ple 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.
The press gave 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 engage