CLEARED of scientific fraud, climate scientists at Britain’s University of East Anglia might have hoped to quietly resume their research.
But despite being exonerated by three separate inquiries, they continue to be hounded by climate sceptics – mostly based in Britain and the US – who refuse to accept the outcome.
Many of these sceptics are internet bloggers whose attacks on the integrity of the scientists could perhaps be dismissed as the rantings of mildly obsessive individuals.
It is harder to ignore the accusations made by political think-tanks and lobby groups that have thousands of members and are run by boards with impressive academic credentials.
While the bloggers may garner attention, it is think-tanks that have the most impact on the political debate.
There is no evidence the oil company ExxonMobil has contributed to “tip jars” on the bloggers’ sites, but it has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that have attacked UEA’s scientists. The Business and Media Institute, part of the Media Research Centre, which has received $420,000 from Exxon in the past seven years including dollars $58,000 last year, published a lengthy attack last week on the independent inquiry into emails sent by the scientists.
Sir Muir Russell, whose report on the leaked emails was the third and most comprehensive inquiry into the affair, said that Professor Phil Jones and his colleagues at the university’s Climatic Research Unit had acted with “rigour and honesty” but should have been more open with their data.
The report by the Business and Media Institute described the inquiry as a whitewash, and accused members of Sir Muir’s team of having conflicts of interest and suggested that sceptics should have been called as “prosecution witnesses”.
The Heritage Foundation, which has received dollars $730,000 from Exxon in the past decade, including $58,000 last year, used the Russell inquiry’s criticism of the labelling of a temperature graph to suggest that man-made climate change was not happening.
Terry Miller, director of the foundation’s Centre for International Trade, wrote: “If the tree ring data is not reliable…perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate.”
The sceptics know that they do not need to supply incontrovertible evidence of scientific fraud to weaken political resolve to address man-made climate change. All they need do is plant seeds of doubt among a public keen to hear that painful changes in lifestyle are unnecessary.
Scepticism was widespread even before the row. A Populus poll for The Times last November, a few days before the emails were leaked, found that 41 per cent of the public believed man-made climate change was happening. By February, the proportion had fallen to 26 per cent.
The reopening of the debate about the science has given political leaders an excuse for inaction. Connie Hedegaard, the European Commissioner for Climate Action, told The Times last week that there was no chance of a global deal at this November’s UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, largely because of the failure by the US to pass domestic legislation on emissions.
The sceptic groups funded by Exxon have helped to give the oil company at least another year of freedom to reap the profits of its high-carbon strategy.
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