Ross Clark Ross Clark

‘Climategate’ still matters – but not how the BBC thinks it does

It is 12 years now since a tranche of emails were scraped from the server of the University of East Anglia in what became know as Climategate. An East Anglia climate server was hacked, and the documents were pored over. The story won’t go away, not least because the BBC has just put out two programmes on the subject: a TV drama called the Trick, and a Radio 4 documentary called ‘The Hack That Changed the World’. Both try to establish the same narrative: that the scientists whose emails were leaked were victims of a crime — a massive data theft — and that these brilliant, honest people were then unfairly dragged through the mire as their integrity was questioned, when the world should really have been asking: who are the evil hackers and why are they trying to discredit climate science?

That the emails were ‘stolen’ is a fair enough description of what happened. Whether the BBC would use the same term had someone hacked into the computers of, say, an oil company and disclosed emails about what it knew about carbon emissions and climate change is quite another matter. I suspect that it might then prefer to view the story as one of legitimate public interest I certainly don’t recall the BBC covering the MPs’ expenses scandal – which happened in the same year as Climategate — as a mere data theft story.

Theft or no theft, Climategate revealed important matters of public interest

It matters because in treating Climategate as pure data theft story, you bury what it revealed about the practices of some climate scientists. It is true that some sceptics over-egged the scandal, wrongly claiming that the infamous words ‘hide the decline’ suggested that scientists knew global temperatures were falling, and were attempting to cover this up. It is also true that the scientists whose emails were leaked were cleared of scientific fraud in an investigation.

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