, whom he frequently refers to as "the Team [83]"—another play on the hockey-stick metaphor. He likes to "tease these guys and kind of make fun of them," he says, and their evident aggravation at his inquiries only egged him on. "I think it was a mistake for them to in effect adopt a fatwa against Climate Audit," says McIntyre.</div><div>
</div><div>McIntyre's latest requests for both the raw CRU data and the email correspondence between scientists about those data were formally denied on November 13, 2009. Four days later, a massive bundle of files named FOIA.zip was anonymously posted on several prominent skeptic blogs and RealClimate. In it were years' worth of the climate scientists' email exchanges. McIntyre says he doesn't know who posted the file but adds that the timing is one of several "really strange coincidences" surrounding the emails, "if it is a coincidence." It was also, notably, just days before the start of the Copenhagen climate talks, which many hoped would result in a new global deal for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>SOMETIME ON OR AFTER November 12, more than 1,000 emails between climate scientists and 3,587 other documents, including raw data and computer code, were copied from the CRU server. The files were posted online, with duplicates posted to several other servers around the world. At 7:24 a.m. EST [84], a link to the files appeared in a comment [85] on McIntyre's Climate Audit.</div><div>
</div><div>Around 7:30 a.m. that day, Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA and cofounder with Mann of RealClimate, awoke to find his site disabled. He attempted to log in and failed. When he finally got in as the administrator, he found that the files had been uploaded to the site. At that very moment, the hacker was using a ghost administrator account to try to create a blog post that linked to the files and quoted some portions of the emails.</div><div>
</div><div>Schmidt recalls, "I was going, 'What's this? Oh God, this is some emails. I wrote some of these emails.'" Schmidt emailed Mann, Jones, and other scientists whose emails were included.</div><div>
</div><div>That same evening, a comment on Watts Up With That? [86] (WUWT)—a prominent skeptic blog run by Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist—linked to the files posted on a Russian file transfer protocol (FTP) site. "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps," read the comment. Charles Rotter, who moderates the site, did not approve the comment for public view, but he did download the files in order to read them himself.</div><div>
</div><div>Next, Rotter called his housemate, Steven Mosher. Mosher, who works in marketing in San Francisco, is a frequent contributor to Climate Audit, WUWT, and other skeptic blogs. He is a self-described "data libertarian" and lukewarmer who has agitated for increased access to the data and computer codes that climate scientists use. Mosher says Rotter and Watts requested that he take a look at the files and evaluate whether they were real before posting them. "We didn't know if they were a Trojan horse, a hoax, a trap, or the real deal," says Mosher.</div><div>One post included a list of 20 juicy teasers from the emails—among them a quote referring to a document as "dirty laundry" and an outside researcher asking for a chapter of a report by a UEA scientist to be "beefed up."</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, the files were still being posted elsewhere. At 9:57 p.m., a commenter under the handle "FOIA" posted on the skeptic blog Air Vent [87] linking to the Russian FTP. This post included a list of 20 juicy teasers from the emails—among them a quote from Mann referring to a document as "dirty laundry" and an outside researcher asking for a chapter of a report by a UEA scientist to be "beefed up." The anonymous poster also sent a follow-up comment to WUWT asking why the original comment hadn't yet been published. Mosher says the IP address was traced to a server in Saudi Arabia; the poster was smart enough to cover the trail.</div><div>
</div><div>Mosher realized that several of the emails appeared to be from McIntyre to climate scientists, so late that night he called McIntyre, who confirmed that the emails were genuine. Mosher was still parsing the files two days later when he learned that they had already been posted on the Air Vent. He began submitting snippets of the emails to another skeptic blog called The Blackboard [88].</div><div>
</div><div>"You get to see somebody with the name of Phil Jones say that he would rather destroy the CRU data than release it to McIntyre," Mosher wrote. "And you get to see what they really say behind the curtain...you get to see how they 'shape' the news, how they struggled between telling the truth and making policy makers happy." As a writer onAndrew Breitbart's conservative news site Big Journalism [89] would later put it, Mosher "is to Climategate what Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate. He was just the right person, with just the right influence and just the right expertise to be at the heart of the promulgation of the files."</div><div>
</div><div>Watts also helped to spread the word. He was returning from a conference in Brussels on November 19 when he logged on to his blog from Dulles International Airport and posted his first piece [86] about the files, citing the most damning emails: In one, CRU's Jones notes [90] the death of a skeptic as "cheering news"; in another, Jones refers to scientists [91] using a "trick" to "hide the decline" in temperatures that tree-ring data showed beginning in the 1960s. (The "trick"—substituting recorded temperature data when proxy data become unreliable—isn't intended to deceive; it's an acceptable practice in paleoclimatology, since most proxy data sets end around the 1980s, and recorded temperatures are more reliable, anyway.)</div><div>
</div><div>"It appears that the proverbial Climate Science Cat is out of the bag," wrote Watts. He said that he had alerted two of the most vocal deniers in the US: the CEI's Christopher Horner and Marc Morano, a former staffer for Sen. Inhofe. Morano is also the editor of Climate Depot [92], a Drudge Report-like clearinghouse for climate skeptics run by the oil-funded think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow [93]. Blogger Terry Hurlbut posted [94] excerpts of the emails on a conservative news site, the Examiner.</div><div>Even as the buzz around the emails kept building, scientists tried to dismiss them as a non-story. By the time they reacted, the story was entering the news bloodstream.</div><div>
</div><div>Even as the buzz around the emails kept building, scientists tried to dismiss them as a non-story. Jones only acknowledged the theft two days after the emails became public, in an interview with the New Zealand magazine Investigate [95]. He said he wasn't sure what exactly was in the hacked data, and noted that the university had not even alerted the police.</div><div>
</div><div>By the time the scientists finally reacted, the story was entering the news bloodstream. On the evening of November 19, CEI's Horner first wrote about it [20] on theNational Review's website, calling it the "blue-dress moment" for climate change—alluding to the infamous evidence of Bill Clinton's sexual exploits. That same day, Mosher sent a Facebook message to New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, flagging the emails. Revkin wrote about them [96] the next day, November 20, noting that they were "causing a stir among global warming skeptics."</div><div>
</div><div>By that time, NewsBusters [97], a site devoted to "exposing and combating liberal media bias," ran a story claiming that the documents "appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists." Fox News' site was running [98] the headline "Climate Skeptics See 'Smoking Gun' in Researchers' Leaked E-Mails." On November 21, the Washington Post quoted CEI's Myron Ebell [99], a well-known skeptic. "It is clear that some of the 'world's leading climate scientists,' as they are always described, are more dedicated to promoting the alarmist political agenda than in scientific research," he said. "Some of the e-mails that I have read are blatant displays of personal pettiness, unethical conniving, and twisting the science to support their political position."</div><div>
</div><div>By December 1, the flap had even made The Daily Show [100]. "Poor Al Gore," mocked Jon Stewart. "Global warming completely debunked via the very internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!"</div><div>
</div><div>Things didn't get much better for climate scientists when glaciologists pointed out an embarrassing error [101] in the 2007 IPCC report—a thinly sourced and false claim [102] that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. (True, 90 percent of the world's glaciers are receding, but the Himalayas aren't expected to be ice-free for several hundred years.) The IPCC acknowledged [103] (PDF) in a statement that the "well-established standards of evidence...were not applied properly." That Glaciergate coincided so closely with Climategate was a happy coincidence for skeptics, who used it as further evidence of the unreliability of climate science.</div><div>
</div><div>By the end of December, the Copenhagen climate talks had ended in a frustrating standoff [104] between the US and China [105], with no major agreements about worldwide greenhouse gas regulations.</div><div>
</div><div>Many of the think tanks that seized upon the scandal in weeks that followed were the same anti-regulation, oil-coated outlets that have been promoting climate change denial for years. The Cato Institute, which has received funding from oil giants Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, was a key player—Cato senior fellow Patrick Michaels got prime real estate in the New York Times [96], on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal [106], and on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 [107]. In a January 2010 newsletter, Cato boasted [108] that its senior fellow was at the "center of the 'Climategate' controversy."</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, CEI, which has also enjoyed Koch and ExxonMobil funding, trotted out Horner at every opportunity: In May 2010, he wrote about what he called "green thuggery" at the National Review's website. In July 2010, Michaels was back [109] in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages accusing scientists of "ugly pressure tactics" and "professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data."</div><div>
</div><div>The story unleashed darker forces, as well. Mann's inbox was flooded with messages, the most civil of which called him a "fraud." Some contained death threats. Images of Mann and other scientists were posted on neo-Nazi sites. The CRU's Jones temporarily stepped down from his post; he later said he contemplated suicide.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>Don't Believe the Hype?</div><div>
</div><div>AMERICAN SKEPTICISM about the danger of global warming was already on the rise when Climategate hit the news in 2009, but the story made independents (and some Democrats) far more likely to answer yes to the question: Do the media exaggerate the seriousness of climate change?</div><div>
</div><div>Republican, Democrats, Independents</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, the question of who stole the emails and released them has never been answered. Mosher and other climate skeptics maintain that it was likely an inside job, carried out by someone at the University of East Anglia who wanted problematic science exposed. The CRU, on the other hand, maintains that it was the work of someone outside of the university—a "very professional job," says Trevor Davies [110], pro-vice chancellor for research at East Anglia and the former head of the CRU.</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, the university hasn't disclosed the evidence for its assertion, nor has the Norfolk Constabulary [111], the local police department responsible for the official ongoing investigation. McIntyre says British counterterrorism officers have contacted him and other bloggers about the case, but as far as he knows, nothing has ever come of the inquiry.</div><div>
</div><div>It's clear that the hacker was at least familiar with the climate-science debate; he knew enough to search through the hacked emails using keywords like "Mann," "hockey stick," and "Phil Jones" and to sort them accordingly. A source close to the CRU explains that the unit's security wasn't very tight—its server is separate from the rest of the university's.</div><div>
</div><div>That said, the cybersecurity experts I talked to noted that a hack like this would have required some sophisticated skills. Once the hacker breached the server, he still would have had to find his way into the system administrator's account, a feat that could have required special software to access the password. Then, in order to remain anonymous when posting the emails online, he would have had to scan the internet for nonsecure servers to work from—this would have allowed him to cover his own IP address. The hacker also used servers in multiple countries, making it even more difficult to trace his whereabouts.</div><div>
</div><div>It later became clear that CRU was not the only target [112]. In the fall of 2009, unknown parties posing as network technicians attempted to break into the office of a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. There were also attempts to gain access to servers at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. According to a source within the institution, there were also unsuccessful attempts to breach the server at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. A US diplomatic cable that WikiLeaks [113] released in late 2010 also revealed "evidence of an attempt to gain unauthorized entry to computer systems" belonging to the State Department's climate bureau in 2009. The cable warned that "as negotiations on the subject of climate change continue, it is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist."</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>SO DID THE SCIENTISTS DO something more diabolical than gripe about critics and fret over how their research would be interpreted? Not according to seven separate inquiries on the subject, each of which found that the researchers' work was not in question—though several concluded that their behavior was. An independent probe organized by the University of East Anglia [114] (PDF) found that some had turned down "reasonable requests for information" and had, at times, been "unhelpful and defensive." It noted "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness."</div><div>
</div><div>But none of the exonerations mattered: The scientists had lost control of the narrative. The percentage of people who believe that the world is warming has fallen 14 points from its 2008 high, according to polling [32] (PDF). Gallup's annual poll [115] in 2010 found that 48 percent of Americans said they believe that fears of global warming "are generally exaggerated"—the highest figure since pollsters began asking that question in 1997.</div><div>
</div><div>Most significant, however, has been the long-term hardening of the political divide on the issue. In 1997, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who believed in climate change was nearly the same—47 percent and 46 percent, respectively. By March 2010, 66 percent of Democrats and only 31 percent of Republicans agreed that global warming was already occurring. Half of the new House GOP members [116] flatly deny that the planet is warming, and only four say [117] they accept the science of climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the new head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform [118] (PDF), last fall outlined plans to hold hearings on the "Politicization of Science," focused largely on Climategate. Rep. Ralph Hall [119] (R-Texas), the new chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has already said that he plans to look into "the global warming or global freezing." The vice chairman of the same committee, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), has accused climate scientists of a "massive international scientific fraud [120] (PDF)." Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, has subpoenaed [121] (PDF) records from Mann's time at the University of Virginia in an attempt to prove that he committed "fraud." Congressional Republicans are also using Climategate as fodder [122] in their fight to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.</div><div>
</div><div>But climate scientists don't tend to be adept at politics, and most of them didn't enter the field expecting to land in the middle of a controversy over the future of industrial society. Accustomed to the slow-moving peer-review process, they were utterly unprepared to deal with the real-time, 24/7 news circus.</div><div>
</div><div>The press gave the think tanks and pundits a bully pulpit in the form of airtime and headlines—without bothering to dig into the hacked emails and figure out what the fuss was about. While journalists were quick to quote email snippets that were causing a ruckus, it wasn't until December 12—nearly a month after the initial release—that a team of Associated Press reporters finally parsed [23] the entire set of emails and published a more accurate picture of their contents.</div><div>
</div><div>Still, you can't completely blame journalists, says Tom Rosenstiel [123], director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism [124]. "That's the typical arc of any story," he says. "Allegations and accusations can move more quickly through the media ecosystem than sorting out what's really true." What's more, for years, the press had become accustomed to the refrain that the "science is settled" on global warming, and that it was now time to figure out how to deal with it. The "science is settled" mantra [125] downplayed the many uncertainties that remain about the impacts and implications of climate change and the hard-fought battles over every conclusion. So when the debates about data were laid bare, the scandal was much easier to report than the science.</div><div>"Science was revealed for what it actually is, which is a messy process that involves a lot of disputes and actual human beings."</div><div>
</div><div>Attempting to figure out what we don't yet understand is the pursuit of science—and as the emails showed, it's not always pretty. "Science was revealed for what it actually is, which is a messy process that involves a lot of disputes and actual human beings," says the Times' Revkin. The problem is that it takes a lot of complicated studies to show that the planet is warming due to human actions—but all that contrarians have to do to sustain inaction is create doubt. "It's asymmetric warfare," says Revkin.</div><div>
</div><div>If something good came of Climategate, says Mann, it's the realization that climate scientists need a better communication and crisis-management strategy. To that end, a trio of scientists last fall formed the Climate Science Rapid Response Team [126], an effort to get climate researchers more directly engaged with the public by linking experts with reporters. "We have to accept much of the blame," says Scott Mandia [127], a professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College and co-coordinator of the project. "It's not good enough to publish information in journals and expect it to get out." Nor, he says, can scientists leave the task of public communication—and of catching all the flak—to a small handful of colleagues.</div><div>
</div><div>The communications work will only get harder in the years to come. The next report from the IPCC [128], due out in 2013, is expected to include even more urgent warnings than the last edition, based on the current acceleration of climate change. And with the help of new sophisticated models for actual climate processes, scientists will attempt to provide a more nuanced and realistic picture of what's to come, writes Kevin Trenberth [129], head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research [130], in a recent Nature article [131] (PDF). But he also warns that the report could raise more questions than it answers: "[W]hile our knowledge of certain factors does increase, so does our understanding of factors we previously did not account for or even recognize." At the leading edge of climate science, he writes, displaying the limits and uncertainties of science so publicly is not without risk, so the IPCC should proceed with caution when sounding the alarm bells.</div><div>
</div><div>"In other disciplines, this might not matter so much, but what to do about climate change is a high-profile, politically charged issue involving winners and losers, and such results can be misused," Trenberth adds. "In fact—to offer one more prediction—I expect that they will be."</div><div>Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/history-of-climategate</div><div>
</div><div>Links:</div><div>[1] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/11/climategate-20-will-media-do-its-job-time</div><div>[2] http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney</div><div>[3] http://motherjones.com/environment/2005/04/man-behind-hockey-stick</div><div>[4] http://www.meteo.psu.edu/_{mann/Mann/cv/cv_pdf.pdf</div><div>[5}] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/</div><div>[6] http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/11/can-we-save-planet-and-rescue-economy-same-time</div><div>[7] http://i43.tinypic.com/15g4jt0.jpg</div><div>[8] http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch1s1-6.html</div><div>[9] https://motherjones.com/files/11_mann_geophysical_rsch_letters_study_1999.pdf</div><div>[10] http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/</div><div>[11] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/04/watch-our-hockey-stick-adventure</div><div>[12] http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba478</div><div>[13] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/hockey-stick-graph-ipcc-report</div><div>[14] https://motherjones.com/files/21_nrcreport.pdf</div><div>[15] http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/07272006hearing2001/hearing.htm</div><div>[16] http://www.stacey-international.co.uk/v1/site/product_rpt.asp?Catid=329&catname=</div><div>[17] http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^{DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0742549224&thepassedurl=[thepassedurl]</div><div>[18}] http://www.regnery.com/books/redhotlies.html</div><div>[19] http://climateaudit.org/2010/05/02/cuccinelli-v-mann/</div><div>[20] http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/14827/mann-made-warming-confirmed/chris-horner</div><div>[21] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/10/cuccinellis-attack-climate-science-continues</div><div>[22] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpgYNsB3x38</div><div>[23] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34392959/ns/us_news-environment/</div><div>[24] http://www.climate-gate.org/email.php?eid=1045</div><div>[25] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/climategate-timeline</div><div>[26] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/03/climategate-anatomy-scandal</div><div>[27] http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/04/climategate-officially-fake-scandal</div><div>[28] http://mediamatters.org/research/200911230052</div><div>[29] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXBo20oztXk&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL</div><div>[30] http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/pdfs/cqtranscript_dec2houseclimatehearing.pdf</div><div>[31] http://environment.yale.edu/uploads/AmericansGlobalWarmingBeliefs2010.pdf</div><div>[32] http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Climategate_Opinion_and_Loss_of_Trust_1.pdf</div><div>[33] http://climateaudit.org/</div><div>[34] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574496850939846712.html?mod=googlenews_wsj</div><div>[35] http://cgxenergy.ca/</div><div>[36] http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/field-guide-climate-change-skeptics</div><div>[37] http://www.uoguelph.ca/_{rmckitri/research/MM03.pdf</div><div>[38}] http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/p240t311h5u5/?p=2da5fe779751430b8a764c4a8e926f96p=44</div><div>[39] http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=376</div><div>[40] http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/188.pdf</div><div>[41] http://rossmckitrick.weebly.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/db_response.pdf</div><div>[42] http://inhofe.senate.gov/pressreleases/climateupdate.htm</div><div>[43] http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=400</div><div>[44] http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl-2005.pdf</div><div>[45] http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt</div><div>[46] http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/</div><div>[47] http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/iceagebook/history_of_climate.html</div><div>[48] https://motherjones.com/files/118_darrigo_etal.pdf</div><div>[49] http://www.climateaudit.info/pdf/news/wsj.2005.pdf</div><div>[50] http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/hearings/2007/oversight/28mar/mccarthy_testimony.pdf</div><div>[51] http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/316.pdf</div><div>[52] http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/11/joe-barton-wegman-report</div><div>[53] http://www.eenews.net/tv/video_guide/512?page=59&sort_type=date</div><div>[54] http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/news/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=6912</div><div>[55] http://statistics.gmu.edu/people_pages/wegman.html</div><div>[56] http://www.realclimate.org/Boehlert_letter_to_Barton.pdf</div><div>[57] https://motherjones.com/files/nrc_studycommitteprocess_pamphlet.pdf</div><div>[58] http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/said-talksept7.pdf</div><div>[59] http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf</div><div>[60] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/11/AR2010101105679.html</div><div>[61] http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/gop-climate-investigations-issa-barton-sensenbrenner</div><div>[62] http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-21-climate-report-questioned_N.htm</div><div>[63] http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/boehlert_2005.pdf</div><div>[64] http://www.uoguelph.ca/_{rmckitri/research/NRCreport.pdf</div><div>[65}] http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt</div><div>[66] http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/06/quantifying-the-hansen-y2k-error/</div><div>[67] http://www.columbia.edu/_{jeh1/distro_LightUpstairs_70810.pdf</div><div>[68}] http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/</div><div>[69] http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110112_globalstats.html</div><div>[70] http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_080907/content/01125106.guest.html</div><div>[71] http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/about/staff/Santer/index.php</div><div>[72] https://www.llnl.gov/</div><div>[73] http://assassinationresearch.com/climategate/1/FOIA/mail/1226451442.txt</div><div>[74] http://www.realclimate.org/</div><div>[75] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/</div><div>[76] http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/</div><div>[77] http://webster.eas.gatech.edu/</div><div>[78] http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/24/cru-refuses-data-once-again/</div><div>[79] http://www.uea.ac.uk/is/foi/disclosure/research/2009_July</div><div>[80] http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090812/pdf/460787a.pdf</div><div>[81] http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=683&filename=1146062963.txt</div><div>[82] http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=935&filename=1226456830.txt</div><div>[83] http://climateaudit.org/?s=%22the+team%22</div><div>[84] http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/12/the-mosher-timeline/</div><div>[85] http://climateaudit.org/2009/11/16/luckman-at-the-canadian-society-for-petroleum-geologists/#comment-201848</div><div>[86] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/19/one-year-ago-today-breaking-news-story-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/</div><div>[87] http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/open-letter/#comment-11917</div><div>[88] http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/real-files-or-fake/</div><div>[89] http://bigjournalism.com/pcourrielche/2010/01/12/peer-to-peer-review-part-iii-how-climategate-marks-the-maturing-of-a-new-science-movement/#more-2402</div><div>[90] http://www.climate-gate.org/email.php?eid=393&s=kwcheering%20news</div><div>[91] http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=154</div><div>[92] http://www.climatedepot.com/</div><div>[93] http://www.cfact.org/s.asp?tag=climate%20depot</div><div>[94] http://www.examiner.com/essex-county-conservative-in-newark/hadley-cru-hacked-with-release-of-hundreds-of-docs-and-emails</div><div>[95] http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/11/hadleycru-says-leaked-data-is-real.html</div><div>[96] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html</div><div>[97] http://newsbusters.org/</div><div>[98] http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2009/11/21/climate-skeptics-smoking-gun-researchers-leaked-e-mails/</div><div>[99] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112004093.html?hpid=sec-nation</div><div>[100] http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-1-2009/scientists-hide-global-warming-data</div><div>[101] http://www.physorg.com/news183201942.html</div><div>[102] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/20/himalayan-glaciers-melt-claims-false-ipcc</div><div>[103] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/himalaya-statement-20january2010.pdf</div><div>[104] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/science/earth/15climate.html</div><div>[105] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/17/us-china-deadlock-copenhagen/</div><div>[106] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398304574598230426037244.html</div><div>[107] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffgj6Deni_Y</div><div>[108] http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v32n1/cpr32n1-4.html</div><div>[109] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704075604575356611173414140.html</div><div>[110] http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/people/facstaff/daviest</div><div>[111] http://www.norfolk.police.uk/aboutus.aspx</div><div>[112] http:// https://motherjones.com/files/136_national_post_dec_4_2009_a8.pdf</div><div>[113] http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2010/12/wikileaks_cable_shows_spear-ph.php</div><div>[114] http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf</div><div>[115] http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/Americans-Global-Warming-Concerns-Continue-Drop.aspx</div><div>[116] http://thinkprogress.org/2010/11/03/gop-frosh-class/</div><div>[117] http://www.grist.org/article/2010-11-03-half-of-gop-caucus-are-climate-zombies</div><div>[118] http://motherjones.com/files/9-22-10_ogr_report-a_constitutional_obligation-congressional_oversight_of_the_executive_branch.pdf</div><div>[119] http://dyn.politico.com/members/forums/thread.cfm?catid=22&subcatid=76&threadid=4835977&adv=1</div><div>[120] https://motherjones.com/files/172_administrationsviewonstateofclimatescience.pdf</div><div>[121] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/New%20Mann%20CID.PDF</div><div>[122] http://washingtonindependent.com/69480/citing-climategate-gop-leaders-call-on-epa-to-withdraw-endangerment-finding</div><div>[123] http://www.journalism.org/about_pej/staff</div><div>[124] http://www.journalism.org/</div><div>[125] http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/climate_change_Schlesinge.htm</div><div>[126] http://www.climaterapidresponse.org/about.php</div><div>[127] http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/</div><div>[128] http://www.ipcc.ch/activities/activities.shtml</div><div>[129] http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html</div><div>[130] http://ncar.ucar.edu/about-ncar</div><div>[131] http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1002/pdf/climate.2010.06.pdf</div><div>
</div><div>url and images gone</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.motherjones.com/print/106101</div><div>
</div><div>---</div><div>2nd try // durban; again press does not come off well:</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>To read Kate Sheppard's story on the first Climategate scandal, click here.</div><div>
</div><div>The new round of hacked emails from climate scientists floating around the internet hasn't generated the same buzz as the last iteration—at least not yet. But in certain circles, it's playing out much like the first batch of emails did in 2009. In addition to the tranche of emails, the poster included a list of "greatest hits"—short quotes from the emails taken out of their context that are intended to paint scientists as scheming or lying. The entire batch was quickly posted in searchable format on another site.</div><div>
</div><div>As with the first "Climategate," a link to the emails was first noticed on several skeptic blogs, to which their commenters have responded with glee.&nbsp; Climate Depot, the denial site run by Marc Morano, quickly jumped all over it, boasting headlines claiming the emails confirm a "pattern of deception and collusion by alarmists" and a comic that that reads "Same cast, same story, same secrets … Will they survive this time?" Morano's page is also touted over on the National Review's Planet Gore blog, along with a bunch of other coverage of "Climategate 2.0."</div><div>
</div><div>It's since also traveled up line to conservative commentators at the UK's Telegraph and Hot Air. And of course, it's getting covered at Fox News, which declared that the emails were "certainly eye-opening" before listing some of the quotes selected by the original poster.</div><div>
</div><div>More interesting to me is whether mainstream journalists will tread more cautiously this time than they did last in covering the emails. In 2009, most reporters just ignored it, and then, when they did bother writing about it, used the out-of-context quotes without taking the time to read the entire exchange or understand the science discussed therein. So, has the press done better this time? Not quite.</div><div>
</div><div>ABC News just rehashed a bunch of he-said, she-said about it, rather than actually reporting. Media Matters took several reporters to task for unquestioningly repeating the out-of-context lines. That includes the Washington Post's story, which mentions an email from Peter Thorne, a scientist now with NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. Thorne expressed concern about the science behind a portion of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on temperatures in the lower atmosphere. The Post's original story online Tuesday did not mention that the email is from February 2005 and referred to an early draft of the IPCC report, nor that the final version of that report was changed to reflect Thorne's feedback when it was released in 2007. (I sent an email to Thorne to get more context on the exchange and its resolution, but got an out-of-office message from him.) The Post did correct the print story to include the dates, but the piece still quotes Morano and Congressional climate skeptic Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) gloating over the fact this proves scientists are all a bunch of liars who can't be trusted.</div><div>
</div><div>The Associated Press story on the new emails was particularly atrocious, noting that they "threatened to cause similar embarrassment" to the 2009 version which "caught prominent scientists stonewalling skeptics and attacking opponents in vitriolic terms." A longer version of that story that has appeared online also states that, while the reporter hadn't read the full emails, "the excerpts appeared to show climate scientists talking in conspiratorial tones about ways to promote their agenda and freeze out those they disagree with."</div><div>
</div><div>The New York Times piece dinged scientists for "catty remarks" and included a quote from the well-known Competitive Enterprise Institute skeptic Myron Ebellclaiming that these emails are further proof that scientists "engaged in a conspiracy to provide a scientifically misleading assessment." But at least the Times bothered to try to learn the context for some of the emails and talk to the scientists involved, and notes the numerous exonerations of the science and scientists following the first release.</div><div>
</div><div>The Guardian probably did the best job, making it clear that the quotes are "cherry-picked." But like the first go-around, a lot of the coverage falls back on the "scientists say this … but skeptics say this" model of coverage that the press is so happy to follow, rather than actual reporting. We'll be following the story as it continues to develop. But given the fact that the subject of climate change is getting less coverage in general these days, I'm guessing it won't get the traction it did two years ago.http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/11/climategate-20-will-media-do-its-job-time</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>greenpeace 2010 on koch involvment: Case Study 1:</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;The Koch-funded “ClimateGate” Echo Chamber</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>In November 2009, anonymous hackers illegally obtained and disseminated thousands of personal</div><div>emails from climate scientists housed on the server of the University of East Anglia. The emails</div><div>spanned 13 years of correspondence and a handful of selected emails were taken out of context</div><div>by a number of climate-denier organizations. These organizations, many funded by Koch, claim the</div><div>emails prove a “conspiracy” of scientists and cast doubt on the scientific consensus on humancaused</div><div>climate change.</div><div>This incident, dubbed “ClimateGate” by climate-denier groups, has been distorted and repeated</div><div>many times by conservative media and blogs since late November 2009. Twenty organizations,</div><div>roughly half of the Koch-funded groups profiled in this report, have contributed to the “ClimateGate"</div><div>echo chamber. Among the most vocal groups are organizations that received over $1,000,000 from</div><div>Koch foundations since 2005, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, and the</div><div>Cato Institute.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>1) Americans For Prosperity (received over $5 million from Koch since 2005) hosted a live webcast</div><div>from Copenhagen6 on Dec 9th as part of their “Hot Air Tour,” using the “ClimateGate”</div><div>emails as a reason to prevent passage of any progressive global warming policy. During</div><div>the webcast, Steve Lonegan, AFP's New Jersey Director, said "ClimateGate” could have</div><div>uncovered “the biggest hoax our world has ever seen” and vowed not to allow any climate</div><div>bill to pass the US Senate. Several members of the Copenhagen youth delegation crashed</div><div>the AFP event and were angrily called “Hitler Youth” by AFP guest speaker and well known</div><div>climate denier Lord Christopher Monckton. In addition to the Copenhagen webcast, AFP</div><div>mentions "ClimateGate” in many7 blog8 posts, including in their protest of the Environmental</div><div>Protection Agency CO2 regulations, known as the endangerment finding.9</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>2) The Heritage Foundation (received over $1 million from Koch since 2005) has posted</div><div>
</div><div>several articles on its website regarding “ClimateGate.” The blogs run the gamut of possible</div><div>climate-denier angles on the incident, ranging from conspiracy accusations10, to a history of</div><div>imagined climate scandals11, to effects on world politics12, to supposed negative economic</div><div>consequences from climate legislation.13</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>3) The Cato Institute (received over $1 million in grants from Koch since 2005) is the frontgroup</div><div>for climate-denier Patrick Michaels14, who has been a vocal spokesperson regarding</div><div>“ClimateGate”. Within two weeks following the email breach at East Anglia University,</div><div>Patrick Michaels had appeared in over twenty media interviews15 on shows including CNN’s</div><div>Anderson Cooper 360, NBC’s Nightly News, FOX’s Fox & Friends, C-SPAN’s Washington</div><div>Journal, and BBC’s Have Your Say. Michaels, taking one line of an illegally-obtained email out</div><div>of context, has claimed the scientists have committed a “capital crime”16 and their actions are</div><div>“akin to filtering what goes in the bible.”17</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers</div><div></div><div>http://www.grist.org/climate-skeptics/2011-02-28-what-we-have-and-havent-learned-from-climategate</div><div>what we have and haven'?t learned from Climategate</div><div>
</div><div>by David Roberts</div><div>
</div><div>28 Feb 2011 2:29 PM</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>I wrote about the "Climategate" controversy (over emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) once, which is about what it warranted.</div><div>
</div><div>My silent protest had no effect whatsoever, of course, and the story followed a depressingly familiar trajectory: hyped relentlessly by right-wing media, bullied into the mainstream press as he-said she-said, and later, long after the damage is done, revealed as utterly bereft of substance. It's a familiar script for climate faux controversies, though this one played out on a slightly grander scale.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Investigations galore</div><div>
</div><div>Consider that there have now been five, count 'em five, inquiries into the matter. Penn State established an independent inquiry into the accusations against scientist Michael Mann and found "no credible evidence" [PDF] of improper research conduct. A British government investigation run by the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee found that while the CRU scientists could have been more transparent and responsive to freedom-of-information requests, there was no evidence of scientific misconduct. The U.K.'s Royal Society (its equivalent of the National Academies) ran an investigation that found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice." The University of East Anglia appointed respected civil servant Sir Muir Russell to run an exhaustive, six-month independent inquiry; he concluded that "the honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt ... We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."</div><div>
</div><div>All those results are suggestive, but let's face it, they're mostly ... British. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) wanted an American investigation of all the American scientists involved in these purported dirty deeds. So he asked the Department of Commerce's inspector general to get to the bottom of it. On Feb. 18, the results of that investigation were released. "In our review of the CRU emails," the IG's office said in its letter to Inhofe [PDF], "we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data ... or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures." (Oddly, you'll find no mention of this central result in Inhofe's tortured public response.)</div><div>
</div><div>Whatever legitimate issues there may be about the responsiveness or transparency of this particular group of scientists, there was nothing in this controversy -- nothing -- that cast even the slightest doubt on the basic findings of climate science. Yet it became a kind of stain on the public image of climate scientists. How did that happen?</div><div>
</div><div>Smooth criminals</div><div>
</div><div>You don't hear about it much in the news coverage, but recall, the story began with a crime. Hackers broke into the East Anglia email system and stole emails and documents, an illegal invasion of privacy. Yet according to The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel, the emails "found their way to the internet." In ABC science correspondent Ned Potter's telling, the emails "became public." The New York Times' Andy Revkin says they were "extracted from computers."</div><div>
</div><div>None of those phrasings are wrong, per se, but all pass rather lightly over the fact that some actual person or persons put them on the internet, made them public, extractedthem from the computers. Someone hacked in, collected emails, sifted through and selected those that could be most damning, organized them, and timed the release for maximum impact, just before the Copenhagen climate talks. Said person or persons remain uncaught, uncharged, and unprosecuted. There have since been attempted break-ins at other climate research institutions.</div><div>
</div><div>If step one was crime, step two was character assassination. When the emails were released, they were combed over by skeptic blogs and right-wing media, who collected sentences, phrases, even individual terms that, when stripped of all context, create the worst possible impression. Altogether the whole thing was as carefully staged as any modern-day political attack ad.</div><div>
</div><div>Yet when the "scandal" broke, rather than being about criminal theft and character assassination, it was instantly "Climategate." It was instantly about climate scientists, not the illegal and dishonest tactics of their attackers. The scientists, not the ideologues and ratf*ckers, had to defend themselves.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Burden of proof</div><div>
</div><div>It's a numbingly familiar pattern in media coverage. The conservative movement that's been attacking climate science for 20 years has a storied history of demonstrable fabrications, distortions, personal attacks, and nothingburger faux-scandals -- not only on climate science, but going back to asbestos, ozone, leaded gasoline, tobacco, you name it. They don't follow the rigorous standards of professional science; they follow no intellectual or ethical standards whatsoever. Yet no matter how long their record of viciousness and farce, every time the skeptic blogosphere coughs up a new "ZOMG!" it's as though we start from zero again, like no one has a memory longer than five minutes.</div><div>
</div><div>Here's the basic question: At this point, given their respective accomplishments and standards, wouldn't it make sense to give scientists the strong benefit of the doubt when they are attacked by ideologues with a history of dishonesty and error? Shouldn't the threshold for what counts as a "scandal" have been nudged a bit higher?</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Agnotological inquiry</div><div>
</div><div>The lesson we've learned from climategate is simple. It's the same lesson taught by death panels, socialist government takeover, Sharia law, and Obama's birth certificate. To understand it we must turn to agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. (Hat tip to an excellent recent post on this by John Quiggen.)</div><div>
</div><div>Beck, Palin, and the rest of Fox News and talk radio operate on the pretense that they are giving consumers access to a hidden "universe of reality," to use Limbaugh's term. It's a reality being actively obscured the "lamestream media," academics, scientists, and government officials. Affirming the tenets of that secret reality has become an act of tribal reinforcement, the equivalent of a secret handshake.</div><div>
</div><div>The modern right has created a closed epistemic loop containing millions of people. Within that loop, the implausibility or extremity of a claim itself counts as evidence. The more liberal elites reject it, the more it entrenches itself. Standards of evidence have nothing to do with it.</div><div>
</div><div>The notion that there is a global conspiracy by professional scientists to falsify results in order to get more research money is, to borrow Quiggen's words about birtherism, "a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe." Once you have accepted that shibboleth, anything offered to you as evidence of its truth, no matter how ludicrous, will serve as affirmation. (Even a few context-free lines cherry-picked from thousands of private emails.)</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Living with the loop</div><div>
</div><div>There's one thing we haven't learned from climategate (or death panels or birtherism). U.S. politics now contains a large, well-funded, tightly networked, and highly amplified tribe that defines itself through rejection of "lamestream" truth claims and standards of evidence. How should our political culture relate to that tribe?</div><div>
</div><div>We haven't figured it out. Politicians and the political press have tried to accommodate the shibboleths of the right as legitimate positions for debate. The press in particular has practically sworn off plain judgments of accuracy or fact. But all that's done is confuse and mislead the broader public, while the tribe pushes ever further into extremity. The tribe does not want to be accommodated. It is fueled by elite rejection.</div><div>
</div><div>At this point mainstream institutions like the press are in a bind: either accept the tribe's assertions as legitimate or be deemed "biased." Until there is a way out of that trap, there will be more and more Climategates.</div><div>
</div><div>David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>Case Study: The Koch-funded ��ClimateGate� Echo Chamber</div><div>Page - March 29, 2010</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>In November 2009, anonymous hackers illegally obtained and disseminated thousands of personal emails from climate scientists housed on the server of the University of East Anglia. The emails spanned 13 years of correspondence and a handful of selected emails were taken out of context by a number of climate-denier organizations. These organizations, many part of the Koch Web, claim the emails prove a �?conspiracy� of scientists and cast doubt on the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>This incident, dubbed "ClimateGate" by climate-denier groups, has been distorted and repeated many times by conservative media and blogs since late November 2009.&nbsp; Twenty organizations, roughly half of the Koch-funded groups profiled in this report, have contributed to the "ClimateGate" echo chamber. Among the most vocal groups are organizations that received over $1,000,000 from Koch foundations since 2005, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute.</div><div>
</div><div>Americans For Prosperity (received over $5 million from Koch since 2005) hosted a live webcast from Copenhagen on Dec 9th as part of their "Hot Air Tour," using the "ClimateGate" emails as a reason to prevent passage of any progressive global warming policy. During the webcast, Steve Lonegan, AFP's New Jersey Director, said "ClimateGate" could have uncovered "the biggest hoax our world has ever seen" and vows not to allow any climate bill to pass the US Senate. Several members of the Copenhagen youth delegation crashed the AFP event and were angrily called "Hitler Youth" by AFP guest speaker and well known climate denier Lord Christopher Monckton. In addition to the Copenhagen webcast, AFP mentions "ClimateGate" in many blog&nbsp; posts, including in their protest of the EPA CO2 endangerment finding.</div><div>The Heritage Foundation (received over $1 million from Koch since 2005) has posted several articles on its website regarding "ClimateGate."&nbsp; The blogs run the gamut of possible climate-denier angles on the incident, ranging from conspiracy accusations , to a history of imagined climate scandals, to effects on world politics, to supposed economic consequences from climate legislation.</div><div>The Cato Institute (received over $1 million in grants from Koch since 2005) is the front-group for climate-denier Patrick Michaels, who has been a vocal spokesperson regarding "ClimateGate". Within two weeks following the email breach at East Anglia University, Patrick Michaels had appeared in over twenty media interviews on shows including CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, NBC's Nightly News, FOX's Fox & Friends, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and BBC's Have Your Say. Michaels, taking one line of an illegally-obtained email out of context, has claimed the scientists have committed a "capital crime"&nbsp; and their actions are "akin to filtering what goes in the bible."</div><div>In addition to AFP, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, about half of the Koch-funded climate denial groups detailed in this report contributed to the "ClimateGate" misinformation echo chamber, including:</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;American Enterprise Institute</div><div>&nbsp;Americans for Tax Reform</div><div>&nbsp;Capital Research Center</div><div>&nbsp;Fraser Institute</div><div>&nbsp;George C Marshall Institute</div><div>&nbsp;Goldwater Institute</div><div>&nbsp;Independent Women's Forum</div><div>&nbsp;John Locke Foundation</div><div>&nbsp;Mackinac Center</div><div>&nbsp;Media Research Center</div><div>&nbsp;Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy</div><div>&nbsp;Reason Foundation</div><div>&nbsp;State Policy Network</div><div>&nbsp;Texas Public Policy Foundation</div><div>Competitive Enterprise Institute</div><div>&nbsp;FreedomWorks&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div>&nbsp;Heartland Institute</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>GP</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>2009-10 � no scandal behind these gates</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The very fact that Climategate was newsworthy is evidence that reporters hold scientists to a much higher</div><div>standard than they hold denialists, even if they won�t admit it in their quest to report a controversy."</div><div>- Mark Boslough112, Physicist at Sandia National Laboratories</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>In late 2009 hacked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) surfaced on the</div><div>internet. These sparked a succession of climate stories that found willing homes in the media, with the UK</div><div>media providing the staging ground. This time the organised sceptics found themselves following the news,</div><div>repeating and publicising a succession of non-stories dug up by amateur experts, convinced that they had found</div><div>evidence of either global conspiracy or scientific failure.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>CRU hacked emails</div><div>
</div><div>As this video113 explains, nothing in the emails stolen from the CRU did anything to call into question any</div><div>climate science. As the video documents, that didn�t stop deniers alleging that not only did they bring the whole</div><div>edifice of climate science crashing down, they also claim they brought to light a conspiracy of truly epic</div><div>proportions - claims that some of the media were all too willing to repeat.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Several independent investigations are underway, and are to be welcomed, but already some investigations</div><div>have exonerated the scientists (see below). Whether police investigations will ever uncover how the emails</div><div>were hacked and who hacked them, leading to criminal prosecution of the perpetrators remains unknown.</div><div>"Not pretty but not faked� was the conclusion of five Associated Press reporters reading and rereading the</div><div>1,500 or so stolen emails - around 1 million words in total:</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>?In the past three weeks since the e-mails were posted, long-time opponents of mainstream climate science</div><div>have repeatedly quoted excerpts of about a dozen e-mails. Republican congressmen and former vice</div><div>presidential candidate Sarah Palin have called for either independent investigations, a delay in US</div><div>Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases or outright boycotts of the Copenhagen</div><div>international climate talks. They cited a �culture of corruption� that the e-mails appeared to show.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>That is not what the AP found. There were signs of trying to present the data as convincingly as possible.� 114</div><div>Even the deniers themselves have admitted that the hacked emails do not bring the large body of climate</div><div>science into doubt. When questioned by the UK House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on 1</div><div>March 2010115, climate deniers Lord Lawson and Benny Peiser, of the newly-formed UK front group, the</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>106 http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=2</div><div>107 http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=1</div><div>108 �Not so dire after all�, Op Ed, New York Sun, 2 February 2007 page 8 http://www.nysun.com/opinion/not-so-dire-after-all/47920/</div><div>109 http://cei.org/gencon/003,05741.cfm</div><div>110 http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=2</div><div>111 http://www.heritage.org/press/events/ev021507b.cfm</div><div>112 http://www.csicop.org/si/show/mann_bites_dog_why_climategate_was_newsworthy/</div><div>113 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&feature=player_embedded</div><div>114 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9319400</div><div>115 http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_technology/s_t_cru_inquiry.cfm response to Q24:&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>?Dr Peiser: Personally I</div><div>do not think that the disclosure of these emails makes a big difference to the overall scientific debate??¢Â?¦âÂ?Â?</div><div>14</div><div>
</div><div>Global Warming Policy Foundation116 both admitted that, at worst, the emails revealed a problem with the</div><div>CRU�s process, but didn�t actually unravel any of the climate science117.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Neither Peiser nor Lawson are climate scientists, something Peiser admitted to the Committee, yet they</div><div>continue to concentrate on the science as their main platform. Bob Ward of the London School of Economics</div><div>pointed out an error on the foundation�s website in a graph of 21st century temperature, but it hasn�t been</div><div>corrected.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>�While it is a relatively small error, it is the kind of discrepancy that many sceptics would be seizing upon if it</div><div>had been found on the website of the Climatic Research Unit,� wrote Ward in a blog on the Guardian website118.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>On another occasion, former IPCC working group chair, Sir John Houghton, who was misquoted by UK sceptic</div><div>Benny Peiser in The Observer119, who claimed Houghton had said, �Unless we announce disasters no one will</div><div>listen.� �[He] thereby attributed to me and the IPCC an attitude of hype and exaggeration. That quote from me</div><div>is without foundation. I have never said it or written it,� Houghton told the Observer120.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>One of the scientists at the centre of the emails, Michael Mann, has been largely cleared by Penn State</div><div>University where he is the Director of the Earth System Science Centre in the Meteorology Department.</div><div>�The internal inquiry has found that Mann did not �participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent</div><div>to suppress or to falsify data121</div><div>Penn State is still undertaking one further investigation.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>IPCC references challenged</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>From the leaked emails, the deniers then moved on to link the CRU�s problems to their favourite target, the</div><div>IPCC. The UK media led the charge, fed by the now lively UK denial community, dubbing each accusation a</div><div>"?gate"? so as to highlight the so-called �scandal� in each.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The accusations centred around three different references in the IPCC. These points have been thoroughly</div><div>rebutted by climate scientists on the RealClimate blog. 122 In summary, two errors were found in the IPCC</div><div>report, the third allegation having been thoroughly discounted.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The 2,800-page AR4 report contains around 18,000 references. The two incorrect references identified have</div><div>rightfully pointed to a need for the IPCC to review the way its processes work, a review that the IPCC has</div><div>announced it is undertaking.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>But, again, what these �gates� have not done is undermine the massive body of evidence pointing to the fact that</div><div>climate change is happening and is being caused by human activity.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The IPCC has now announced an independent review into its processes123, which, again, is a welcome move</div><div>but, as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said when he announced the review, �Let me be clear: the threat</div><div>posed by climate change is real. Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the</div><div>fundamental scientific consensus on climate change. Nor does it diminish the unique importance of the IPCC's</div><div>work.�124</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The hacked emails provided a platform for the denial movement, which has launched an all-out campaign,</div><div>from everyone from Marc Morano, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the UK deniers �� including climate denier and</div><div>Republican Senator James Inhofe125.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Inhofe is now attempting to use the hacked emails and IPCC references to run �McCarthy-style� �?criminal</div><div>investigations� on a list of 17 of the world�s top climate scientists and lead authors in the IPCC. He is using&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>the (non) scandals to question not only the IPCC�s conclusions, but also to challenge the scientific basis of new US EPA rules on regulating greenhouse gas emissions126.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>On 16 February 2010, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with Fred Singer, filed a lawsuit to the US</div><div>EPA,127 demanding that, on the basis of the hacked emails and so called �flawed datasets�?��, the EPA drop all</div><div>its proposed regulation on CO2 and other greenhouse gases.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>116 Both from the UK front group the Global Warming Policy Foundation � they refused to disclose their funding to the select committee.</div><div>http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation</div><div>117 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/uc387-i/uc38702.htm</div><div>118 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/05/global-warming-thinktank-double-standards</div><div>119 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/07/robin-mckie-benny-peiser-climate</div><div>120 http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/feb/14/climate-change-scepticism-robin-mckie</div><div>121 http://www.research.psu.edu/orp/Findings_Mann_Inquiry.pdf</div><div>122 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/</div><div>123 http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs//2010/100310_IAC.doc.htm</div><div>124 http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/detail/92042.html</div><div>125 http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=E01&cycle=All&recipdetail=M&sortorder=U</div><div>15</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>wiki</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Timeline of the initial incident</div><div>The incident began when someone accessed a server used by the Climatic Research Unit and copied 160 MB of data[3] containing more than 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents.[17] The University of East Anglia stated that the server from which the data were taken was not one that could easily have been accessed and the data could not have been released inadvertently.[18] The breach was first discovered on 17 November 2009 after the server of the RealClimate website was hacked and a copy of the stolen data was uploaded.[4] According to The Guardian, RealClimate's Gavin Schmidt said that he had information that the files were obtained through "a hack into [CRU's] backup mail server."[19][unreliable source?]</div><div>
</div><div>On 19 November an archive file containing the data was uploaded to a server in Tomsk, Russia,[7] before being copied to numerous locations across the Internet.[3] An anonymous post from a Saudi Arabian IP address[20] to the climate-sceptic blog The Air Vent[4] described the material as "a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents" and stated that climate science is "too important to be kept under wraps".[21] That same day, Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit was forwarded an internal email sent to UEA staff warning that "climate change sceptics" had obtained a "large volume of files and emails". The climate-sceptic blog Watts Up With That, which had obtained a copy of the files, also received a posting from the hacker complaining that nothing was happening. Its moderator Steve Mosher replied: "A lot is happening behind the scenes. It is not being ignored. Much is being coordinated among major players and the media. Thank you very much. You will notice the beginnings of activity on other sites now. Here soon to follow." Shortly afterwards, the emails began to be widely publicised on climate-sceptic blogs and subsequently in the media.[22]</div><div>
</div><div>The Norfolk police subsequently confirmed that they were "investigating criminal offences in relation to a data breach at the University of East Anglia" with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime unit,[7] the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the National Domestic Extremism Team (NDET).[23] Commenting on the involvement of the NDET, a spokesman said: "At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations." However, the police cautioned that "major investigations of this nature are of necessity very detailed and as a consequence can take time to reach a conclusion."[24] The investigation is as yet unresolved. According to Nature, however, the police are no longer considering the possibility that the data was leaked, rather than stolen. Jones and others fear that the hackers may be sitting on other stolen emails.[25]</div><div>
</div><div>Climate scientists at the CRU and elsewhere received numerous threatening and abusive e-mails in the wake of the initial incidents.[26][27] Norfolk Police interviewed Phil Jones about death threats made against him following the release of the emails,[28] and death threats against two scientists also are under investigation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.[26] Climate scientists in Australia have reported receiving threatening e-mails including references to where they live and warnings to "be careful" about how some people might react to their scientific findings.[29]</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
</div><div>Content of the documents</div><div>For more details on this topic, see Climatic Research Unit documents.</div><div>
</div><div>The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (November 2010)</div><div>The material comprised more than 1,000 emails, 2,000 documents, as well as commented source code, pertaining to climate change research covering a period from 1996 until 2009.[30] According to an analysis by The Guardian, the vast majority of the emails related to four climatologists: Phil Jones, the head of the CRU; Keith Briffa, a CRU climatologist specialising in tree ring analysis; Tim Osborn[1], a climate modeller at CRU; and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The four were either recipients or senders of all but 66 of the 1,073 emails, with most of the remainder of the emails being sent from mailing lists. A few other emails were sent by, or to, other staff at the CRU. Jones, Briffa, Osborn and Hulme had written high-profile scientific papers on climate change that had been cited in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; they had aroused the ire of climate change sceptics for declining to release data or computer code, citing commercial agreements with suppliers.</div><div>
</div><div>Most of the emails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate research, such as data analysis and details of scientific conferences.[31] The Guardian's analysis of the emails found that the hacker had filtered them using keywords, including "Yamal", "tree rings", and "Phil Jones", so that these terms appear in many of the documents.[19] The controversy has thus focused on a small number of emails.[31] Cherry picked phrases, including one in which Kevin Trenberth stated, �The fact is that we can�t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can�??t�,[4] were actually part of a discussion on the need for better monitoring of energy flows involved in short-term climate variability.[32]</div><div>
</div><div>Climate change sceptics gained wide publicity in blogs and news media,[33] making allegations that the hacked emails showed evidence that climate scientists manipulated data.[3] A few other commentators such as Roger A. Pielke[not in citation given] said that the evidence supported claims that dissenting scientific papers had been suppressed.[34]</div><div>
</div><div>The Wall Street Journal reported the emails revealed apparent efforts to ensure the IPCC included their own views and excluded others, and that the scientists withheld scientific data.[35] Reason reported that the CRU evidently plotted to remove journal editors with whom they disagreed and suppressed the publication of articles that they disliked.[36] The ICO made a statement that the emails revealed that freedom of information requests were 'not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation' but that they could not prosecute due to statute of limitations.[37] The Telegraph reported that academics and climate change researchers dismissed the allegations, saying that nothing in the emails proved wrongdoing.[38] Independent reviews by FactCheck and the Associated Press said that the emails did not affect evidence that man made global warming is a real threat, and said that emails were being misrepresented to support unfounded claims of scientific misconduct. The AP said that the "[e]-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data."[5][39] In this context, John Tierney of the New York Times wrote: "these researchers, some of the most prominent climate experts in Britain and America, seem so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude " and ultimately undermine their own cause."[40]</div><div>
</div><div>Many commentators quoted one email referring to "Mike's Nature trick" which Jones used in a 1999 graph for the World Meteorological Organization, to deal with the well-discussed tree ring divergence problem "to hide the decline" that a particular proxy showed for modern temperatures after 1950, when measured temperatures were rising. These two phrases from the emails were also taken out of context by climate change sceptics including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin as though they referred to a decline in measured global temperatures, even though they were written when temperatures were at a record high.[33] John Tierney, writing in the New York Times in November 2009, said that the claims by skeptics of "hoax" or "fraud" were incorrect, but the graph on the cover of a report for policy makers and journalists did not show these non-experts where proxy measurements changed to measured temperatures.[40] The final analyses from various subsequent inquiries concluded that the so-called 'trick' was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion,[8][41][dubious �?? discuss] and while the WMO graph would have been clearer with separate colours for the change in measurement[citation needed], the 2001 IPCC report discussed this issue and the graphs in IPCC reports clearly showed a separate line for the instrumental temperature record.[42]</div><div>
</div><div>Computer source code and a readme file included in the documents were the subject of discussion in the media.[43] The readme file indicated to some that "the coder, supremely frustrated with the poor quality of his data, simply creates some [data]."[44] John Graham-Cumming, a computer scientist interviewed by the BBC, said that the coding divulged was "below the standard you'd expect in any commercial software."[45] In an editorial, Myles Allen wrote that contrary to its treatment by some commentators the code was entirely pedagogical and was not used for any research or analysis associated with the scientific publications showing the existence of global warming.[43]</div><div>
</div><div>Responses</div><div>In the United Kingdom and United States, there were calls for official inquiries into issues raised by the documents. The British Conservative politician Lord Lawson said, "The integrity of the scientific evidence ... has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay." Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics said that there had to be a rigorous investigation into the substance of the email messages once appropriate action has been taken over the hacking, to clear the impression of impropriety given by the selective disclosure and dissemination of the messages.[46] United States Senator Jim Inhofe, who had previously stated that global warming was "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,"[47] also planned to demand an inquiry.[48]</div><div>
</div><div>University of East Anglia</div><div>The University of East Anglia was notified of the security breach on 17 November 2009, but when the story was published in the press on 20 November they had no statement ready.[49] On 24 November, Trevor Davies, the University of East Anglia pro-vice-chancellor with responsibility for research, rejected calls for Jones' resignation or firing: "We see no reason for Professor Jones to resign and, indeed, we would not accept his resignation. He is a valued and important scientist." The university announced it would conduct an independent review to "address the issue of data security, an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests, and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed."[50]</div><div>
</div><div>The university announced on 1 December that Phil Jones was to stand aside as director of the Unit until the completion of the review.[51][52] Two days later, the university announced that Sir Muir Russell would chair the inquiry, which would be known as the Independent Climate Change Email Review, and would "examine email exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data". The review would also scrutinise the CRU's policies and practices for "acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review, and disseminating data and research findings" and "their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice". In addition, the investigation would review CRU's compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests and also "make recommendations about the management, governance and security structures for CRU and the security, integrity and release of the data it holds."[53] The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review report was published on 7 July 2010.[54]</div><div>
</div><div>On 22 March 2010 the university announced the composition of an independent Science Assessment Panel to reassess key CRU papers which have already been peer reviewed and published in journals. The panel did not seek to evaluate the science itself, but rather whether "the conclusions [reached by the CRU] represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data." The university consulted with the Royal Society in establishing the panel. It was chaired by Lord Oxburgh and its membership consisted of Professor Huw Davies of ETH Zurich, Professor Kerry Emanual at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Lisa Graumlich of the University of Arizona, Professor David Hand of Imperial College London, and Professors Herbert Huppert and Michael Kelly of the University of Cambridge. It started its work in March 2010 and released its report on 14 April 2010. During its inquiry, the panel examined eleven representative CRU publications selected by the Royal Society that spanned a period of over 20 years, as well as other CRU research materials. It also spent fifteen person days at the UEA carrying out interviews with scientists.[13]</div><div>
</div><div>Climatologists</div><div>Among the scientists whose e-mails were disclosed, the CRU's researchers said in a statement that the e-mails had been taken out of context and merely reflected an honest exchange of ideas. Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, said that sceptics were "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious",[17] and called the entire incident a careful, "high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem."[55] Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said that he was appalled at the release of the e-mails but thought that it might backfire against climate sceptics, as the messages would show "the integrity of scientists."[4] He also said that climate change sceptics had selectively quoted words and phrases out of context, and that the timing suggested an attempt to undermine talks at the December 2009 Copenhagen global climate summit.[56] Tom Wigley, a former director of the CRU and now head of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, condemned the threats that he and other colleagues had received as "truly stomach-turning", and commented: "None of it affects the science one iota. Accusations of data distortion or faking are baseless. I can rebut and explain all of the apparently incriminating e-mails that I have looked at, but it is going to be very time consuming to do so."[26] In relation to the harassment that he and his colleagues were experiencing, he said: "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. So this is a worse manifestation but it's happened before so it's not that surprising."[57]</div><div>
</div><div>Other prominent climate scientists, such as Richard Somerville, called the incident a smear campaign.[58] David Reay of the University of Edinburgh said that the CRU "is just one of many climate-research institutes that provide the underlying scientific basis for climate policy at national and international levels. The conspiracy theorists may be having a field day, but if they really knew academia they would also know that every published paper and data set is continually put through the wringer by other independent research groups. The information that makes it into the IPCC reports is some of the most rigorously tested and debated in any area of science."[26]</div><div>
</div><div>One of the IPCC's lead authors, Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, expressed concern at the precedent established by this incident: "[T]his is a criminal act of vandalism and of harassment of a group of scientists that are only going about their business doing science. It represents a whole new escalation in the war on climate scientists who are only trying to get at the truth... What next? Deliberate monkeying with data on servers? Insertion of bugs into climate models?"[59] Another IPCC lead author, David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, reported receiving hate e-mails in the wake of the incident and said that he believed there was "an organised campaign to discredit individual climate scientists". Andrew Pitman of the University of New South Wales commented: "The major problem is that scientists have to be able to communicate their science without fear or favour and there seems to be a well-orchestrated campaign designed to intimidate some scientists."[29]</div><div>
</div><div>In response to the incident, 1,700 British scientists signed a joint statement circulated by the UK Met Office declaring their "utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities."[60] Met Office chief executive John Hirst and its chief scientist Julia Slingo asked their colleagues to sign the statement "to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change."[61]</div><div>
</div><div>Patrick J. Michaels who was criticised in the e-mails and who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming, said "This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud". He said that some e-mails showed an effort to block the release of data for independent review, and that some messages discussed discrediting him by stating that he knew his research was wrong in his doctoral dissertation, "This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people's reputations in very serious ways."[4]</div><div>
</div><div>James Hansen said that the controversy has "no effect on the science" and that while some of the e-mails reflect poor judgment, the evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.[62] Hans von Storch, who also concurs with the mainstream view on global warming,[63] said that the University of East Anglia (UEA) had "violated a fundamental principle of science" by refusing to share data with other researchers. "They play science as a power game," he said.[64]</div><div>
</div><div>Judith Curry wrote that in her opinion "there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and 'tribalism' in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process." She hoped that the affair would change the approach of scientists to providing their data to the public, and their response to criticisms of their work. She had herself learned to be careful about what to put in e-mails when a "disgruntled employee" made a freedom of information request. Mann described these comments as "somewhat naive" considering that in recent years scientists had become much more open with their data. He said that skeptics "will always complain about something else, want something more. Eventually, as we see, they've found a way to get access to private communications between scientists."[55]</div><div>
</div><div>Scientific organizations</div><div>The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I issued statements that the assessment process, involving hundreds of scientists worldwide, is designed to be transparent and to prevent any individual or small group from manipulating the process. The statement said that the "internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges".[65][66]</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The American Meteorological Society stated that the incident did not affect the society's position on climate change. They pointed to the breadth of evidence for human influence on climate, stating "For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true�which is not yet clearly the case�the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited."[67]</div><div>
</div><div>The American Geophysical Union issued a statement that they found "it offensive that these emails were obtained by illegal cyber attacks and they are being exploited to distort the scientific debate about the urgent issue of climate change." They reaffirmed their 2007 position statement on climate change "based on the large body of scientific evidence that Earth's climate is warming and that human activity is a contributing factor. Nothing in the University of East Anglia hacked e-mails represents a significant challenge to that body of scientific evidence."[68]</div><div>
</div><div>The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reaffirmed its position on global warming and "expressed grave concerns that the illegal release of private emails stolen from the University of East Anglia should not cause policy-makers and the public to become confused about the scientific basis of global climate change. Scientific integrity demands robust, independent peer review, however, and AAAS therefore emphasized that investigations are appropriate whenever significant questions are raised regarding the transparency and rigor of the scientific method, the peer-review process, or the responsibility of individual scientists. The responsible institutions are mounting such investigations." Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the AAAS and executive publisher of the journal Science, said "AAAS takes issues of scientific integrity very seriously. It is fair and appropriate to pursue answers to any allegations of impropriety. It�s important to remember, though, that the reality of climate change is based on a century of robust and well-validated science."[69]</div><div>
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</div><div>CJR decries lack of coverage of clearing:&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/wanted_climate_frontpager.php</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Each of these reviews has, in turn, drawn significant coverage in mainstream media and independent blogs of all varieties and points of view (see round-ups here, here, and here for instance). But only a few brief articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines, and they were usually buried deep inside. It is not surprising that editors have been reluctant to highlight each and every report as it came along (lamentably, documents and letters of this sort are commonly dismissed as having little news value). However, journalists love a good trend, and, as the BBC�s Richard Black noted on this blog, these reports are �beginning to look like a pattern.� As such, the press (especially the American press) needs to give this story more comprehensive, high profile treatment.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>horowitz site has no mention of investgations clearing all involved</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=859</div><div>
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</div><div>cites d'aleo and we wms</div><div>
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</div><div>threat of congr investigation:</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.thegwpf.org/international-news/1783-climategate-investigations-may-be-re-opened-after-us-elections.html</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Climategate Investigations May Be Re-Opened After U.S. Elections</div><div>Saturday, 30 October 2010 12:23 Neela Banerjee, Los Angeles Times</div><div>
</div><div>If Republicans win control of the House, they plan to go after the Obama administration's environmental policies and the researchers who have offered evidence on global warming, whom they accuse of manipulating data.</div><div>
</div><div>Reporting from Washington � If the GOP wins control of the House next week, senior congressional Republicans plan to launch a blistering attack on the Obama administration's environmental policies, as well as on scientists who link air pollution to climate change.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The GOP's fire will be concentrated especially on the administration's efforts to use the Environmental Protection Agency's authority over air pollution to tighten emissions controls on coal, oil and other carbon fuels that scientists say contribute to global warming.</div><div>
</div><div>The attack, according to senior Republicans, will seek to portray the EPA as abusing its authority and damaging the economy with needless government regulations.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In addition, GOP leaders say, they will focus on what they see as distortions of scientific evidence regarding climate change and on Obama administration efforts to achieve by executive rule-making what it failed to win from Congress.</div><div>
</div><div>Even if Republicans should win majorities in both the House and Senate, they would face difficulties putting their views into legislative form, since Senate Democrats could use the threat of filibuster to block bills just as the GOP did on climate and other issues during the past year.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Also, Obama could use his veto power.</div><div>
</div><div>But the GOP's plans for wide-ranging and sustained investigations by congressional committees could put the EPA and administration environmental policymakers on the defensive and create political pressures that could cause Obama to pull back on environmental issues as the 2012 presidential election draws closer.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In comments last week, White House officials said they are considering hiring more lawyers to the Office of Legal Counsel to gird for the possible battles ahead. Yet even with the White House running interference for the EPA and other agencies, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson conceded that a Republican anti-regulatory campaign could end up effectively hamstringing her agency's work.</div><div>
</div><div>The new rules EPA has issued over the last year on vehicle emissions and those expected soon for industry, Jackson said, "would be endangered by many, if not all, of the efforts we've seen to take away the agency's greenhouse gas authority."&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Over the last two years, the Obama administration and the EPA have stepped up pressure on industry, utilities and states to curtail pollution. A 2007 Supreme Court ruling opened the door for the EPA to use its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in new rules for vehicle emissions and, starting early next year, regulations for emissions from utilities.</div><div>
</div><div>In contrast to the previous administration, the Obama White House has also embraced the broad consensus within the scientific community that human activity, mainly through the emitting of carbon dioxide, has led to global warming.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>All that will be up for scrutiny in the event of a Republican takeover of the House, which political analysts are predicting. The Republican Party has hammered at the administration's environmental agenda during the campaign. And rejecting the work of climate scientists has become increasingly common among conservatives.</div><div>
</div><div>Several key Republican Congressmen âÂ?Â? most notably Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who could take over the chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ??¢Â?Â? have said they plan to investigate climate scientists they contend manipulated data to prove the case that human activity is contributing to global warming.</div><div>
</div><div>Using control of congressional committees � and their investigative powers � to attack the opposition is not a new idea. After Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, they held critical hearings on everything from an energy task force run by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Bush administration's support of abstinence-only sex education.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Similarly, during the Clinton administration, when Republicans took over they appointed independent counsels to investigate various aspects of the administration, leading to the Whitewater probe and the impeachment proceedings, among others.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In a recent op-ed article, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, declared that the GOP is preparing to "declare war on the regulatory state."&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>A steady flow of letters, subpoenas and congressional hearings would prove "incredibly disruptive" to an agency's ability to work and promulgate rules, said Kate Gordon, of the energy policy project at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research and advocacy group in Washington.</div><div>
</div><div>Congressional inquiries also offer a platform for energizing the GOP's conservative base in the run-up to the 2012 elections.</div><div>
</div><div>The investigations are expected to target questions about EPA's preparedness for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Already, House Republicans have written letters to the Interior Department questioning the moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling that the administration invoked after the explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers and spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil.</div><div>
</div><div>But the primary focus will be on the EPA's determination last year that carbon dioxide and other emissions endanger public welfare by contributing to climate change. Armed with this finding, the EPA has moved to reduce greenhouse gases by mandating emissions reductions in vehicles and will soon move to regulate stationary sources like power plants and factories.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>House Republicans like Issa and James F. Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming have criticized the EPA for basing its endangerment finding on what they consider flawed research. Republicans assert that the science on climate change is not yet "settled," despite the vast global scientific consensus about its human causes.</div><div>
</div><div>Specifically, Issa has said he wants to investigate the "Climategate" scandal that broke late last year, when hackers illegally obtained and released thousands of emails of climate scientists working with a leading British laboratory.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Climate skeptics, among them House Republicans like Issa, contend that the sniping and harshness in some emails prove that climate scientists suppressed dissenting studies and that science showing the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is biased and tainted.</div><div>
</div><div>Several independent panels abroad and in the U.S. that reviewed the emails cleared the scientists of wrongdoing and found their research to be reliable. The EPA has also said that "nothing in the emails undermines the science upon which" the endangerment findings are based.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Like officials within the administration, scientists around the country who expect to be investigated by Issa and others are getting legal advice on how to best protect themselves. Among them is Michael E. Mann, professor of meteorology at Penn State University and one of the researchers who developed the "hockey stick" graph that shows a recent spike in global temperatures.</div><div>
</div><div>Issa named Mann in a letter to the EPA as a scientist whose work was not "unbiased, accurate or reliable."</div><div>
</div><div>"I don't think we can cower under the politically motivated attacks by the forces of anti-science, which includes prominent politicians who are in the pay of the fossil fuel industry," Mann said in a telephone interview about his approach to possible congressional investigations.</div><div>
</div><div>"One prepares for this by doing one's best to get the truth out because we have nothing to hide as climate scientists: We can stand proudly on our research," he said.</div><div>
</div><div>Los Angeles Times, 30 October 2010</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>----</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Several key Republican Congressmen � most notably Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), who could take over the chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee �?? have said they plan to investigate climate scientists they contend manipulated data to prove the case that human activity is contributing to global warming.</div><div>
</div><div>Using control of congressional committees � and their investigative powers � to attack the opposition is not a new idea. After Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, they held critical hearings on everything from an energy task force run by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Bush administration's support of abstinence-only sex education.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Similarly, during the Clinton administration, when Republicans took over they appointed independent counsels to investigate various aspects of the administration, leading to the Whitewater probe and the impeachment proceedings, among others.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In a recent op-ed article, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, declared that the GOP is preparing to "declare war on the regulatory state."</div><div>
</div><div>A steady flow of letters, subpoenas and congressional hearings would prove "incredibly disruptive" to an agency's ability to work and promulgate rules, said Kate Gordon, of the energy policy project at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research and advocacy group in Washington.</div><div>
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</div><div>good explanation of trick to hide decline</div><div>
</div><div>http://climateprogress.org/2011/03/31/scopes-climate-hearing-richard-muller-and-john-christy/</div><div>
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</div><div>Himalayagate aka glaciergate</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The first concerns the rate of the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers. The 2007 IPCC fourth assessment report included an estimate that "if the present rate [of melting] continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high (IPCC-speak for 90 percent-plus likely) if the earth keeps warming at the current rate." That assessment was based on an interview that India's leading glaciologist, Syad Iqbal Hasnain, had given to Fred Pearce of the New Scientistmagazine in 1999.</div><div>
</div><div>---</div><div>
</div><div>mojo</div><div>
</div><div>http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/01/about-those-himalayan-glaciers</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>amazongate: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-now-for-amazongate.html wacko blogger</div><div>
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</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>===</div><div>
</div><div>http://news.change.org/stories/for-climate-scientists-death-threats-come-with-the-job</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>For Climate Scientists, Death Threats Come With The Job</div><div>by Jess Leber �· July 06, 2010</div><div>
</div><div>But when do aggressive emails and comments cross this line? This has been an issue in so many areas of our modern life. Sure, the occasional controversial academic could get used to attacks, but in the climate change arena, the discourse is getting seriously out of hand.</div><div>
</div><div>Others suggest these attacks are orchestrated, and blogger Tim Lambert notes that one high-profile spokesperson for the climate denial machine regularly publishes the email addresses of "target" scientists. MORANO&nbsp; Regardless of the source, I fear it is only a matter of time before abusive words translate to abusive actions.</div><div>
</div><div>The Guardian in the U.K. has compiled some of this hate mail, much of it directed at scientists whose private email exchanges were published by unknown hackers last year. These scientists were called "Nazi morons" and told to "gargle razor blades" and "rot in hell," in a small sampling of hundreds of expletive-laden rants, many from anonymous writers. (I actually can't a imagine a U.S. paper publishing the language in the above link.) They've also received many death threats and been told to commit suicide. Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the "Climategate" scandal, said a few months ago that he has indeed had suicidal thoughts.</div><div>
</div><div>These scientists have called out for help, but U.S. local police and the FBI have generally not taken any action, citing free speech rights. Instead, researchers are left fearful and paranoid, which surely affects their ability to concentrate on their job and most certainly colors what they are willing to say in public.</div><div>
</div><div>"The effect on me has been tremendous," Stanford University scientist Stephen Schneider told The Guardian. "Some of these people are mentally imbalanced. They are invariably gun-toting rightwingers. What do I do? Learn to shoot a Magnum? Wear a bullet-proof jacket?"</div><div>
</div><div>Earlier today, Change.org blogger Nikki Gloudeman wrote about growing calls for transparency in the climate science process. I wonder how in the world scientists can be more "transparent" when they fear for their lives. Clearly, these anonymous attackers -- the original Climategate hacker, likely among them -- are not after any real honesty. They are after blood. I truly hope they don't ever get what they came for.</div></div>