---
title: "Climatic Research Unit email controversy"
chunk: 11/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:22:41.916840+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The initial story about the hacking originated in the blogosphere, with columnist James Delingpole picking up the term "Climategate" from an anonymous blogger on Watts Up With That?, a blog created by climate sceptic Anthony Watts. The site was one of three blogs that received links to the leaked documents on 17 November 2009. Delingpole first used the word "Climategate" in the title of his 20 November article for The Telegraph: "Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?" A week later, his co-worker Christopher Booker gave Delingpole credit for coining the term. Following the release of documents in the blogosphere, unproven allegations and personal attacks against scientists increased and made their way into the traditional media. Physicist Mark Boslough of the University of New Mexico noted that many of the attacks on scientists came from "bloggers, editorial writers, Fox News pundits, and radio talk show hosts who have called them liars and vilified them as frauds". According to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book Unscientific America (2010), the accusations originated in right-wing media and blogs, "especially on outlets like Fox News". Journalist Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian reported that according to an analysis by Media Matters, "Fox had tried to delegitimise the work of climate scientists in its coverage of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia" and had "displayed a pattern of trying to skew coverage in favour of the fringe minority which doubts the existence of climate change".
The intense media coverage of the documents stolen from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia created public confusion about the scientific consensus on climate change, leading several publications to comment on the propagation of the controversy in the media in the wake of a series of investigations that cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing. In an editorial, The New York Times described the coverage as a "manufactured controversy" and expressed hope that the investigations clearing the scientists "will receive as much circulation as the original, diversionary controversies". Writing for Newsweek, journalist Sharon Begley called the controversy a "highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal", noting that the public was unlikely to change their mind. Regardless of the reports exonerating the scientists, Begley noted that "one of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, 'No, we were wrong about X,' most people still believe X."
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and science historian Naomi Oreskes said that the "attacks on climate science that were made ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit were 'organised' to undermine efforts to tackle global warming and mirror the earlier tactics of the tobacco industry". Noting the media circus that occurred when the story first broke, Oreskes and Erik Conway writing about climate change denial, said that following the investigations "the vindication of the climate scientists has received very little coverage at all. Vindication is not as sexy as accusation, and many people are still suspicious. After all, some of those emails, taken out of context, sounded damning. But what they show is that climate scientists are frustrated, because for two decades they have been under attack."
Bill Royce, head of the European practice on energy, environment and climate change at the United States communications firm Burson-Marsteller, also described the incident as an organised effort to discredit climate science. He said that it was not a single scandal, but "a sustained and coordinated campaign" aimed at undermining the credibility of the science. Disproportionate reporting of the original story, "widely amplified by climate deniers", meant that the reports that cleared the scientists received far less coverage than the original allegations, he said. Journalist Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review criticised newspapers and magazines for failing to give prominent coverage to the findings of the review panels and said that "readers need to understand that while there is plenty of room to improve the research and communications process, its fundamental tenets remain as solid as ever". CNN media critic Howard Kurtz expressed similar sentiments.

In June 2021, the BBC reported that Climategate would be the subject of a film entitled The Trick with actors Jason Watkins, George MacKay, Victoria Hamilton, Jerome Flynn and Adrian Edmondson.
In November 2021, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-part series, The Hack that Changed the World, about the issue; it was presented by BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera.

== Public opinion and political fallout ==
Jon Krosnick, professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford University, said that scientists were overreacting. Referring to his own poll results of the American public, he said: "It's another funny instance of scientists ignoring science." Krosnick found that "Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the public that scientists do, and those numbers haven't changed much in a decade. We don't see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) emails. It's too inside baseball."
The Christian Science Monitor, in an article titled "Climate scientists exonerated in 'climategate' but public trust damaged", stated: "While public opinion had steadily moved away from belief in man-made global warming before the leaked CRU emails, that trend has only accelerated." Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times, argued that this, along with all other incidents that called into question the scientific consensus on climate change, was "a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media". But UK journalist Fred Pearce called the slow response of climate scientists "a case study in how not to respond to a crisis" and "a public relations disaster".
A. A. Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale University Project on Climate Change, and colleagues found in 2010 that: