Ten years ago, leading climate scientists at the University of East Anglia had a mass of email correspondence stolen from their computers and broadcast around the world, in what became known asย โClimategateโ.
Climate science deniers pounced on the leaked emails as supposed proof that scientists were manipulating data and creating panic about climate change out ofย nothing.
The email release was deliberately timed to sow doubt ahead of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, which ended in disappointment when countries failed to come to an agreement on curbing emissions. Saudi Arabiaโs lead climate negotiator at the talks even claimed that the correspondence showed there was โno relationship whatsoever between human activities and climateย changeโ.
Multiple inquiries were conducted andย no evidence of scientific malpractice was found โ thoughย the scientists in question received some criticism for not being completely transparent around their data andย methodologies.
Public trust in climate science was shaken, with a series of scientists’ quotes stripped of context and used to cast aspersions on theirย integrity.
While the identity of the hackers is still unknown, there was a very public effort by long-time climate science deniers, particularly in the UK and US, to make the most of the controversy and weaken trust in theย science.
Some have gone on to become prominent advisors to those in government. Others have been forced to the fringes of theย blogosphere.
So, who were Climategateโs ringleaders, and where are theyย now?
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UK
US andย Canada
Steve McIntyre & Rossย McKitrick
UK
Jamesย Delingpole
James Delingpole was one of the first journalists to write about the hacked emails and was credited with coining the term โClimategateโ, though he has since admitted he came across it in the comments section of a climate scepticย blog.
In an article for the British newspaper The Telegraph, for which he was blogging, he said the emails had caused the โconspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming mythโ to be โsuddenly, brutally and quite deliciouslyย exposedโ.
He predicted the episode would deal a โblow to the AGW lobby’s credibility from which it is never likely to recoverโ, calling it a โBerlin Wall momentโ for climate sceptics in a post on hisย website.
In the intervening years, Delingpole has continued to claim that there is โno convincing evidenceโ that the climate is warming โin ways which are dangerous orย unprecedentedโ.
He has also been a vocal opponent of wind energy in the UK and was involved in a plan in 2012 to push the issue up the political agenda by standing against the Conservative MP Chris Heaton-Harris โ himself a prominent critic of renewable energy.
Since 2014, Delingpole has been executive editor of the London branch of the alt-right website Breitbart and regularly writes for the Spectator magazine, where he recently described his reporting on Climategate as his โfinestย hourโ.
Christopherย Booker
Christopher Booker passed away in July 2019. For decades he was one of the UKโs most prominent climate science deniers, writing regular columns for Theย Telegraph.
Booker saw the emails as evidence of a great conspiracy among climate scientists, calling it the โgreatest scientific scandal of our ageโ. He said the accused scientists were โtrying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction โ to lower past temperatures and to โadjustโ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an acceleratedย warmingโ.
Just a month before Climategate, Booker had published a book called The Great Global Warming Disaster, which has been dubbed a โdefinitive guide forย scepticsโ.
The following month, Booker accused the then head of the UNโs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of making a โfortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies,โ representing a conflict of interest with his IPCC position. After an independent audit found this to be untrue, the newspaper was forced to apologise and retract theย article.
Booker continued to write columns casting doubt on theย threat of climate change for a decade after Climategate, last year describing the idea the UKโs summer heatwave was linked to climate change as โhot airโ in an article for the Daily Mail. โWe shall continue to have abnormally hot summers from time to time, just as we did in 1976 and 1846, way back before global warming was invented,โ heย concluded.
He also wrote a report for the UKโs principal climate science denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) that characterised the scientific consensus on climate change as โgroupthinkโ. An article based on the report was published by CapX, a news and opinion site run by the Thatcherite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which is based in offices next door to the GWPF on Tufton Street, in Westminster,ย London.
Grahamย Stringer
Labour MP Graham Stringer was a member of the House of Commonsโ Science and Technology Committee at the time and was part of an investigation into the hacked emails launched by the committee the followingย year.
Highly sceptical of the climate scientists, Stringer pushed for a more critical final government report on the incident and later wrote that the โwork done at [the University of East Angliaโs] Climatic Research Unit barely qualified asย scienceโ.
The inquiry found that โaccusations of dishonesty against CRUโ were unfounded but acknowledged that climate scientists needed to โbecome more transparent by publishing raw data and detailedย methodologiesโ.
Stringer has since been a leading supporter of Brexit in the Labour party, serving on the board of the official Vote Leave campaign and subsequently backing the Leave Means Leave pressure group, co-founded by Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice.
He joined the board of the UKโs principal climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, inย 2015.
Nigelย Lawson
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Nigel Lawson, had just founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) when the scientists’ emails were released and quickly called for a publicย inquiry.
He said in a statement that the integrity of climate science had been โcalled into questionโ and the reputation of British science โseriously tarnishedโ by the email hack. Lawson gave evidence to the parliamentary investigation launched the following year, alongside GWPF director Benny Peiser.
Since then, the GWPF has continued to cast doubt on the threat of climate change and lobby against action to cutย emissions.
Lawson, who stepped down as Chairman of the group at the start of this year but remains its Honorary President, has frequently been the subject of complaints to the BBC for misleading statements about climateย change.
He has also played a leading role in the Brexit campaign, chairing the official Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 EUย referendum.
Andrewย Montford
Andrew Montford, a writer and retired accountant, was commissioned by the Global Warming Policy Foundation to conduct an inquiry of their own into Climategate. The output was ‘GWPF Reportย 1′.
Montford was paid ยฃ3,000 for his services and the GWPF released the results in September, 2010. He has been Deputy Director of the group sinceย 2017.
Three enquiries in the UK, one by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, one an independent panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh, and an independent review led by Sir Muir Russell, had all exonerated the scientists of any scientific misconduct before the GWPF conducted itsย enquiry.
According to Montford’s own report, the other three inquiries were โrushed, cursory, and largely unpersuasive.โ Although two known climate science deniers had been involved โ Labour MP Graham Stringer and engineering professor Michael Kelly โ Montford criticised the inquiries’ lack of climate โscepticsโ on theirย panels.
Discussing his report, he admitted he was โpartisan in this argumentโ but argued it should not, however, beย dismissed.
Since Climategate, Montford has written reports claiming children are being brainwashed about climate change in schools and that a recent David Attenborough documentary was an โeight-part, multi-million pound fundraiserโ for the environmental organisation WWF.
Rogerย Tattersall
Roger Tattersall is the author of the blog Tallblokeโs Talkshop and was one of the first four blogs to receive a link to the hackedย emails.
Tattersall has referred to the mysterious person(s) who released the stolen East Anglia emails as โour old friend FOIA,โ although he claims he doesn’t know the hacker’sย identity.
According to his blog, police seized some of his computers in 2011 but he was not considered a suspect by the followingย year.
Anthony Watts later lauded Tattersallโs blog for being โThe first blogger to break the Climategate2 storyโ, a second wave of email releases inย 2011.
Like many others involved in Climategate, Tattersall has since been heavily involved in campaigning for Brexit, working as Assistant Director of Vote Leave, as well as for Grassroots Out and Leave Meansย Leave.
He was a prospective parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party for the 2015 election and a โWest Yorkshire Organiserโ for The Brexit Party earlier thisย year.
He is also currently Chief Executive of a fringe group called Clexit (Climate Exit), formed shortly after the UKโs decision to leave the EU and whose founding statement reads: โThe world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control theย climate.โ
USย andย Canada
Anthonyย Watts
Anthony Watts is a retired TV meteorologist who founded the popular scepticsโ blog Watts Up With That (WUWT), where he was among the first to publish extracts of the emails. He is also behind surfacestations.org, a website questioning the validity of the surface temperatureย record.
Since the initial release of emails in November 2009, WUWT has published no less than 385 posts on Climategate, including coverage of the so-called โClimategate 2.0โ where additional emails retained from the first hacking were laterย released.
Watts was involved in a document leak of his own in 2012. His name cropped up in a leaked fundraising strategy from the fossil fuelโfunded think tank the Heartland Institute, which outlined how it pledged to raise $88,000 for a new website forย Watts.
In 2019, Watts officially joined the Heartland Institute as a seniorย fellow.
Patrick J.ย Michaels
Patrick Michaels was a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute at the time of the email release and appeared on both Fox News and CNN to discuss Climategate in the followingย days.
He was quoted as saying: โThis is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroomย cloud.โ
The Cato Institute later boasted that Michaels had appeared in the media more than 150 times since the initial release of emails and โhas quickly become the most recognized face decrying the obstructionism of global warmingย alarmists.โ
The think tank has been closely-tied to the Koch family since it was founded by Charles Koch in 1977 and has received over $20 million over the years from relatedย foundations.
Michaels later became director of the Cato Instituteโs โCenter for the Study of Scienceโ but left earlier this year following disagreement over the think tankโs focus. Cato subsequently closed theย center.
In 2010, Michaels faced his own controversy when a trove of documents from a 2007 court case revealed he had significant ties to big energy interests, as Mother Jones reported, โties that he’s worked hard to keepย secret.โ
Michaels is currently a Senior Fellow at the fossil fuelโfunded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and recently joined the CO2 Coalition, a group that emerged out of the now-defunct George C. Marshall Institute and headed by prominent climate science denier William Happer.
Steve McIntyre & Rossย McKitrick
Steve McIntyre is the founder of Climate Audit, another of the initial websites to receive a link to the hacked emails. McIntyreโs background is in the mining industry, having worked as an officer or director of numerousย companies.
Ross McKitrick is a close colleague of McIntyre, and an economics professor in Guelph, Ontario, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Koch-funded Fraser Institute.
Before the leak, McIntyre had spent years filing or coordinating dozens of Freedom of Information requests to climate scientists at East Anglia, with the pace escalating significantly in the months leading up to the leak.
McIntyre and McKitrick have regularly co-authored papers and were given an award by the Competitive Enterprise Institute for their work onย Climategate.
Watts wrote at theย time:
โMuch of Climategate involves research initially called into doubt by the analysis of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. The scientists involved in the scandal saw McIntyre and McKitrick as major threats to global warming orthodoxy and to their own credibility. Consequently, they are mentioned more than 150 times in the ClimateGateย e-mails.โ
Both McIntyre and McKitrick have spoken at Heartland Institute conferences since Climategate. In a Heartland podcast earlier this year hosted by Anthony Watts, McKitrick claimed that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could provide a net benefit toย agriculture.
Myronย Ebell
Myron Ebell is Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the fossil fuelโfunded Competitive Enterprise Institute and was one of the most prominent voices in the media discussingย Climategate.
In a statement on Climategate, Ebellย said:
โIt is clear that some of the โworldโs leading climate scientists,โ as they are always described, are more dedicated to promoting the alarmist political agenda than in scientific research. Some of the emails that I have read are blatant displays of personal pettiness, unethical conniving, and twisting the science to support their politicalย position.โ
He later appeared on Fox News to debate climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, whose emails were among thoseย hacked.
In the interview, Ebell claimed the scientists were โcooking the data โฆ And cooking is a technical term which means manipulating and falsifying theย data.โ
โThese people have already been revealed as not having any honor. Now theyโre being revealed as not having a sense of shame,โ heย said.
In 2016, Ebell led Donald Trumpโs transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency. He held a press conference in London in 2017, hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, in which he said Brexit was an โopportunityโ to shed environmental regulations. He continues to chair the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of organisations โthat question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policiesโ and have been credited with helping to persuade Trump to pull the U.S. out of the Parisย Agreement.
Main image: Banksy art: I don’t believe in global warming. Credit: Magnus D,ย CC BYย 2.0
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