Climate Email Coverage Casts Big Chill

The conservative blogosphere has been atwitter the last week or so about email exchanges from scientists they claim are efforts aimed at fabricating the idea of climate change. But that storyline misses some crucial details.

The Guardian reports hackers apparently sympathetic with climate change skeptics broke into a British university’s computer network and posted the purloined email and documents to a site popular with climate change deniers. Since then, all manner of outlets have pounced on the story to attack climate change science. The Wall Street Journal gleefully suggests scientists are in on the public being tricked, and the hacked emails are proof of such.

The premise that courageous hackers uncover a grand conspiracy of scientists and governments out to dupe the unsuspecting public sounds like a plot right out of the movies, almost too good a story to be true. Perhaps it is because the story is far more involved than what the corporate press is making it into.

The Real News Network provides anti-climate denialist responses to the furor, as did the University of East Anglia, where the hacking took place, in its own official statement. “The publication of a selection of stolen data is the latest example of a sustained and, in some instances, a vexatious campaign which may have been designed to distract from reasoned debate about the nature of the urgent action which world governments must consider to mitigate, and adapt to, climate change,” said Professor Trevor Davies, pro-vice chancellor for research at the school. “We are committed to furthering this debate despite being faced with difficult circumstances related to a criminal breach of our security systems and our concern to protect colleagues from the more extreme behaviour of some who have responded in irrational and unpleasant ways to the publication of personal information.”

Carbon Fixated has a good critical climate change email scandal roundup of coverage, as does Real Climate on the climate change emails and a few response and context to the climate change email debates (plus a special data post). Jon Small at The Third Estate gets special note for his trouncing of the climate change critics, especially conspiracy buff Alex Jones, who have seized on “climate-gate” to forward their own nutty agenda. Small does it by getting down to basics:

The conspiracy theorist’s interpretation of this particular email leads to this absurdity, but in truth the likes of Alex Jones are not really engaging with the technical debate at all, they are simply taking easy headline quotes and putting their own spin on them, based on what they already assume to be the case: that the scientists are all in on selling us a big con. And this indicates a fairly serious problem in the general level of public (mis)understanding of science. For those who fail to engage with the technicalities of the topic, or who simply do not understand the principles of the scientific method, such as Alex Jones and his cheerleaders, the decrees of scientists appear as just another source of unfounded assertion, just another empty statement of politically motivated rhetoric. But science doesn’t work like that. The scientific method contains its own safeguards. Research findings such as these, including problematic and conflicting ones, are published in peer-reviewed academic journals precisely in order for people to pull them apart if they don’t hold up, or to verify them if they do.

The academic science community is fiercely combative and competitive, and it would gain a working scientist considerable kudos, and possibly even make an academic career, if she were to find – and correct – a mistake that has been presented as fact. This is the way science works. It doesn’t and can’t give us an absolute version of the truth, but it can give us as close an approximation of the truth as is possible, given our current knowledge. This is what these climate scientists are doing – trying to hammer out the best estimates of what is going on with the world’s climate and why, through the comparison of various sources of data. This adheres to the scientific principle of repeatability: there is not one single source of evidence backing up current theories of anthropogenic climate change, but hundreds of matching ones. The fact that there are many hundreds of lines of evidence which have gone through this process of robust analysis and peer scrutiny, all of which point in the same direction, gives us the overwhelming consensus that, with our current state of knowledge, the world appears to be experiencing climate change which is being forced beyond natural variability by manmade factors.

Check the link for Jon Small’s climate email denialist rebuttal.

One of the best responses to the gotcha machine, additionally, comes from Open Democracy. There, Rupert Read discusses positive outcomes from the climate email controversy, as well as hypocrisy among climate change deniers. One blog commenter, he says, would love to “inspect all e-mails ever sent or received by (a) anyone connected with the major oil companies [that funded climate-denial organizations], (b) at least a few of those who have been most vocal in their skepticism to man-made climate change.” The unethical behavior of some scientists, Read reminds us, doesn’t in itself cast any doubt over the central findings of their research.

There are many good resources for learning about how the petrochemical industry is pouring big money into obscuring climate change science. Think Progress reminded us earlier this year how ExxonMobil was bankrolling organizations speaking out against climate change. For many countries, David Le Page says, denying climate change is about protecting the bottom line.

Media coverage of the climate change email controversy is certain to drag on, but it is important the public understand there is more to the story.

POSTSCRIPT: Today is an international day for climate justice. As Rising Tide North America puts it, “There are alternatives to the current course that is emphasizing false solutions such as market-based approaches and agrofuels. If we put humanity before profit and solidarity above competition we can live amazing lives without destroying our planet.” Read more about it climate justice actions and mobilizations for the planet.

ALSO: Just Seeds has action photos.