By Faiz Shakir, The Progress Report. Posted December 10, 2009.
This story was written by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, and Alex Seitz-Wald.
As delegates from countries across the globe gather at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, the world is waiting to see if international leaders will commit to the bold reductions in carbon emissions needed to curb the effects of global warming. One group of individuals who is doing everything it can to prevent progress is the climate change deniers — a coalition of dirty energy-funded groups and their political allies on the far right. The newest ammunition employed by these deniers is “Climategate” — a smear campaign claiming that there is a “coordinated campaign to hide scientific information” about the supposed hoax of global warming. The conservative swiftboating attack in “Climategate” involves illegally hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU) in the U.K., which skeptics are using to claim that leading climate researchers are suppressing scientific data that shows that climate change is not occurring. The truth is that the hacked e-mails offer no proof of the suppression of scientific data, the mainstream media has given undue credibility to the story, and the science behind global warming is as undeniable as ever.