‘Climategate’ still matters – but not how the BBC thinks it does

It is 12 years now since a tranche of emails were scraped from the server of the University of East Anglia in what became know as Climategate. An East Anglia climate server was hacked, and the documents were pored over. The story won’t go away, not least because the BBC has just put out two programmes on the subject: a TV drama called the Trick, and a Radio 4 documentary called ‘The Hack That Changed the World’. Both try to establish the same narrative: that the scientists whose emails were leaked were victims of a crime — a massive data theft — and that these brilliant, honest people were then unfairly dragged through the mire as their integrity was questioned, when the world should really have been asking: who are the evil hackers and why are they trying to discredit climate science?

That the emails were ‘stolen’ is a fair enough description of what happened.