Climategate: The Real Story - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 152

Climategate was simply a vehicle for a more widespread and sustained smear campaign against
climate science and climate scientists than was before possible. While the identity of those
responsible for the initial break-in has not, as of this writing, been determined, it is clear that many of
the usual suspects in the climate change denial movement played critical roles in fashioning how it
would be framed and promoted. Indeed, the usual groups linked to fossil fuel interests appear to have
been closely involved in the orchestration of the associated PR campaign. 56 Koch Industries and the
Scaife Foundations played a particularly important role. One report showed that twenty or so
organizations funded at least in part by Koch Industries had “repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and
appeared as media spokespeople” in stories about climategate. 57
While these organizations may have been the principal architects of the climategate smear
campaign, it is instructive to look at some of the individual spokespeople who led the charge. Marc
Morano primarily acted as an aggregator, accumulating the various allegations and smears in a central
location, his Climate Depot Web site and e-mail distribution list. The most often quoted attackers,
however, were the usual contrarian protagonists, such as Patrick Michaels, Steve Milloy, Roy
Spencer, Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, and Christopher Monckton.
The tenor of the public discourse had, in the months following the CRU hack, shifted in favor of
the climate change deniers, and they seized full advantage. Suddenly, nothing was out of bounds.
Otherwise responsible journalists were suddenly willing to act as little more than stenographers for
the constant stream of bogus allegations being fed them. With each passing week, there was seemingly
a new climate-related “gate” to be manufactured and promulgated by contrarians in the climate
change debate.
Several of these “gates” related to minor errors in the IPCC AR4 report. There were two
sentences on page 493 in the working group 2 impacts report regarding the projected rate of future
decline of Himalayan glaciers that were in error. Rather than using the correct estimates as given in
the report of the scientific working group (working group 1), the authors had relied upon an outside
source. That source had made a transcription error, turning the projected time frame for
disappearance of those glaciers from A.D. 2350 into A.D. 2035. 58 There was another error in a
statement about sea level rise influences on the Netherlands in the working group 2 report, which
actually came from the Dutch. 59 Neither error made it into the technical summary reports or the
summaries for policy makers. Nonetheless, these minor errors in a three-thousand-page report were
seized upon by deniers.
Suddenly, how quickly Himalayan glaciers would melt (ironically, nobody was even questioning
that they would melt!) became the central issue of the IPCC report in the blogosphere and then the
mainstream media. “GlacierGate” was born, breathed into life by denialists like Marc Morano,
Christopher Booker, and James Delingpole of the Telegraph , and especially Jonathan Leake of the
Sunday Times . Then there was “Amazongate” and “Africagate” based, respectively, on media
distortions of what the IPCC actually said about Amazon drought, and African crop yields; Leake
once again had a prominent role in promulgating these faux scandals. 60 And eventually there was
“Pachaurigate,” a baseless character attack against IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri. 61 Such attacks on
the IPCC played into domestic politics as well. Denial outfits in the United States were bent on
overthrowing the EPA “endangerment finding” calling for regulation of greenhouse gas emissions by
attacking its scientific basis, which, in substantial part, was the scientific findings of the IPCC. If the