COMMUNICATING CLIMATE SCIENCE AND THOUGHTS ON CLIMATEGATE

This article briefly summarizes my views that have formed in recent years on communicating climate change in the light of first hand experiences in so-called “climategate”. latter term refers to the emails and personal information about individuals, including me, that were illegally taken from the University of East Anglia through a hacking incident. material published relates to the work of the globallyrespected Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and other scientists around the world. selective publication of some stolen emails taken out of context and distorted is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with the climate change issue in a responsible way. Instead there should be condemnation of the abuse, misuse and downright lies about the emails: that should be the real climategate! I was involved in just over 100 of the hacked email messages. In my case, one cherry-picked email quote went viral and at one point it was featured in over 110,000 items (in Google). Here is the quote: The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. It is amazing to see this particular quote lambasted so often. It stems from a paper I published bemoaning our inability to effectively monitor the energy flows associated with short-term climate variability. It is quite clear from the paper that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in the context of short-term natural variability. But that is the way a vast majority of the internet stories and blogs interpreted it.