Leave it to navel-gazing so-called climate journalists to get to the bottom of the aftermath of ClimateGate.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media asked - what did the 'climate journalism community' learn over the 12 months stemming from the controversy, or as it prefaced, 'pseudo-controversies,' specifically the 'cherry-picked' and 'hacked' emails that came out of ClimateGate.
Some of the journalist's surveyed by Yale Forum dismissed ClimateGate altogether. However, one of those journalists surveyed offered a surprising claim. Eric Pooley, a writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, said ClimateGate did have a lasting impact on moving the ball away from what many alarmists would like to see.
In a Yale Forum post from Nov. 23, Pooley said 'famously skeptical' Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., was right about one thing - ClimateGate kept legislation from being passed in the United States on global warming:
"[W]e can try [to counter skepticism] - and of course many of us have been trying. I saw some of my colleagues get a wake-up call last December in the big COP 15 media center in Copenhagen. I was talking with some climate journalists after Senator James Inhofe, the famously skeptical Oklahoman, came through the room. Some journalists began joking about Inhofe, so-called 'climategate,' and the absurdity of those who claimed that the hacked e-mails were proof that climate scientists had cooked their data. The journalists were right - those claims were absurd - but they were also missing the point. Inhofe had just predicted that a U.S. climate bill was 'not going to happen,' and he was right."
Giving credit where credit is due is a step forward, but Pooley made it clear he was disappointed that ClimateGate was a set back for global warming alarmists:
"While climate journalists in Copenhagen were studying the fine points of the latest REDD proposal, 'climategate' was going viral on the internet and in the mainstream media. Soon CNN was hosting a debate on the validity of climate science, and I was pulling out my calendar to remind myself what year it was. Surely we couldn't still be arguing the basic science in 2009 and 2010."
