'Climate-gate,' weak economy embolden US warming sceptics

Dec 11, 2009, 9:53 GMT

Washington - Copenhagen was meant to be the summit where climate change was finally treated with the urgency that proponents feel it deserves, but in the United States the talks have been partly overshadowed by a scandal over the science behind global warming.

The dispute, sparked by some 1,000 leaked emails from a top British university, has emboldened US-based sceptics - conservative politicians and some scientists - who insist that global warming is not a major threat to the world's climate.

The emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, hacked from their server and posted anonymously on the internet, were seized on as examples of scientists manipulating data and dismissing sceptical research.

Supporters of action against climate change, including top US government scientists, argue the emails do nothing to detract from the consensus that heat-trapping gases are warming the Earth's atmosphere.

Yet climate-gate, as the row has been dubbed, is proving awkward for US President Barack Obama, who has made tackling global warming a top priority and hopes to join other world leaders in agreeing a new climate treaty when he travels next week to the Copenhagen summit.

Opponents of policies to tackle global warming have also tapped into public anxiety over the economic consequences of forcing companies to lower their carbon emissions, especially as the US is only just beginning to emerge from its deepest recession in more than half a century.

'Climate-gate builds on other reasons to not see global warming as a crisis,' said Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington. 'The Obama administration should be very careful not to agree to anything until this is resolved.'

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president, called on Obama to boycott the Copenhagen summit. Senator James Inhofe, a leading sceptic, said the scandal dooms Obama's chances of pushing climate legislation through Congress.

US-based scientists were implicated in some of the emails. John Holdren, one of Obama's top environmental advisers, derides a group of opposing scientists as 'amateurs.'

Research from Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University also figures prominently. CRU Director Phil Jones, who has stepped down pending an investigation, advises a fellow scientist to use Mann's 'trick' for filling out temperature data.

Both scientists insist that 'trick' refers to something clever rather than something manipulative. Others argue that, even if there were something incriminating in the emails, there is a wealth of independent data that backs up East Anglia's temperature data.

'There is so much information that tells us that the planet has been warming,' Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters this week.

Yet climate skeptics had been making headway with the US public, even before the latest scandal. An opinion poll by the Pew Research Centre found that 57 per cent of Americans believe there is 'solid evidence' of global warming, down from 71 per cent in April 2008. Just 36 per cent believe climate change is a man-made phenomenon.

Republicans are pushing for an official congressional inquiry into 'climate-gate,' but whether the scandal will have any long-term impact is unclear. Three key senators, including one Republican, said Thursday they had the outlines of a compromise on legislation that would cap US greenhouse gases. Obama's administration has also downplayed the scandal.

'I think everybody is clear on the science' behind global warming, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said this week. 'This notion that there's some debate ... on the science is kind of silly.'