Climategate
 Climategate    | |
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 What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? | |
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy (aka Climategate) began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.[1]
The story was first broken by climate change denialists, with columnist James Delingpole popularising the term "Climategate" to describe the controversy. They argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy and that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. The CRU rejected this, saying that the emails had been taken out of context. Fact-checkers confirmed that climate change deniers misrepresented the contents of the emails.[2]
The mainstream media picked up the story, as negotiations over climate change mitigation began in Copenhagen on 7 December 2009. 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. In response to Climategate, 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".[3]
Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations.[4]
Related Documents
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:Climategate its the heat source stupid | Commentary | |||
| Document:People and Data Cherry-Picked For the IPCC Political Agenda | article | 20 April 2014 | Tim Ball | A cogent critique of the UN IPCC personnel and methodology designed to suborn and harness science to a clearly political agenda. Written by a Doyen of climate science and author of the book "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science". |
| File:Climategate-emails.pdf | article | March 2010 | John Costella |
References
- ↑ "Government Response to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee 8th Report of Session 2009-10: The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia"
- ↑ "Climategate Redux"
- ↑ "Climategate 10 years on: what lessons have we learned?"
- ↑ "Climate scientists defend work in wake of new leak of hacked emails"
