The Global Warming of Climate Science: Climategate and the Construction of Scientific Facts

Abstract

This article analyses 1,073 e‐mails that were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009. The incident was popularly dubbed ‘Climategate’, indicating that the e‐mails reveal a scientific scandal. Here we analyse them differently. Rather than objecting to the exchanges based on some idea about proper scientific conduct, we see them as a rare glimpse into a situation where scientists collectively prepare for participation in heated controversy, with much focus on methodology. This allows us to study how scientists communicate informally about framing propositions of facts in the best possible way. Through the eyes of science and technology studies, the e‐mails provide an opportunity to study communication as part of science in the making across disciplines and laboratories. Analysed as ‘written conversation’ the e‐mails provide information about processes of consensus formation through ‘agonistic evaluations’ of other scientists’ work and persuasion of others to support one’s own work. Also, the e‐mails contain judgements about other groups and individual scientists. Consensus‐forming appeared as a precarious activity. Controversies could be quite resilient in the course of this decade‐long exchange, probably reflecting the complexity of the methodological challenges involved.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Knut Holtan Sørensen for many fruitful discussions and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. The material presented in this article was also presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Tokyo, 25–29 August 2010.

Notes

[1] Official statements from CRU and UEA confirm that at least some of the material is genuine, for example a press release of 24 November 2009 (UEA 2009a). Pennsylvania State University has carried out an inquiry regarding Mann’s role in the leaked e‐mails. The inquiry report says nothing about the authenticity of the e‐mails, but the methodology mobilized suggests that those involving Mann are indeed real (Foley, Scaroni and Yekel 2010).

[2] The procedure is explained in, for example, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (1998, 784), where the caption of a figure displaying a reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures reads: ‘“NH”, reconstructed NH temperature series from 1610–1980, updated with instrumental data from 1981–95’.