The Times of London retracts its "Global warming is a trick" climategate story the paper printed in late 2009 after a large batch of e-mails and documents were stolen from servers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, in England, and put up anonymously on the web.
The Times of London took isolated and out of context snippets of those emails and spun it into a claim of scientific malfeasance.
The result has been a field day for those intent on discrediting the idea of man-made climate change.
The spin that climate change deniers put out from the story,
trumpeted by news organizations around the world, was that the stolen emails reveal what they always claimed, an evil global liberal conspiracy. See The Economist "
Climate Change Mail-Strom" and the AP "
Science not faked, but not pretty,
"Climategate" Exposed]
Read fully and in context the stolen emails do not support claims that the science of global warming is faked. The stolen emails, read in their entirety, reveal only that climate scientists have discussed issues related to protecting their research from false distortion by climate change deniers and how to effectively and convincingly present their conclusive climate change data. (see News Week story,
Why climate change is “even worse than we feared.”)
The Times of London and other newspapers are now
retracting their ‘Climategate’ claims, but the damage is done with
public opinion turning against the scientific proof of climate change.
News Week, June 2010: A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on, as
Mark Twain said, and nowhere has that been more true than in "climategate."