Pleased that the INDY today published my letter on why it's not 'Climategate':
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-a-debate-about-tax-1836606.html
Sir;
I commend The Independent on being one of the few media outlets not using the term "Climategate" in news coverage. That is the term preferred by those who deny the existence of man-made climate change, to refer to the recent illegal hack into the email systems of the Climatic Research Unit [CRU] at the University of East Anglia.
I find it surprising that so much of the rest of the media has fallen for this term. For "Climategate" seems to suggest that there is some serious doubt raised about our knowledge of the world's warming climate by the emails that have been made public: but our knowledge of the dangerous climate change that greenhouse gases are creating is of course largely consensual and uncontroversial.
Dr Rupert Read
Department of Philosophy
University of East Anglia
Norwich
...However, irritated that they cut what I thought was the best line in the whole letter:
"The use of the term 'Climategate' as promoted by manmade-climate-change-deniers to attack mainstream climate science is extremely ironic, in that it appears blatantly to ignore the real, central parallel between so-called 'Climategate' on the one hand and the Watergate scandal [after which the CRU hack has apparently been renamed] on the other: that both are scandals about criminal theft operations in which innocent people have been targetted and abused for political purposes - Nixon's Democrat opponents, in Watergate, and leading environmental scientists, in so-called 'Climategate'."
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