e, CRU’s Jones notes the death of a skeptic as “cheering news”; in another, Jones refers to scientists using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures that tree-ring data showed beginning in the 1960s. (The “trick”—substituting recorded temperature data when proxy data become unreliable—isn’t intended to deceive; it’s an acceptable practice in paleoclimatology, since most proxy data sets end around the 1980s, and recorded temperatures are more reliable, anyway.)
“It appears that the proverbial Climate Science Cat is out of the bag,” wrote Watts. He said that he had alerted two of the most vocal deniers in the US: the CEI’s Christopher Horner and Marc Morano, a former staffer for Sen. Inhofe. Morano is also the editor of Climate Depot, a Drudge Report-like clearinghouse for climate skeptics run by the oil-funded think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Blogger Terry Hurlbut posted excerpts of the emails on a conservative news site, the Examiner.
Even as the buzz around the emails kept building, scientists tried to dismiss them as a non-story. Jones only acknowledged the theft two days after the emails became public, in an interview with the New Zealand magazine Investigate. He said he wasn’t sure what exactly was in the hacked data, and noted that the university had not even alerted the police.
By the time the scientists finally reacted, the story was entering the news bloodstream. On the evening of November 19, CEI’s Horner first wrote about it on the National Review‘s website, calling it the “blue-dress moment” for climate change—alluding to the infamous evidence of Bill Clinton’s sexual exploits. That same day, Mosher sent a Facebook message to New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, flagging the emails. Revkin wrote about them the next day, November 20, noting that they were “causing a stir among global warming skeptics.”
By that time, NewsBusters, a site devoted to “exposing and combating liberal media bias,” ran a story claiming that the documents “appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world’s leading global warming alarmists.” Fox News’ site was running the headline “Climate Skeptics See ‘Smoking Gun’ in Researchers’ Leaked E-Mails.” On November 21, the Washington Post quoted CEI’s Myron Ebell, a well-known skeptic. “It is clear that some of the ‘world’s leading climate scientists,’ as they are always described, are more dedicated to promoting the alarmist political agenda than in scientific research,” he said. “Some of the e-mails that I have read are blatant displays of personal pettiness, unethical conniving, and twisting the science to support their political position.”
By December 1, the flap had even made The Daily Show. “Poor Al Gore,” mocked Jon Stewart. “Global warming completely debunked via the very internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!”
Things didn’t get much better for climate scientists when glaciologists pointed out an embarrassing error in the 2007 IPCC report—a thinly sourced and false claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. (True, 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are receding, but the Himalayas aren’t expected to be ice-free for several hundred years.) The IPCC acknowledged (PDF) in a statement that the “well-established standards of evidence…were not applied properly.” That Glaciergate coincided so closely with Climategate was a happy coincidence for skeptics, who used it as further evidence of the unreliability of climate science.
Many of the think tanks that seized upon the scandal in weeks that followed were the same anti-regulation, oil-coated outlets that have been promoting climate change denial for years. The Cato Institute, which has received funding from oil giants Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, was a key player—Cato senior fellow Patrick Michaels got prime real estate in the New York Times, on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, and on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. In a January 2010 newsletter, Cato boasted that its senior fellow was at the “center of the ‘Climategate’ controversy.”
Meanwhile, CEI, which has also enjoyed Koch and E