Source: BBC4: Climategate: Science of a Scandal
URL: N/A
Date: 14/11/2019
Event: Climategate: Science of a Scandal
Credit: BBC4
People:
Michael Mann: I received an envelope in the mail, one day. And so I opened this envelope and some powder comes wafting out of it. My first thought was that I may have been subject to a deadly substance - anthrax. All because I decided to study applied math and physics, and then move into climate science. Yeah...
[Caption: Today there is scientific consensus about the threat of catastrophic climate change.]
[Scenes from COP25 in Paris: Lord Stern, Al Gore, Ban ki Moon et al applauding.]
Female newsreader: The historic agreement struck in Paris is the first to commit all countries to cut emissions.
[Caption: Ten years ago, the debate over global warming also seemed settled. Until one event shook climate science to its core.]
Female voice: This is about as scandalous as it gets in climate science...
Donald Trump: I guess they're saying it's a con...
Ted Poe: The science behind man-made global warming is melting before our eyes...
[Caption: In 2009, over one thousand emails from British climate scientists were hacked and released on the internet.]
Male anchor: Hackers broke into the email accounts of several prominent scientists who were working on climate change...
[Caption: The emails seemed to suggest scientists were exaggerating global warming, causing a scandal the media dubbed 'Climategate'.]
Male voice: Emails revealed a plot amongst the world's top climate scientists to hide the truth.
Male anchor: Do they show that some in the climate community are beginning to have second thoughts about whether global warming exists or not? Are they having doubts?
Fred Pearce: It was the greatest crisis that climate science had faced.
Male talk show host: Let me ask you: how damaging are those emails?
James Inhofe: It's the worst scientific scandal of our generation.
[Caption: Now for the first time all the key players at the heart of the scandal tell their story.]
Michael Mann: Climategate was a very organised misinformation campaign.
Fiona Fox: I have never experienced anything quite like the furore.
Tim Osborn: The speed with which it developed added to the feeling of being out of control of the process. It was hell, at times.
Alex Jones: Everything this group says is a fraud!
Gavin Schmidt: You have no idea what's going on, where all this shit is coming from...
Tim Osborn: We had death threats, saying "We know where you live and we're going to pay your wife and children a visit..."
Gavin Schmidt: That kind of thing can hit people very hard.
[Caption: CLIMATEGATE: Science of a Scandal.]
[Caption: By the mid 2000s, there was broad international agreement on the reality of global warming.]
[Scenes from the Novel Peace Prize Ceremony, Oslo in 2007, with Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri.]
Jeremy Paxman: Former US Vice President Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of his environmental work. The award was given to him jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Al Gore: We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise and we will act.
Gavin Schmidt: Climate change was very much in evidence in the media - around 2006, 2007 was kind of a leap, if you like.
Male newsreader: The UN Secretary-General says the prize shows it's beyond doubt that climate change is now affecting the world.
Michael Mann: In 2007, when the IPCC was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore, I think there was this sense of elation within the scientific community.
Gavin Schmidt: When IPPC was - got the Nobel Peace Prize, everybody was very excited - it was like: oh, finally like a recognition of the effort that goes into those reports.
Michael Mann: And it wasn't just the Nobel Peace Prize, it was a number of things that sort of came together.
[Caption: AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.]
Al Gore: Our ability to live is what is at stake.
Michael Mann: The movie An Inconvenient Truth brought the science to a much larger audience.
Male voice: An Inconvenient Truth was a surprising box-office hit, confronting audiences with the dangers from global warming...
Mike Hulme: Hollywood had got involved with climate change in 2004, with The Day After Tomorrow...
[Caption: THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.]
[Scenes from the movie The Day After Tomorrow].
Mike Hulme: ... very dramatic portrayal of climate change as existential and immediate.
Fred Pearce: So by the mid-2000s, more or less everybody agreed that climate change was happening and that it was really important. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the UN, had produced a series of blockbuster reports, which were by and large accepted by the political community, and they concluded that not only had the 20th century been the warmest century in a thousand years, the 1990s had been the warmest decade in a thousand years.
Michael Mann: There were all of these different threads that came together, in a way that made it feel like the battle over the basic science of climate change had been won, on the side of scientists. And I knew that wasn't true. There was a sense of complacency within the scientific community. I knew that that was ill-advised complacency, because there were signs, well in advance, that there was this coming rearguard assault on climate science.
[Caption: An unprecedented criminal attack was about to take place. Its focus would be one of the world's most important centres of climate science.]
Phil Jones: My name is Philip Jones, and I'd been Director of the Climatic Research Unit for a number of years. I joined the CRU in late 1976. I thought, though - and my wife thought, as well - that we would be moving on after three years. But I've been very fortunate in [being] able to stay here for the whole of my career.
Trevor Davies: Climatic Research Unit was established at the University of East Anglia in the early 1970s, as one of the very first research units anywhere in the world to be dedicated specifically to the study of climate change.
Fred Pearce: The Climatic Research Unit became a repository, globally, of information about what our climate was doing, especially about temperatures.
Tim Osborn: We've got a range of climatological information here - some in map form. We've got tables of meteorological data - this is from the 19th century. Here we've got some ships' log-book records...
Fred Pearce: In the 1980s and '90s, Phil and his colleagues were collecting data from all around the world - raw data, so from individual thermometers in individual weather stations in thousands of places across the planet.
Phil Jones: Well, I think - hold on - yes, this is the 1938 paper...
Michael Mann: Phil played a fundamental role in developing these surface temperature records into something that's a reliable measure of the actual changes in temperature at the surface of Earth.
Tim Osborn: The climate temperature reconstruction is an estimate of how the climate varied in the past. For the modern period we have measurements and observations from instruments - from thermometers and from rain gauges - but before those instruments were widely available, then we have to use indirect indicators of the climate - we called them "climate proxies". And these proxy records could come from various different natural archives, for example from ice cores or from the annual growth rings of trees.
Here's a sample that was made from a tree that had been cut down - this is an oak tree. You can see the annual growth rings - there's about 150 rings altogether. One of the advantages of tree-ring data is that the - each of the annual growth rings can be dated absolutely. Providing we have enough samples and they haven't overlapped together, then you can really calculate the dating back centuries and even thousands of years. You can see the sequence of rings - some are wider, some are narrower.
A number of scientists realised that the reason why these trees showed these patterns of poor growth and good growth were because they were responding to the climate or the weather, and therefore you could use that information, not just for dating the rings but actually telling us something about climate. So this particular ring I'm measuring next is quite a narrow one, so in my opinion colder, so the growing season was shorter.
Fred Pearce: So if you then put together the proxy data from the tree rings with the temperature data from thermometers, you can basically draw a line of global temperatures going back thousands of years. And that is a global temperature reconstruction.
Phil Jones: Now some of the first reconstructions we did were in the late 1990s, about '98, that went back almost a thousand years.
[Caption: The CRU's temperature reconstructions were used by the IPCC as part of its Third Assessment Report in 2001. This publication triggered a chain of events leading to Climategate.]
Fred Pearce: When the UN set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, it asked them to write regular big reports summarising where the climate science had got to. And the Third IPCC Assessment was the blockbuster report - it's the one that nailed the idea of that climate change was happening and it was real and it was big. The central image that they used to make their case was a graph that they put in the summary showing a reconstruction of global temperatures over the last thousand years.
George Monbiot: It was drawn from a whole load of different data sources, some from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, but all showing an almost identical pattern, of global temperatures trundling along innocently enough, not very much happening, and then suddenly the impact of industrialisation, of burning fossil fuels, of releasing greenhouse gases, and temperatures go voom!
[Caption: The global temperature graph which partially drew upon CRU data was given a name. 'The Hockey Stick'. The scientist who constructed the Hockey Stick was Mike Mann.]
Michael Mann: The Hockey Stick is this curve that my co-authors and I published 20 years ago... What it told us was that the warming that we've seen over the last century is not typical. It doesn't appear to happen naturally, on these time scales. [He draws a line on a blackboard.] Something like that... The warming is unprecedented, as far back as we could go, a thousand years. [At the blackboard again]. If you use your imagination, and you sort of fit a line here and a line here, it looks sort of like a hockey stick. Um, this is the blade and that's the handle, and that's the name that got - that was ultimately given to this curve.
Fred Pearce: It was an iconic image, if you like - scientists don't often produce iconic images but that was certainly one.
Tim Osborn: So based partly on the Hockey Stick, from Mike Mann's work, and partly on the reconstructions contributed by the Climatic Research Unit - the headline finding for the Assessment Report was that the modern period was likely the warmest in the last thousand years.
George Monbiot: When that was published, it was very difficult then to refute what climate science was telling us. And so it became imperative for climate science deniers to find some way of demonstrating that the Hockey Stick was bogus. And one of the most persistent critics of the Hockey Stick one of the people who seemed most determined to show that the Hockey Stick was false, was Steve McIntyre.
Steve McIntyre: I'm Steve McInyre, I've been interested in climate for 15 years now. In the late '80s and early '90s I worked for a variety of small mining companies, and I learned things that later became applicable to the climate business. [Showing photographs in an album.] There's a picture of me with several of the directors of the company, and investors.
Fred Pearce: Steve McIntyre is a Canadian, made some money betting on good and bad mineral prospecting. In his later years - his family had grown up, he'd paid off his mortgage, that kind of thing - he gave more time to recreational use of his mathematical skills.
Steve McIntyre: In the fall of 2002 I first became interested in the Hockey Stick because of the government brochures - they emphasised that 1998 was the warmest year in a thousand years. And I wondered, in the most casual way possible, how they knew that. In the business world, hockey-stick graphs are very common, and I produced a few myself. What tends to happen is that you have the business that's not doing very well, and then you've changed some things and - lo and behold - you then produce a projection of increasing revenues and profits. So I didn't automatically accept the Hockey Stick graph as being true. I thought: well, if nobody else has looked at Mann's work, I will.
Fred Pearce: McIntyre set up a website called Climate Audit and he began to publish, with some co-authors. And they started making... a few waves.
Steve McIntyre: At the end of October 2003 I published a first article on Mann's work.
Michael Mann: He published this article in this journal Energy & Environment. And he claimed that, um, you know, that the results were an artefact of missing data, bad data, all sorts of claims.
Steve McIntyre: And Mann says in response that we'd used the wrong data, and our criticisms of his study were therefore worthless. So we submitted an article in late 2004 to Geophysical Research Letters, a well-known scientific journal.
Michael Mann: But at this point, by the mid-2000s, there isn't just a Hockey Stick, there's what I sometimes refer to as a Hockey League - numerous published studies reaffirming our findings. And so McIntyre's - I think, sensing that he's lost that battle, he sort of moves on to other fronts, and now he's attacking the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit in the UK.
Fred Pearce: He began to ask Phil Jones and others at the Climate Research Unit for their raw data. Was it really true that the tenperatures had been warming around the world, in the way that the CRU said?
Steve McIntyre: My earliest interactions with Phil Jones were very positive. In 2004 I asked him for data and he gave me a polite and literate answer, going into much more detail than I expected.
Fred Pearce: Initially, Phil Jones would say "Yeah okay, I can give you the data, here it is". But the relationship rather broke down, with time.
Tim Osborn: Climatic Research Unit is not a prolific producer of raw data. We rely upon getting data from third parties. There was a genuine concern that if we shared the data from third parties, then in some cases we may not obtain further data in the future.
Steve McIntyre: And so they refused, on the basis that they had confidentiality agreements that prevented them from sending data to a non-academic.
Phil Jones: It really wasn't our data - so we'd done none of the collection. The met services had done all of the collection. And some met services - then, and even today - are reluctant to make all their data freely available.
Fred Pearce: The climate scientists started to see McIntyre as an ideologue, trying to bring them down. So the data flow dried up. McIntyre did not like that, so in the end he started putting in Freedom of Information requests.
Tim Osborn: The application of FOI - Freedom of Information regulations - to universities was a new thing, and it's also cloaked in uncertainty, because there's no hard and fast rules about what should be released and what shouldn't be released.
Phil Jones: First FOI request from him was about 2007.
Male interviewer: Could you use his name in that sentence, as well, as opposed to "him"?
Phil Jones: Um... I'd rather not.
Fred Pearce: Phil Jones found himself with almost endless requests for his data, using the Freedom of Information Act.
Tim Osborn: University took the lead in responding to the FOI requests and either released the information, all the data, or provided justification why they didn't. And so it is true that we weren't 100% open and transparent with data, at that time.
Fred Pearce: All this culminated in a breakdown of communication, really, between McIntyre and Jones. McIntyre then mobilised his readers on his website to put in a mass request of Freedom of Information for data.
Steve McIntyre: I did an FOI request and I invited blog readers to send similar requests to CRU.
Phil Jones: We had about 50 plus requests, one weekend, some time during 2009.
Fred Pearce: And I think, kind of, the system crashed at that point.
[Caption: The FOI campaign against the Climatic Research Unit reached a climax in July 2009. Four months later, an unidentified computer hacker plunged climate science into global crisis.]
Gavin Schmidt: My name's Gavin Schmidt and I'm a climate scientist. Back in the early 2000s, I started a blog called RealClimate. One of the first things I would do when I got up in the morning would be to check the blog. And so I logged in and started to look around to see what was going on, and I was logged out immediately. At which point I thought: well, that's very strange. That's when I noticed there was this massive file that had been uploaded onto our server, which, when you opened that up, was, you know, all this massive selected list of emails and documents that it doesn't take more than two seconds to work out had obviously come from the University of East Anglia.
Tim Osborn: Gavin Schmidt told us that we'd been hacked. We didn't receive a copy of the material that had been released, so we were somewhat left wondering as to what exactly this material was. A day or two later we then received a copy of the material from Gavin Schmidt and, to be honest, I looked at it, had a quick glance through it and I thought: well, there's not very much in this, is there. Turned out I was wrong.
Michael Mann: This was just days before Thanksgiving, and I check into my email and I get this message from Gavin, pointing out, you know, that RealClimate had been hacked. And not only had it been hacked but the hackers had uploaded a very large archive of emails to and from me and involving other leading researchers.
Gavin Schmidt: We kind of went back to being online. It was obvious to me that this was going to drop through some other method, so really it was just a question of: where's it going to pop up?
Steve Mosher: I'm getting a cab home, and I got this link, and it's a link to a website. And I go to the link, and it's a zip file of emails. And they're from CRU, which is a climate research unit in England. I'm like: what?! And so I start reading.
Fred Pearce: Steve Mosher was a statistician - he often called himself a "lukewarmer", which in the jargon basically means he thinks global warming is maybe not such a big deal and that people are making too much of it. And he was a kind of go-to person in California, for a group of climate sceptics. The hacked emails were sent to him, to verufy whether he thought they were true.
Steve Mosher: You know, I was kind of like: investigation - what can I do to verify these emails? So then I would call up Mac and I would say "Okay Mac, er, did you send a mail to Jones on such and such a date?"
Steve McIntyre: Mosher was reading a lot of these emails to me and I said "Yeah, those are 100% that they're real".
Fred Pearce: There were thousands of emails - there was a huge amount of material.
Bob Ward: They showed an ongoing argument between climate scientists and some of their critics, something that had been going on for many, many years.
Fred Pearce: Mosher was the first person to read all these emails.
Steve McIntyre: He started going through the file and finding some of the more interesting emails.
Steve Mosher: I picked a few mails that I thought were trenchant.
Male voice: The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment.
Steve Mosher: They stiil end up being the most mails talked about.
Male voice: I've just completed Mike's Nature trick... to hide the decline.
Michael Mann: They had decided to choose, you know, a dozen or so of the emails that seemed the most salacious. Anything that had a word or phrase that sounded incriminating.
Male voice: Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith?
Steve Mosher: I published a link to the mails, so like, told everyone [?] "Go read 'em". Cat's out of the bag.
[Caption: On Friday 20 November the hacked emails go viral. 'Climategate' has begun.]
Bob Ward: The web was alive with reports of a massive number of emails which appeared to show evidence of wrong-doing by climate scientists, in particular about the record of global temperature, and the so-called Hockey Stick graph.
Fred Pearce: What was presented to the world was that these emails showed a conspiracy among climate scientists to hide their data, to stop independent people having access to their data so that they could control the story of climate change.
Tim Osborn: We first saw the material on the Thursday and then over that weekend, so just within a few days it had blown up into a national and then a kind of world-wide media storm.
[Caption: Monday 23 November.]
Female voice: Hackers apparently broke into a UK university department, dumped thousands of emails, sparking allegations that climate scientists are attempting to pull the wool over everbody's eyes.
Trevor Davies: The media narrative didn't really develop - it just happened. A great deluge, a tsunami.
Male voice: There's a series of hacked email exchanges going back a decade, appear to show evidence of data being withheld from critics, and even adjusted...
Jeremy Paxman: If we can't trust the scientists on global warming, then is any of the change they tell us is necessary worth the effort?
George Monbiot: As soon as this stuff began to hit the press, it was instantly spun as being evidence of some vast conspiracy.
Male anchor: Do they show that some in the climate community are beginning to have second thoughts about whether global warming exists or not? Are they having doubts?
George Monbiot: The mainstream media were highly hostile to climate science anyway. The billiionaires who owned the newspapers hated the idea that the whole economy might have to change because we were destroying our life-support systems.
Pat Michaels: There is so much in here - it's like Watergate. Things are going to come up and up and up and up, for the next year.
Michael Mann: The claim is that climate scientists were trying to hide the fact that the globe is actually now not warming, that there's a decline in temperature.
Alex Jones: Everything this group says is a fraud! But they're following the rule of Hitler - the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.
George Monbiot: So it was - or so it appeared - the climate science deniers' Holy Grail.
James Inhofe: It's the worst scientific scandal of our generation.
Michael Mann: This was a very organised misinformation campaign, a propaganda campaign.
James Inhofe: It's the worst scientific scandal of our generation.
Lord Monkton: It is absolutely no point trying to mitigate carbon emissions - it makes not the slightest difference to the climate
Michael Mann: The campaign to discredit the science of climate change, just weeks in advance of the Copenhagen climate summit, which was the most important opportunity for meaningful progress, in terms if international climate policy in years.
Julian Gregory: The message came in to us on Friday, and over the weekend I think its siginificance began to emerge. We designated the investigation a Category A investigation - that's the highest level, and it's usually associated with things like homicide or terrorist incidents. The reason for that was the apparent publication of this data intended to influence world events, to influence a global intergovernmental conference on climate change.
Male interviewer: So you think the hacker was someone who was a reader of your site?
Steve McIntyre: Well, there's - yeah, I'm - I'm convinced of that. If the hacker were ever identified, I'm 100% convinced that he would have an alter ego that I would recognise.
Fred Pearce: Whoever did the hacking didn't just stumble on this material by accident. They made a point of hacking their way into the server of the Climate [sic] Research Unit. And they knew what they were looking for when they got there.
George Monbiot: The focus of the attack was the Director of the Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones.
Female newsreader: It's important to look at who these people are that are involved - obviously there's Professor Jones, who is the scientist at the heart of this recent leaked email scandal.
Fred Pearce: The media storm very quickly began to focus on Phil Jones at the Climate [sic] Research Unit. All the emails were either from or to researchers there. And his name turned up more than anywhere else.
Female newsreader: One email from the Director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, has attracted the most comment. It talks about using "Mike's Nature trick", to "hide the decline".
George Monbiot: One of the key phrases that was picked out of these emails, which was just constantly bruited abroad as evidence of manipulation, was the phrase "hide the decline".
Female newsreader: That graph was discussed in the much-mentioned email which talked of a "trick" to "hide the decline..."
Male voice: ... the best way of hiding the decline...
Male voice: ... to hide the decline...
Male voice: ... hide the decline... [echoing] ... cline... cline... cline...
Fred Pearce: Most people thought that it was a big statement about hiding a decline in global - real global temperatures.
Male voice: In there, the bombshell is revealed that they knew that since 1961 the Earth began a cooling trend, that they were cooking the data.
Michael Mann: "Hide the decline" happened to appear in an email from Phil Jones to me, and it's amazing how this email has been laundered and misrepresented and cherry-picked to feed all of these different mythologies.
Gavin Schmidt: That email, the "hide the decline" email, was written about a graph that appeared in a 1999 WMO publication, there was like a - it was cover art.
Tim Osborn: For that particular diagram, the purpose was to show the course of temperatures across the northern hemisphere over the last 1,000 years.
Michael Mann: And Phil's showing three different reconstructions. But one of them is using tree-ring density data. There was a problem that was known as the "divergence problem", which is that after about 1960 these tree-ring densities, which correlate so well with temperatures in previous decades, starts to break down.
Tim Osborn: We chose not to include the last three decades of the tree-ring density record, because we knew they were showing something that wasn't backed up by the accurate thermometer data, which show the ongoing warming. Trees are complex biological organisms, and therefore they respond to multiple factors - not only temperature. Something else could have affected the tree that year.
Michael Mann: And there have been various theories for why this unnatural decline in the response of these tree-ring data to temperature after 1960 might happen.
Tim Osborn: The most convincing explanations are linked to other things that happened in the late 20th century, that didn't happen before.
Michael Mann: It could have to do with acid rain, it could have to do with ozone depletion. And so in the email, when Phil Jones' refers to "hiding the decline" all he meant was: not showing the bad and misleading data.
Tim Osborn: The word "trick" in the email was simply used to indicate a useful and convenient way of addressing a particular problem.
Michael Mann: So it was an entirely innocent and appropriate conversation between three scientists talking about the most honest way to depict what we know, on the cover of a government report to policy makers who might want to know something about climate change.
[Caption: With Climategate now a global story, the world's media focuses on the 'hide the decline' email. And tracking down Phil Jones.]
Male voice: ... and we were hoping to talk directly to Professor Jones about the leaked emails but in his absence we're joined on the line by climate historian Tom Crowley, whose previous...
Fiona Fox: The Science Media Centre was set up to encourage scientists to engage more effectively and more often with these kind of big, messy, politicised stories that were hitting the headlines. We were getting calls from science and environment journalists in the UK media - the theme was very consistent. We need Phil Jones - or somebody - to interpret these emails for us, because right now this vacuum is being filled by the sceptics, who are putting their interpretation on it.
Gavin Schmidt: My suggestion to the folks at UEA was that they should have a big press conference with all the people that were involved, and just let people ask questions until everybody got bored and went home. That's not what they did.
Trevor Davies: The media wanted Phil - the rest of us were not good enough.
Bob Ward: I had spoken early on to the University of East Anglia about putting Phil Jones up to respond to the accusations. But they told me early on that he had been taking this all very badly, and they had essentially taken the wise decision to shield him from the media.
John Roberts: It has taken an incredible toll on the Director, Professor Phil Jones - he has literally gone underground. There are dozens of requests from media outlets here in the UK and around the world, including in the United States, to have an interview with him - when we went looking for him yesterday and couldn't find him...
Tim Osborn: We felt a great deal of sympathy for - for Phil Jones, because of the scrutiny and the pressure he was under.
Male interviewer: You went through such an appalling experience - it would just be interesting to hear how it felt.
Phil Jones: How I feel might change from week to week, year to year, so it's not... something I want to go down that route...
Male interviewer: Sure.
Trevor Davies: I can understand why Phil Jones does not want to talk about the level of stress that he was under, because it was enormous.
Gavin Schmidt: It's like a fire hose of shit. They'll train their fire hose on somebody for a little while, and you have no idea what's going on, where all this shit is coming from. And then as soon as they're done with you, they'll move on to somebody else and then you'll be - you'll just be left in a pile. That kind of thing can hit people very hard.
Tim Osborn: So all these things together, you know, it made it a very difficult time. We had death threats. You know, receiving an email saying "We know where you live and we're going to" - [Tim Osborn looks upset, has a drink of water] - so yes, receiving emails that say "We know where you live and we're going to pay your wife and children a visit"... Sorry, I'd rather have a pause... Yeah.
Trevor Davies: We considered the best way of demonstrating an appropriate duty of care to our scientists would be to commission an independent inquiry.
[Caption: Tuesday 1 December 2009. Phil Jones steps aside as director of the CRU. The UEA commissions two independent inquiries into the emails.]
Male newsreader: Phil Jones, the head of a British climate research institute has stepped aside, after leaked emails were said to suggest that the case for global warming had been...
Female newsreader: An inquiry has been launched into Climategate, the hacking of scientists' emails that has fuelled scepticism about global warming, which will ask how messages from the University of East Anglia found their way onto the internet...
Bob Ward: I think from that point on, the University of East Anglia were playing in defensive mode - they did not have control of the story, they were responding to their critics who were pushing forward this story. [Placing newspapers on a desk.] Some [inaudible] examples here of the kinds of coverage that was happening, over that period. So much of of it was inaccurate and misleading and hostile to the climate scientists.
George Monbiot: What you had was just a festival of destruction, as the newspapers, the bloggers, the climate science deniers, the fossil-fuel companies ran roughshod over the reputation of those scientists.
Bob Ward: Any suggestion of a link with climate change science suddenly became front-page news. There was a tendency to report the claims of climate change deniers as if they were equivalent in credibility to those of mainstream science.
Male anchor: Kevin Trenberth is a climatologist for the US Center for Atmospheric Research, Myron Ebell is Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute...
Bob Ward: And so what would happen is the audience would just hear one scientist talking about what mainstream science had found about climate change, and then they heard another, apparently credible, voice - even though not a scientist - saying the opposite.
Marc Morano: You can't act as if this is sceptics. Your fellow colleagues -
Martha Kearney: Hang on a second, Marc Morano -
Marc Morano: - are saying this.
Martha Kearney: - let him answer your question.
Andrew Watson: Will you stop shouting? Um - I...
Marc Morano: Sir, I'll stop shouting.
Andrew Watson: Oh, good.
Bob Ward: And they were left thinking: well, who should I believe?
Piers Corbyn: Carbon dioxide is actually a good thing for the world - more CO2 means plants and agriculture is more efficient, and plants grow faster.
Bob Ward: We tend to describe it as false balance.
Andrew Watson:... but what I would agree with [Mark Morano is saying something] is that the science - will you shut up, just a second? Um -
Marc Morano: Oh...
Gavin Schmidt: These kind of pseudo-debates, they do a disservice to both the topic and to the news organisations that organise them.
[Montage of previous clips from news programmes, with soundtracks from each clip being played simultaneously, creating a cacophony.]
Michael Mann: What makes climate science contentious? It isn't the science itself, the nature of the science that makes it contentious. Because I could tell you, as somebody who started out in theoretical physics, there are some assumptions and approaches we use in theoretical physics that are as tentative as any approach used in climate science. And yet where are the huge lobby groups attacking theoretical physics and attacking theoretical physicists? They're not there - they don't exist, because theoretical physics doesn't pose a threat to the wealthiest, most influential industry on the face of the Earth, the fossil-fuel industry.
George Monbiot: And so climate science's obscure, innocuous profession becomes the battleground for vast economic and political interests.
[Caption: Just two weeks after the release of the CRU emails, world leaders gathered for the 15th UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.]
Female newsreader: The long-awaited UN conference on climate change has begun in Copenhagen...
Jon Sopel: Yes, the mood music is positive and thousands of people have converged on Copenhagen, hoping that some sort of historic deal might be within reach...
Female voice: A warm welcome to Copenhagen...
Michael Mann: Climategate did help, in part, to derail the proceedings in Copenhagen - in fact, the first words out of the Saudi Arabian delegate's mouth was that these stolen emails show that climate change is not the problem people are claiming it is, and this is going to have a fundamental impact on the proceedings here in Copenhagen.
Female newsreader: To the dismay of environmental campaigners, the UN conference on climate change is drawing to a close without reaching a legally binding agreement.
Male newsreader: The climate change talks seem to be ending in confusion, if not chaos. [Echoing.] Chaos... chaos... chaos...
George Monbiot: I think it's fair to say that the talks were probably doomed anyway. You had several nations which were absolutely determined that there was going to be no significant global action.
Fred Pearce: I think it may well be true to say that the emails had their biggest effect in the aftermath of the Copenhagen conference. They certainly made it harder to make the case for urgent action.
[Caption: Saturday 9 January 2010. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee summons Phil Jones to give evidence.]
Susan Watts: This is the only day of verbal evidence for the select committee, and they're keen to hear from their star witness, the former head of the Climate [sic] Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and the subject of many of those emails - Phil Jones. This is the first time he's come under close public scrutiny.
Bob Ward: I felt a sense of trepidation on Phil's behalf, because I'd heard from the University of East Anglia that he was really struggling to cope. I worried that he was going to break down or that he would be treated badly by a select committee - with politicians, not scientists.
Susan Watts: The toughest questions came from Labour MP Graham Stringer, who asked Professor Jones why he'd been reluctant to release data to certain people, and quoted from one email Professor Jones wrote, in particular.
Graham Stringer: Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?
Phil Jones: I've obviously written some very awful emails, and I fully admit that.
Graham Stringer: That's very clear -
Phil Jones: Yes, it is -
Graham Stringer: - it's absolutely clear denial of this man's attempt to get at what you were doing.
Phil Jones: Yes, and I had been in discussion with him for a number of months before that.
Bob Ward: I think he gave painfully honest answers to those questions. He admitted to making some mistakes. But I think what was very obvious was that he was not engaged in any kind of conspiracy and not engaged in misconduct.
Susan Watts: There had been some concern about how Professor Jones would react to close media attention. In fact he was pretty robust under questioning.
[Caption: The House of Commons Committee published its report on the CRU's work in March 2010. In the months following, the independent inquiries also delivered their findings. There was "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice". "The rigour and honesty of the scientists are not in doubt". Phil Jones was reinstated as director of the CRU in July 2010.]
Gavin Esler: The Climategate controversy is, officially at least, over. The third and final inquiry into questionable and embarrassing...
Female journalist: Rarely has an area of science and its relationship with the world come under such intense scrutiny. Three inquiries focussed on the team at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, CRU. Broadly, all dismissed suggestions that the thousand-odd emails release onto the internet showed scientists had manipulated data to exaggerate the evidence of climate change...
Fred Pearce: The inquiries certainly exonerated the scientists from any charges of having a grand conspiracy or indeed lying to anybody about the climate science.
Trevor Davies: Clearly we were pleased that the science had been vindicated, not only for our own scientists' sake, but also for climate science generally.
[Caption: However, the inquiries criticised the scientists for not always showing the "proper degree of openness".]
George Monbiot: Major charges did not stick, but there were some serious issues left over, and they were to do with failing to release data and blocking Freedom of Information Act requests.
Bob Watson: They should have had more openness and transparency in their data and in their computer codes - there's no question, whatsoever.
Trevor Davies: The University, very soon after the outcome of those inquiries, increased its capacity for responding to Freedom of Information requests. So I think that is - that is one of the lessons that we learned, that scientists not only have to open but they have to be seen to be open.
Gavin Schmidt: These are lessons that all of the scientific community are learning , you know, pretty much on a day-to-day basis, you know, after the last twenty years, as we've moved into a more open-science kind of expectation.
[Caption: Two years after the inquiries, some scientists in the USA remained unconvinced by the CRU's science. And they began running their own analysis of the CRU data.]
[Caption: BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA: March 2011.]
Phil Jones: A number of physicists at the University of Berkeley in California decided to start again and produce what they said would be the true record of temperature, from the mid-19th century to the present.
Steve Mosher: When I joined, I was involved helping to write the papers, to re-write the papers, to answer their reviewers' concerns.
Gavin Schmidt: This is partially funded by fossil-fuel interests - the Koch brother, who were the, I think, the richest people in the US, who run very a large fossil-fuel conglomerate. And they funded it, presumably with the anticipation that it would undermine all of the other work that had been done by the CRU.
Phil Jones: Well, they did lots of this work, and it still came out with the same answer.
Gavin Schmidt: They came up with exactly the same answer that everybody else had come up with.
Steve Mosher: What's that mean? It means CRU are not frauds. It means it's not a hoax. So let's end the debate over temperature, so that we can focus on the part of the debate that really matters. The CO2 will warm the planet. How much? What can we do about it? What should we do about it?
George Monbiot: There are still plenty of people denying climate science. I get them in my social media feed every day. What has changed a bit is that on the whole, they're not outright denying the entire scientific canon. They're saying "It's not as bad as you say, and therefore we don't have to take action".
Steve McIntyre: I've lived through fifty years of climate change, as an adult, and I'm over 70 now. And in those fifty years, there has been a slight warming. Our civilisation has adapted effortlessly to that slight warming. If the things were as bad as advertised, it should be biting us a lot harder than it is now.
[Caption: Global temperatures have changed faster in recent decades than during any period in the last 2000 years. Eight of the warmest years on record have occurred since the hack. The frequency and severity of certain extreme weather events is increasing.]
Phil Jones: If we continue to burning fossil fuels and releasing other trace gases into the atmosphere, then the climate is going to continue to warm. And the change could become quite rapid.
Bob Ward: We need to do more if we're going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. We're not acting fast enough. Climategate and the emails and the controversy around it, has contributed to slowing that down.
Michael Mann: You continue to see Climategate used as an argument for inaction by certain politicians.
Bob Ward: I think it would be a very serious mistake to assume that Climategate couldn't happen again today.
[Caption: Since the email hack of 2009, Phil Jones, Mike Mann and Tim Osborn have continued to research the Earth's climate. Their work remains central to our understanding of the threat of global warming.]
[Caption: Whoever hacked the CRU's emails was never caught. The criminal investigation was closed in 2012. ]