Source: Washington Post
The reverberations of the scandal many refer to as "climategate," which erupted last December after personal emails between top climate scientists were taken from a British University server and posted online, continue... but they are taking some new twists and turns.
One of the key components of the pseudo scandal was the hostile treatment that climate scientists received in the mass media, in North America but especially in Europe. Story after story appeared that lambasted the credibility of all of climate science, based only on emails between a handful of climate specialists. Press coverage was so unfair to one researcher that he has resorted to suing a publication for libel to force it to issue retractions.
It didn't help that immediately following climategate there came another kerfuffle regarding minor errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report. One such dustup concerned statements about the likelihood that climate change would dry out the Amazon Rainforest. A particular reference to Amazon drying was sourced to the environmental group WWF, rather than to a peer-reviewed scientific paper.
"Amazongate," as people who lack respect for the magnitude of Watergate called it, was trumpeted in the press as another example of climate scientists behaving badly. Yet, as was made clear last week, at least two media outlets got that story completely and totally wrong.
As detailed by Newsweek's Sharon Begley, two newspapers -- The Sunday Times of London and a German language paper -- both retracted their reporting on "Amazongate," and by extension, raised the specter of journalistic malpractice in their coverage of "climategate" as well. As Begley notes, the Times "led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors." The paper, she noted, "retracted its central claim--namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was 'unsubstantiated.'"
The Sunday Times' retraction stated in part:
The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an "unsubstantiated claim" that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as "green campaigners" with "little scientific expertise." The article also stated that the authors' research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.
In fact, the IPCC's Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure ... was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that ... Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.
Although the retraction was comprehensive, it's doubtful it will have much of an influence on public opinion in the U.K., which had turned sharply more skeptical of the threat of manmade climate change soon after "climategate" (although it's not clear that there was a cause-and-effect relationship there). Nor will it make much of an impression here in the U.S., where similar shifts in public opinion have been noted by some pollsters, and where that particular Sunday Times article influenced the blogosphere and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.
As Begley astutely observes:
The Times's criticism of the IPCC--look, its reports are full of mistakes and shoddy scholarship!--was widely picked up at the time it ran, and has been an important factor in turning British public opinion sharply against the established science of climate change. Don't expect the recent retractions and exonerations to change 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.
Jim Hoggan, a Canadian PR executive and author of the book "The Climate Coverup," wrote in a blistering post on his "DeSmogBlog" that the retraction offers a lesson for the media: get the story right the first time!
Had the Times' editors bothered to verify the story before running it, we may never have seen this level of confusion in the public about threats to the Amazon from climate change. Ditto for the entire Climategate saga - had reporters read the emails themselves and investigated the context of statements cherry-picked by deniers to fuel doubt, Climategate would have fizzled out quickly under scrutiny. But that's not how it happened, and we will continue to face the consequences of the mythical tale spun by deniers for the foreseeable future.