Every so often, a story comes along that is so messy, politicised and toxic that all the principles of open engagement go out the window. One of these stories was the affair in 2009 that became known as “Climategate” – when unknown hackers dumped ten years’ worth of email exchanges between leading climate scientists onto the internet. Researchers recoiled in horror as sceptics highlighted the messages that painted climate science in the worst possible light and managed to garner enormous coverage in the world’s media. Many feared that the controversy would prove the death knell for public trust in climate science and a major setback for those relying on the credibility of the science to convince policymakers that action was needed to reduce CO2 emissions.
I don’t actually remember how I found out about the hacked emails, although they dominated life at the SMC for many months; it’s one of the stories that left its mark on everyone who got involved. That was nothing, however, compared to its effect on the scientist at the centre of the storm. In November 2009, Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), learned – along with the rest of the world – that a large number of his emails and documents, covering over thirteen years of research, had been stolen.
The emails were leaked to a website just days before a major climate summit in Copenhagen. Climate change sceptics were quick to seize on them and, within days, their interpretation of the emails moved from the blogosphere to become the dominant narrative in the global media: they revealed a vast conspiracy to overstate the scientific case for global warming and suppress contrary findings. These emails proved what they had been saying all along, they argued – that climate change was a hoax.
We swung into action. Our first thought was to get Jones on a train and into the SMC. Whatever the truth, we knew we needed him to interpret his own emails rather than leave it to his critics. Our phones were on fire with science reporters desperate to hear from him, so I called Simon Dunford, our main contact in the UEA press team. Dunford and his boss Annie Ogden seemed to share our view that we needed to get Jones out there to explain his own emails. But they could not deliver. The university was officially treating the hack as a crime and was asking the media and others not to report on the emails because they were stolen property. The police were investigating and there would be no comment from Professor Jones or anyone else. So, no, they could not get him on a train to us.
We were dismayed. We understood how difficult it was, but every screen in our office had the talking head of a familiar climate sceptic gleefully quoting decontextualised extracts. Their favourite email was from Jones to US climatologist Professor Michael Mann in 1999, in which he discussed what he called Mann’s ‘Nature trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in global warming – seemingly a smoking gun for anyone who didn’t believe in climate change.
Jones’s colleagues, however, told us that the ‘trick’ simply involved using data from a longer period of time to properly demonstrate the historic heat rise. Other exchanges were selected to show how Jones and his colleagues were working out ways to keep inconvenient findings out of peer-reviewed journals, and were downplaying scientific disagreements about Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, which had been widely cited as demonstrating that global warming in the twentieth century had been unprecedented. Used out of context, Jones’s words were alleged to prove that he and other researchers were fiddling with data and the press was having a field day. ‘The big climate change fraud’ was the front page of the Daily Express.
The press officers at UEA sounded as dismayed as us that they could not get Phil Jones into the SMC to answer for his own emails. So much of the UK’s world-class climate research took place at UEA that the press team there were specialists in climate science comms. I got the distinct impression that the media strategy for this crisis was being dictated by people way above the paygrade of the media team. In my experience, that is never a good thing.
The further up the communications ladder you go in universities, the further you move away from the science press officers who understand the material they’re dealing with. The directors of corporate communications, and the crisis management agencies they often employ at times like this, are tasked with protecting the reputation of the institution; the public’s understanding of science is not their primary concern. But this was building up to be a global media storm, which threatened to derail the Copenhagen climate summit and undermine public trust in the scientific consensus on climate change, as well as trust in science more generally. There was a much bigger issue at stake than the reputation of a single university.
Professor Jones’s research area involves measuring the annual growth rings in ancient trees to assess historic temperature change. As this relatively esoteric background might suggest, he is a mild-mannered man who does not enjoy the media limelight, and he was certainly not mentally prepared to be in it for all the wrong reasons. The media circus around Jones grew rapidly, with journalists camped outside his house and doorstepping his neighbours; he received hundreds of abusive emails; and threats were made against him and his family. We had no idea at the time just how great a toll the scandal was having on him. A decade later, when a prime-time BBC drama told the story of Climategate, a former colleague of Jones told me that the speed at which he had collapsed was astonishing: he lost a lot of weight very rapidly and was hardly able to talk – he became almost “ghost-like”.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Scientists vs Sceptics: The Story of Climategate from Beyond the Hype: Inside Science’s Biggest Media Scandals From Climategate to Covid, Fiona Fox, Elliott and Thompson.
