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IMPACT
In December 2009, world leaders came together at Copenhagen to address the issues of climate change and collectively take the first steps on the long road to global environmental health. However, even before the first words were spoken, thousands of documents and emails had been hacked and released after heavy editing which undermined the whole process. This event was called Climategate. Not only did Climategate undo previous work to raise the profile of the crisis but almost dashed the science of climate change upon the rocks of ignorance. Recently, BBC Four aired the documentary ‘Climategate: The science of scandal’ showing the horrific damage doneby the manipulation of these private documents and how, even now, world leaders are still turning a blind eye to uncomfortable and devastating truths. If we were to look at the thinking on climate change a few years before Climategate we are able to see evidence that suggest global warming was an accepted fact, notably the film from Al Gore, ‘An inconvenient Truth’ which was a box office success and key to his acceptance of a Nobel peace prize. Science had linked global warming to the burning of fossil fuels, and it seemed all that had to be done was the world leaders to take these facts on board and come up with “Documents plan. This would all sadly were leaked, and aunravel however, as mining company director Steve email McIntyre questioned the conversations data, leading to had been edited miscommunication, and to make it seem accusation eventually a call for confidential information. that climate When denied this, McIntyre change was asked everyone on his blog to send a Freedom of false” Information Request to the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit. Inevitably the system crashed but with this came what many felt was the end of the whole situation, yet just four months later in November 2009 many of the scientists involved saw much of their private correspondence had been uploaded onto the internet. Even more insidious was the choice of the documents that were leaked and how the email conversations had been structured and edited to make it seem that climate change was false, a conspiracy by top climate change scientists to further their own agenda. The fallout was huge.
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“Fossil fuel companies used Climategate as a ‘get out of jail free card’ when asked about their carbon emissions” Immediately the media began to report on the great climate change scam, fraudulent science and claims that tackling issues such as carbon emissions and fossil fuels were pointless as it had no effect on the environment. It seemed that the past few years of climate change certainty was horribly unravelling into an almost definitive belief that climate change was neither man-made nor a concern. Professor Phil Jones, the head of the climate research department, became the focus of much of the media vitriol, and the manipulation of a three-word phrase “hide the decline”, a simple phrase referencing tree growth, was shouted as proof that the world was actually cooling.
