Attempts by Climate Progress to link the UEA email hacking to News Corp have little basis in fact, and make advocates of climate action look silly

Last week I looked (very briefly) at MMR conspiracy theories advanced by Age of Autism in the wake of the News International scandal. Not to be outdone, Climate Progress waded in with a devious plot of their own linking News Corp to the hacked climate change emails at the University of East Anglia.

Their theory goes roughly like this:



We don't know who hacked the UEA e-mails

Scotland Yard, who investigated, had links to News International

News Corp doesn't like climate scientists

Neil Wallis, an ex-News International journalist with links to the Met, also did PR for UEA after 'Climategate'

WE NEED TO INVESTIGATE NEWS CORP OVER CLIMATEGATE!!!

It's pretty desperate stuff, which fails to provide any real evidence or logic to link the facts into a coherent argument.

The idea that the Murdochs coordinate an editorial position against climate science falls apart pretty quickly when you look at the work of Mark Henderson's science team at The Times. Then there are the views of James Murdoch, who has publicly called for stronger policies on climate change, and if you think that's purely posturing then consider that his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, was a senior director at the Clinton Climate Initiative, and that both serve on the board of the Kew Foundation.

In short, there's nothing to suggest that the behaviour of individual News Corp businesses reflects wider policy, and quite a bit of evidence that the attitudes exhibited by, say, Fox News are at odds with current thinking at their parent company. A New York Times profile of the "Murdoch-in-waiting" in February even suggested: "James Murdoch's views raise the question of whether he would interfere with Fox News's coverage if he were running the News Corporation."

Leaving all that aside, the e-mails emerged not in a News International publication, nor in any other mainstream media organ, but in the blogosphere. There they were pushed by hard-of-thinking internet eccentrics like James Delingpole, until proper journalists eventually took notice and began covering the news. It seems like a pretty circuitous way to break a story, like the Telegraph getting hold of the MPs' expenses documents and handing them over to Guido Fawkes.

The climate debate is of course full of conspiracy theories, with varying degrees of merit. The arguments of denialists (as opposed to 'skeptics', it's wrong to tar genuine climate skeptics with the denialist brush) almost inevitably degenerate into conspiracy theories when challenged. As the Denialist blog neatly puts it:

"This is because denialist theories that oppose well-established science eventually need to assert deception on the part of their opponents to explain things like why every reputable scientist, journal, and opponent seems to be able to operate from the same page."

It's disappointing to see climate campaigners getting sucked into the same game. Lumping mismatched and dubious "facts" into a dark narrative populated with sinister characters and devious plots isn't useful. It just makes people look a bit silly, and undermines the serious points about corporate responsibility and climate change than need to be made. There's enough fiction in the climate debate as it is.