Rolling news: The Daily Mail's Friday afternoon Climategate reversionising
- 25 Nov 2011, 18:15
- The Staff
After a
relatively sensible article about the second release of emails
stolen in 2009 from the University of East Anglia's Climate
Research Unit earlier in the week, the Daily Mail has let rip with
a heroically silly exercise in 'live-update' journalism on its
website.
Originally entitled
"Second climate emails leak: Political giants weigh in on 'biased'
scientists bowing to financial pressure from sponsors", the
piece quotes just one ex-MP - former chancellor, Nigel Lawson,
founder of the Global Warming
Policy Foundation. It provides a whistlestop tour of the Mail's
editorial views, with climate science and policy, the BBC and UK
energy and climate change minister Chris Huhne* all
criticised.
It's not entirely clear what argument the piece is making, but in
the first paragraph the Mail appear to believe Huhne's "weak
performance" - possibly on Question Time - has inflamed a
row over the email release*. They also link cite a
letter Lawson wrote to Huhne in which he defends the GWPF's
work and stresses the 'rudimentary' state of scientific knowledge
about climate feedbacks. Lawson also extends his criticism to the
BBC's scientific coverage.
The piece then replicates truncated quotes from the latest emails,
apparently cherry-picked by the hacker, implicating not just the
scientists but the Department
for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in its allegations of
climate spin. We have taken a quick look at some of these claims
already, here.
The article then copies and pastes the earlier Mail piece on the
subject, which has a different tone and rather more
caveats. Presumably this is preparation for a splash on
the emails in the Mail on Sunday, but it does make for a rather
bizarre piece.
The title also made three changes as we were writing this blog
post - from 'Second climate emails leak: political giants weigh in
on 'biased' scientists bowing to financial pressure from sponsors',
to '...politicians weigh in...' to just changing the whole thing to
'Revealed: how climategate scientists DID collude with government
officials to hide research that didn't fit their apocalyptic global
warming claims'.
*Oh, and they just deleted the first paragraph about Chris
Huhne.
Incidentally, gratifyingly - and just in time for the Literary
Review's Bad Sex Awards this year - they refer to Phil Jones as
the "director of the Climactic Research Unit". Although that will
probably have changed by the time you read this. Never mind, we
have screenshots.
---
Update: 6.15pm - The whole article has now been rewritten. Have
a good weekend.