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Sam Butler

Lecturer Levin

Writing 140

12/02/11

A5

Climategate and the Role of the Internet in Climate Change Denial

In November of 2009, an anonymous hacker stole over one thousand emails

from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in the UK and published them

online. After a few small groups of people sifted through the huge amount of data,

some emails were picked out that raised questions on whether some climate

scientists might be manipulating data on climate change. The emails were sent all

over the web and gave new life to a climate change denial movement. The scandal

was called Climategate, likened to the Watergate scandal that led to President

Richard Nixons resignation in 1974, and gave way to conspiracy theories

surrounding the legitimacy of climate change. This, occurring right before the UN

Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, lead to a failure of the attending countries

to agree on any action in addressing climate-change, and even further, on whether

or not climate-change was man-made, or even real. Due to the nature of the emails

being easily transmitted over the Internet, dissent and doubt among climatologists

in the emails were cherry picked, taken out of context, and widely distributed,

contributing to a very misleading climate change denial movement.

This newly invigorated climate change denial movement is based on emails

that were hacked illegally from climatologists computers, taken out of context, and

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used to falsely represent climate scientists as a whole. The most largely cited email

by climate change deniers is that sent by Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit of

East Anglia who writes, Ive just completed Mikes Nature trick of adding in the real

temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for

Keiths to hide the decline. Taken out of context this would seem as if Jones was

using tricks to manipulate data. When the email is examined closer, in the context

that it was written, the decline that Jones is trying to hide is not of global

temperatures, but of tree-ring growth. Tree-rings are often used to determine past

global temperatures, but since the 1960s, trees in higher latitudes have seen a

decline in growth making tree-ring data unreliable. The trick Jones uses is not to

manipulate data, but to mathematically integrate tree-ring and other sources of data

in order to make temperatures accurate. Since the emails were stolen, information

was released prematurely that had not followed standard scientific procedures for

publication and therefore could not make this clarification. This, being expected by

casual emails between colleagues, allowed for bloggers and many climate change

skeptics to jump to false conclusions about the intentions of scientists. Any

vagueness or clarification needed for the data would easily have been cleared up by

a formal publication of the scientists findings in a scientific journal.

Scientific journals, however, are not nearly as accessible or easy to read as

emails. The digital nature of emails allows for rapid dissection and retransmission of

information all across the Internet without fact checks. Before the onset of the

internet, almost all news consumed by the public came from books, television,

magazines and newspapers, all of which require some sort of journalistic fact check

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or peer review process. Information on the Internet and transmitted through emails

requires no such procedures, and sanctions quick forwarding and re-posting of

sometimes misguided information. The one thousand climategate emails were

quickly picked apart and degraded to a few juicy gotcha quotes thatwould inspire

doubt in accepted scientific theory. These tidbits of information were easy to

understand and gained the trust of much of the public. Formal scientific

publications on the other hand, are usually many pages long and require thorough

reading and basic understanding of the topic. Since most people are more inclined to

read small tidbits of information they come across on the internet, than pages of

complex scientific journals, the informal and unofficial climategate emails won out

over at least three independent studies, the most recent being the Berkeley Earth

Surface Temperature study, aimed at retesting the existence and causes of climate

change (NPR). Even though these studies came in the wake of climategate and

vindicated the climate scientists from any misconduct, belief in the existence of

climate change in the US has dropped 14%, from 71% to only 57%, much due to the

climategate incident (Pew Research Center).

Since climategate, a growing number of Americans have come to regard

climate change as simply an elaborate hoax. Even after a statement from 18

different scientific associations, including the American Meteorological Society and

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that concludes Observations

throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous

scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human

activities are the primary driver," Americans continue to be skeptical of the issue. In

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information at the speed of light can have terrible consequences. The prime example

of the major effects of climategate, is the utter failure of the UN Climate Change

Summit in Copenhagen in 2009 to make any sort of progress in combating global

warming. In the months leading up to the conference, high hopes were set for an

agreement by the countries of the world to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that

cause climate change. Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130

developing countries, said the deal had "the lowest level of ambition you can

imagine. It's nothing short of climate change skepticism in action. Not surprisingly,

this skepticism came from the doubt raised by many countries over the legitimacy of

climate change in the wake of the climate gate emails.

Skepticism of climate change based on the climategate emails is more than

unreasonable. Countless studies have been done confirming the existence of climate

change for decades with three confirmations by independent studies done directly

after the climategate incident. The sad truth is that these studies will never convince

many people of the realness of climate change. The phrase climategate itself is

instantly is associated with the alleged wrong doing of many climate scientists. Just

like the Nixon Administration after Watergate, many climatologists will never have

the credibility to regain some peoples trust, but unlike Watergate, the scientists are

the victims. The scientists are the ones that had their information illegally taken

from them, but because of our inability to distinguish fact from fiction on the

Internet, it will ultimately be us to face the consequences of a changing climate.