Fleishman Hillard: The Political View

Why on earth is CBC missing out on what must be the biggest story in the politics of science right now? No, I’m not referring to H1N1 and whether it’s a real threat or not, nor am I talking about the possibly revolutionary discovery that at least some types of Multiple Sclerosis may be vascular in origin. Each of those is receiving plenty of air time on CBC.

I’m talking about the infamous CRU Hack that is about to be investigated by the US Congress. in a nutshell, somebody published a few thousand emails and sundry documents that create the impression leading climate researchers, including Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, have systematically worked to suppress evidence that could be used to question the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis. The Wall Street Journal is all over it, so is the National Post (and here, and here), and you can find a lot more all over the internet.

Of course, it takes a lot of optimism to believe that this revelation just happened to coincide with the run-up to the Copenhagen Conference. The motives of the hackers are even more abundantly clear to anybody who has actually seen the zip-file that contains the incriminatory information, which is divided into two sections – “emails” and “documents”. Almost all the quotes you read in the WSJ and other sources are taken from the ‘documents’ section, where the juiciest bits have been conveniently made available for anybody too lazy to do their own research. It also contains a number of documents that are already in the public domain.

Regardless, this is a big story. Climate research is not something one could do in one’s backyard and with a home computer – not even a Mac. We laypeople have to take on face value what the experts (and non-experts) are telling us. But unlike many other scientific issues – water on the moon, life on other planets – the AGW hypothesis requires that we do something. If it is true, we have to do massively change our way of life and take some painful – and expensive – steps now to prevent something much worse in the distant future. That’s asking a lot.

For people to believe the AGW hypothesis, they must first have trust in the AGW hypothesis proponents. Until quite recently, that was not too difficult. After all, climate researchers are scientists, and scientists are busy following the data wherever it leads them. Well, not anymore. In addition to boring discussions on travel arrangements and grant applications, the emails reveal that science can be very, very personal, acrimonious, and nasty. And some of them even hint at the possibility of fraud and deception.

I’m sure that if hackers had found emails from scientists working for the Tobacco Institute talking about ‘tricks’ to suppress increased lung-cancer rates and engage in efforts to blacklist journals publishing articles that showed tobacco can cause cancer, or if hackers had found that Cato Institute scientists had destroyed the raw data for studies showing increased warming, our tireless journalists at CBC would have been all over it. And rightly so.

CBC radio’s Jian Ghomeshi today interviewed Al Gore and David Suzuki on Climate Change – but not once did he ask about the CRU hack and its implications (at least I did not hear it). And a quick search of the CBC site reveals that it hasn’t reported on the story even once the first time the issue was mentioned anywhere within the CBC network was on November 26 (a after I wrote this post, and almost a week after it happened, and was reported on extensively all over the world). Excuse me? There’s a global debate on whether scientists promoting one of the most important ideas of the century are actively suppressing contrary information, and for more our national broadcaster says – nothing [except for that one post, well-hidden on its website]?

At the very least we could have a story on how malicious forces are trying to undermine the Copenhagen Conference – even by criminal means. That would be a story. But not reporting on it at all – that’s a major failure by the CBC to live up to its mandate.