. Once the hacker breached the server, he still would have had to find his way into the system administrator’s account, a feat that could have required special software to access the password. Then, in order to remain anonymous when posting the emails online, he would have had to scan the internet for nonsecure servers to work from—this would have allowed him to cover his own IP address. The hacker also used servers in multiple countries, making it even more difficult to trace his whereabouts.
It later became clear that CRU was not the only target. In the fall of 2009, unknown parties posing as network technicians attempted to break into the office of a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. There were also attempts to gain access to servers at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. According to a source within the institution, there were also unsuccessful attempts to breach the server at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. A US diplomatic cable that WikiLeaks released in late 2010 also revealed “evidence of an attempt to gain unauthorized entry to computer systems” belonging to the State Department’s climate bureau in 2009. The cable warned that “as negotiations on the subject of climate change continue, it is probable intrusion attempts such as this will persist.”
SO DID THE SCIENTISTS DO something more diabolical than gripe about critics and fret over how their research would be interpreted? Not according to seven separate inquiries on the subject, each of which found that the researchers’ work was not in question—though several concluded that their behavior was. An independent probe organized by the University of East Anglia (PDF) found that some had turned down “reasonable requests for information” and had, at times, been “unhelpful and defensive.” It noted “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness.”
But none of the exonerations mattered: The scientists had lost control of the narrative. The percentage of people who believe that the world is warming has fallen 14 points from its 2008 high, according to polling (PDF). Gallup’s annual poll in 2010 found that 48 percent of Americans said they believe that fears of global warming “are generally exaggerated”—the highest figure since pollsters began asking that question in 1997.
Most significant, however, has been the long-term hardening of the political divide on the issue. In 1997, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who believed in climate change was nearly the same—47 percent and 46 percent, respectively. By March 2010, 66 percent of Democrats and only 31 percent of Republicans agreed that global warming was already occurring. Half of the new House GOP members flatly deny that the planet is warming, and only four say they accept the science of climate change.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the new head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (PDF), last fall outlined plans to hold hearings on the “Politicization of Science,” focused largely on Climategate. Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas), the new chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has already said that he plans to look into “the global warming or global freezing.” The vice chairman of the same committee, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), has accused climate scientists of a “massive international scientific fraud (PDF).” Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, has subpoenaed (PDF) records from Mann’s time at the University of Virginia in an attempt to prove that he committed “fraud.” Congressional Republicans are also using Climategate as fodder in their fight to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
But climate scientists don’t tend to be adept at politics, and most of them didn’t enter the field expecting to land in the middle of a controversy over the future of industrial society. Accustomed to the slow-moving peer-review process, they were utterly unprepared to deal with the real-time, 24/7 news circus.
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