Climate skeptics treated hacked emails as evidence of scientific fraud

Evidence

The IPCC’s conclusions did not sit well with skeptics and denialists, who disagreed that the earth’s climate was becoming warmer. They questioned the impartiality of the scientists, their forecasting models, and their analyses of the data. Amid the controversy, hackers downloaded files containing batches of e-mails and documents by climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. In an incident that became known as Climategate, climate skeptics claimed that the hacked documents showed that the scientists withheld and manipulated data. These allegations added further fuel to the already heated debate. Skeptics alleged that the scientists were not only biased but had committed outright fraud. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2737

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s existing vault claims about how moral disengagement strategies delegitimize messengers to discount unwelcome evidence — here applied to climate, parallel to the Islamophobia/authoritarianism thread. — connects to: Corporate climate misinformation differs categorically from conspiracist fabulation — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 245
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2737