e the think tanks and pundits a bully pulpit in the form of airtime and headlines—without bothering to dig into the hacked emails and figure out what the fuss was about. While journalists were quick to quote email snippets that were causing a ruckus, it wasn’t until December 12—nearly a month after the initial release—that a team of Associated Press reporters finally parsed the entire set of emails and published a more accurate picture of their contents.
Still, you can’t completely blame journalists, says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “That’s the typical arc of any story,” he says. “Allegations and accusations can move more quickly through the media ecosystem than sorting out what’s really true.” What’s more, for years, the press had become accustomed to the refrain that the “science is settled” on global warming, and that it was now time to figure out how to deal with it. The “science is settled” mantra downplayed the many uncertainties that remain about the impacts and implications of climate change and the hard-fought battles over every conclusion. So when the debates about data were laid bare, the scandal was much easier to report than the science.
Attempting to figure out what we don’t yet understand is the pursuit of science—and as the emails showed, it’s not always pretty. “Science was revealed for what it actually is, which is a messy process that involves a lot of disputes and actual human beings,” says the Times‘ Revkin. The problem is that it takes a lot of complicated studies to show that the planet is warming due to human actions—but all that contrarians have to do to sustain inaction is create doubt. “It’s asymmetric warfare,” says Revkin.
If something good came of Climategate, says Mann, it’s the realization that climate scientists need a better communication and crisis-management strategy. To that end, a trio of scientists last fall formed the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, an effort to get climate researchers more directly engaged with the public by linking experts with reporters. “We have to accept much of the blame,” says Scott Mandia, a professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College and co-coordinator of the project. “It’s not good enough to publish information in journals and expect it to get out.” Nor, he says, can scientists leave the task of public communication—and of catching all the flak—to a small handful of colleagues.
The communications work will only get harder in the years to come. The next report from the IPCC, due out in 2013, is expected to include even more urgent warnings than the last edition, based on the current acceleration of climate change. And with the help of new sophisticated models for actual climate processes, scientists will attempt to provide a more nuanced and realistic picture of what’s to come, writes Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in a recent Nature article (PDF). But he also warns that the report could raise more questions than it answers: “[W]hile our knowledge of certain factors does increase, so does our understanding of factors we previously did not account for or even recognize.” At the leading edge of climate science, he writes, displaying the limits and uncertainties of science so publicly is not without risk, so the IPCC should proceed with caution when sounding the alarm bells.
“In other disciplines, this might not matter so much, but what to do about climate change is a high-profile, politically charged issue involving winners and losers, and such results can be misused,” Trenberth adds. “In fact—to offer one more prediction—I expect that they will be.”