Climategate: Why it matters
The scandal we see and the scandal we don’t
Analysis – Reading the Climategate archive is a bit like discovering that Professional Wrestling is rigged. You mean, it is? Really?
The archive – a carefully curated 160MB collection of source code, emails and other documents from the internal network of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – provides grim confirmation for critics of climate science. But it also raises far more troubling questions.
Perhaps the real scandal is the dependence of media and politicians on their academics’ work – an ask-no-questions approach that saw them surrender much of their power, and ultimately authority. This doesn’t absolve the CRU crew of the charges, but might put it into a better context.
After a week of scrutiny of the emails, attention is now turning to the programming source code. Three quarters of the material released is the work of the academics, much of which they had jealously guarded. This includes a version of the world’s most cited and respected temperature record – HADCRUT – and a number of surveys which featured prominently in the reports of the UN’s climate change panel, the IPCC. The actors here shaped the UN reports, and ultimately – because no politician dare contradict the ‘science’ – shaped global policy.
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