Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
(the atmosphere, oceans, and ice), a topic on which he had recently published.
29
There were some ill-advised statements in some of the e-mails. Phil Jones asked colleagues to
were vexatious, part of a campaign of harassment, his comment showed poor judgment. Let's keep in
mind, however, that, first, nothing in one's training as a scientist prepares one for the kind of
dishonest attacks to which he and others have been subjected, and second, that it can be incredibly
exasperating to find yourself barraged by, for example, more than sixty frivolous FOIA demands in a
single weekend, as was detailed in the preceding chapter. In any case, there is no evidence that Jones
actually deleted any e-mails. Nor is there any evidence of any impropriety in his e-mails which, after
all, are now all in the public domain as a result of the CRU e-mail theft.
Shaping the Narrative
Some pundits have likened the disinformation campaign built around the CRU hack to earlier public
propaganda campaigns.
Climate Cover-Up
author James Hoggan, for example, took note of its
similarity to World War II propaganda in the way it employed “character assassination, innuendo,
misdirection, and obfuscation” to create the appearance of “a sparkly 'scandal' easily digestible by a
lazy, incompetent media.”
31
The climate change denial movement had absorbed the lessons contained in the 2002 Luntz
memo on the importance of messaging and language and employed it in the East Anglia hacking
episode to maximum effect. Critically, the deniers seized the initiative in framing the media narrative
from the start, ensnaring journalists into emphasizing the out-of-context and—as we have now seen—
distorted content of the stolen e-mails, rather than the crime through which they had been obtained. It
was a sweet victory for climate change deniers that so much of the media adopted their framing, even
to the point of accepting their moniker—climategate—to characterize the affair.
There were several layers of irony to this framing. First of all, many of the far-right groups
working to manufacture or promote the climate-gate scandal advocated libertarian views of
government that stress individual freedoms and warn against the intrusion of government into the
affairs of individuals. Did they believe that it was somehow OK when individuals, rather than
government, intruded into those affairs? Sarah Palin, among the first politicians to pounce on climate
scientists after the CRU hack, expressed outrage when her own e-mails had been hacked during the
2008 presidential campaign and delight when the hacker was convicted of a felony offense:
“Violating the law, or simply invading someone's privacy for political gain, has long been repugnant
to Americans' sense of fair play.”
32
Indeed, the smear campaign surrounding the stolen CRU e-mails had more in common with the
aforementioned swiftboat attacks against presidential candidate John Kerry than with the Watergate
scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. Award-winning filmmaker Richard
Brenne perhaps summarized it best: “[Emphasizing] the content of the e-mails rather than the illegal
hacking would be like someone emphasizing only what the Watergate burglars found without ever
mentioning their crime or its cover-up.”
33
Supporters of the climate scientists consequently argued for
the use of a more appropriate name such as SwiftHack, Deniergate, KochScam, or Imhoax.
34
As Morgan Goodwin of DeSmogBlog put it, “'Climategate,' or 'Swifthack' was a media story
