Climategate: Science of a Scandal review – the hack that cursed our planet

Is it pure arrogance that makes laypeople think they know better than scientists who have spent their lives painstakingly researching an issue? Or a desperate insecurity that makes them unable to stand the respect accorded to experts?

These questions swirled round Climategate: Science of a Scandal (BBC Four) as it anatomised the events of 10 years ago, when an anonymous hacker stole and shared thousands of emails between scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. They were seized on by assorted sceptics and deniers and used to cast doubt on climate change and global warming, helped by an uncritical media that leaned into the storm.

For fossil fuel companies and their ilk, the timing was propitious. The emails were released just as scientific consensus on the threat posed by global warming was filtering through to public consciousness and beginning to take root. The story began a few years before, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had – by collating historical and contemporary temperature data from around the globe – highlighted the iconic “hockey stick” graph. Its easily understandable depiction of 1,000 years of relatively stable temperatures (the long handle of the stick) veering sharply upwards from the industrial age onwards (the blade) did much to impress the threat of global warming on the collective mind.

Then Steve McIntyre, who worked in the fossil fuel industry, decided the graph was suspect and asked Phil Jones, the director of the CRU – a key contributor to the hockey stick study – to provide him with the data behind it. Prof Jones initially agreed (“He gave me much more than I was expecting,” noted McIntyre here). But, as the requests became more frequent, he stopped handing over data, because it wasn’t truly the CRU’s to give and he feared antagonising its suppliers. A stream of freedom of information requests followed, and even more when McIntyre mobilised his blog followers to apply en masse.

After that came the hack. By cherrypicking phrases from the e-mountain of correspondence, opponents undid much of the persuasive work that had been done. Amid the onslaught from sceptics and deniers, the scientists, wholly unused to such assaults, struggled to get their rebuttals across. One email from Jones caused the most excitement. The phrase “Use Mike’s nature trick to hide the decline” was heralded as proof of a conspiracy to deceive the world about global warming. In fact, his email was discussing how to exclude a well-known set of anomalous tree-ring results that, unlike all other data, purported to show a decline in temperature, so as not to distort the overall picture. “Trick” in statistician-speak basically means “neatest, best way to do something”. Deniers and the media went after Jones to the extent that he can still barely bring himself to talk about it. His former colleague Tim Osborn is likewise unable to suppress tears when he remembers the death threats and anonymous promises “to visit your wife and children”.

It is a story we are now depressingly familiar with, and it induces the same incredulous rage. Beyond the trolls, who have their own revolting pathology, who are these people who feel justified to try to undo a life’s work? Who feel able to set themselves up in judgment? What have they added to the sum of human knowledge?

The media’s role was examined, though not thoroughly enough. We saw multiple clips of incompetent spokespeople being presented as if they were of equal standing to the scientists under attack or their representatives, and forever whipping up the furore further rather than digging down into the facts. The question of what truly constitutes balance in programmes, of course, has become all the more pertinent in the years since, as our major broadcasters seem to have accepted that it equates to equal air time for all, however unqualified or small a group they represent.

Two independent inquiries and a government select committee exonerated the CRU of all the accusations hurled at it. “There is no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice … The rigour and honesty of the scientists is not in doubt.” On the 10th anniversary of Climategate, it would have been nice to see the rigour and honesty of their accusers interrogated more closely, but at least the scientists finally got to tell their side of the story.

The scandal almost certainly contributed to the lack of success of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference that followed. Fossil fuel industry-funded researchers have since carried out their own studies on the hockey stick data. They yielded precisely the same results as the original. The injustice still burns, along with the world.