Climategate: anatomy of a public relations disaster

I have concentrated on the media response because that has, to an extraordinary degree, been the story. But there will be other repercussions, when the breathless academics and policymakers catch up. This week there have been calls from members of American Physical Society to amend their 2007 statement declaring climate change an international emergency.

Climategate could also make scientists more cautious in their day-to-day work and their communications. That would be a big blow since science is a necessarily adversarial process that thrives on blunt debate. But as Mike Hulme, also of the University of East Anglia, wrote in the Wall Street Journal this month, as “climate scientists, knowingly or not, become proxies for political battles ... science, as a form of open and critical enquiry, deteriorates while the more appropriate forums of ideological battles are ignored”.

On the other hand, there could be some benefits for science from this whole incident, such as greater transparency and open data access. Whoever was responsible for the original hacking (and the supposed miscreants range from Russians in cahoots with the Kremlin to Norwich interns on a night out), the heat rose because of the context. The Canadian sceptical researcher Steve McIntyre had submitted a blizzard of freedom of information applications to the University of East Anglia, demanding access to global temperature data assembled by Jones. The emails appeared just as the university was preparing its case for not releasing the data.

It is worth explaining why that was so. Jones had always refused to release the data, partly, as the emails reveal, because he simply didn’t want to and figured those demanding it wanted to trash his life’s work. But it was also partly because he couldn’t - much of the data was obtained with confidentiality agreements attached, including data from his own government’s Met Office.

One early outcome of the fracas is that British researchers will now be moving heaven and earth to get approval to release the data. Britain’s Met Office, a government agency, released a subset of its global temperature data this week, with the rest to follow when it has secured permissions from the government bodies across the world that had supplied the data. And in a nod to a row that has simmered over demands for access to other data sets, the Met Office promised that “the specific computer code that aggregates the individual station temperatures into the global land temperature record ... will also be published as soon as possible.”

The data do not show any surprises. And even if the data are regarded as tainted by association with Jones, the graphs he has produced of global temperatures over the past 150 years are almost identical to those produced by, among others, two US agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

But that may not still the debate. Scientists have generally been good at sharing data within their priesthood - a somewhat closed world of publicly-employed scientists using peer-reviewed journals. What they have sometimes been dreadful at is engaging with the outside world - not just telling the world what they are up to, but allowing outsiders close enough to access and analyse their data. These days, scientists need rules of engagement for what to do when outsiders come calling, whether those outsiders are Greenpeace activists or investigative journalists or trouble-making climate sceptics.

In the climate community, and perhaps elsewhere, Climategate may lead to far greater openness about research data. It will hurt. But it is essential. Already the widely read blogsite for climate scientists, Realclimate.org, is promising to promptly post data and relevant computer codes on its site. Note that one of its leading lights is Michael Mann, a paleoclimatologist from Penn State University who figures in many of the more lurid email exchanges but who insists, “I have nothing to hide”.

What about Copenhagen and the climate negotiations? In the short term, the fracas is unlikely to alter things much. The negotiators live in their own cocooned world. They have long since received their orders of engagement for the climate talks.

“We don’t know how this will play out,” says Ben Stewart, media director at Greenpeace UK. “It’s not as if the Pentagon or the Chinese government will change their position as a result of these emails. The damage is being done in newsrooms.” And the fallout from the newsrooms could well influence how the public and legislators back home receive whatever deal is reached in Copenhagen and what will happen to the climate legislation now before the US Senate.

Already the cries of bellicose sceptic Sen. James Inhofe can be heard on Capitol Hill inveighing once more against the climate conspiracy. That will be just the start. Al Gore returned from Kyoto in 1997 with a deal he knew would be next to impossible to sell to Congress. In the end, he and Bill Clinton never seriously tried. Thanks to Climategate, President Obama could find himself in a similar position next year.

I have been speaking to a PR operator for one of the world’s leading environmental organisations. Most unusually, he didn’t want to be quoted. But his message is clear. The facts of the emails barely matter any more. It has always been hard to persuade the public that invisible gases could somehow warm the planet, and that they had to make sacrifices to prevent that from happening. It seemed, on the verge of Copenhagen, as if that might be about to be achieved.

But he says all that ended on November 20. “The emails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the CRU leak is nothing less than catastrophic.”