By Livia Gershon
Why on Earth is it taking so long for the world’s richest countries to take action on climate change? For a partial answer, we can look back to the controversy that started a decade ago this November, which came to be known as Climategate. In a 2010 paper in the journal Environmental Values, the sociologist Brigitte Nerlich looked at what happened.
Climategate began with the leaking of emails sent to and from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in the UK. The leaked file included more than 1,000 emails, but climate skeptics quickly seized on just a few of them: some messages in which scientists debated the publication of potentially flawed work, and some others in which they discussed adjusting data using a “trick”—a piece of mathematical jargon that commentators misinterpreted as an effort to deceive the public.
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