Media and climategate - Research Paper Example

Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is an internationally renowned research institution for climate change and global warming. The research done at CRU is globally accepted and practiced, for instance, global temperature record and other data sets.CRU was the key contributor of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.It was a  collaboration between World Meteorological Organization(WMO) and United Nations Environment Program and considered to be the most authoritative of the likes(CNN).

According to Seymour, climategate proved to be the starting point of a series of leaks that shook scientists’ long held and advocated belief that “the science is settled”. However, despite the authoritative position of CRU and far reaching impact of the leaked information, news media networks played soft on the whole incident. They seemed unshaken by the unethical course of action taken by the scientists whose claims were promoted by these networks over the years and gradually shaped public opinion.

Surprisingly, since November 20, 2009, less than 10 percent of the global warming and climate change related news stories pointed towards any of the climate related scandals. The most disturbing email communication was among CRU Director Phil Jones and Penn State Scientist Michael Mann. The later is internationally renowned for his hockey stick graph of global warming which was the main feature of IPCC’s report in 2001.In e-mail Jones informed Mann that he worked on a trick to make addition in real temperature record of last 20 years in order to hide the decline.

Other e-mails encourage criminal act of destroying information rather than passing them on to Freedom of Information requests(Seymour).Daily Mail(UK) reported on January 28,2010 that Information Commissioner discovered that ERU scientists are violating FOI law, but he couldn’t take legal action because of the statute of limitation(qtd. in