Climategate: anatomy of a public relations disaster

How many of us could withstand scrutiny of 15 years of our emails?

But this saga has now gone far beyond discussion of the content of the emails. The failure of the University of East Anglia to respond substantially to the avalanche of invective from climate sceptics has been a PR disaster that undermined the reputation of science as well as the institution itself. One angry media insider says: “Their response will be taught in university communications courses. Because I’m going to make sure it is.” The university’s failure for a full fortnight to put up a single scientist to defend Phil Jones amounted to cruelty.

During this silence, many things happened that otherwise might not.

For one thing, in Britain, the liberal media had no idea what to do. The London-based Guardian began by holding its nose, quoting the hysterical coverage among sceptic blogs and hoping the affair would go away. The equally liberal-minded Channel 4 TV news held up to ridicule the inability of a Fox News presenter to pronounce East Anglia (he hesitantly settled on “Angila”) and signed off.

Then the notably combative environmental writer George Monbiot declared in the Guardian that Jones should resign. That was a smoking gun for greens and liberals everywhere. What did Monbiot know? Still the university remained silent.

Viewers of the BBC watched a crashing of gears. For several years most of its coverage of climate change has been based on the scientific consensus that warming is real and that mankind is to blame. Did that still hold? The editors no longer knew for sure. Fearing for their impartiality, they abruptly reverted to the journalists’ default. Equal time (or close to it) for the sceptics.

Much the same happened in the United States, with seasoned experts like Andrew Revkin at the New York Times feeling unwilling to defend people whose employers were leaving them to hang in the breeze.

Everyone was running for cover. Even environmental campaigners kept quiet - ostensibly because it was up to scientists to defend their own, but equally because they were unnerved by Monbiot and others apparently siding with the sceptics.

After two weeks, the university announced that Jones had “stood down” while an inquiry took place. British ministers denounced “flat Earth” sceptics, but also criticised the language in the emails. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced it was joining the inquiry business - but failed to defend Jones personally, even though (or perhaps because) he was one of the lead authors of its last report, covering precisely the issues now called into question.

Jones’ co-author at IPCC, Kevin Trenberth of NCAR, was clearly angered. He lamented, cryptically but unmistakably, in an open letter: “It is disappointing that the IPCC has not been more forthright in standing up for its procedures.” More directly, the American climate researcher Ben Santer wrote an open letter describing and praising the honest, open and transparent work of CRU, and calling Jones “one of the gentlemen of our field.”

Meanwhile the sceptics made hay.

They even invented a new organisation to stoke up the rhetoric. Britain did not have its own high-profile sceptics organisation. So Lord Nigel Lawson, a former chancellor of the exchequer under Margaret Thatcher and now avowed climate sceptic, set one up four days after the emails broke - the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The organisation’s director, a social anthropologist named Benny Peiser, became an instant staple of the new “balanced” media reports.