Beyond the Hype by Fiona Fox;

Beyond the Hype by Fiona Fox;

Author:Fiona Fox; [Fox;, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783966189
Publisher: LightningSource


One of the comments we offered came from a non-scientist, Bob Ward, who was by then head of policy and comms for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). One of the SMC’s policies is that we usually only ask scientists expert in the correct field to comment on an issue, but we felt this particular crisis was an exception. There were elements of this story that were not only about the science, but also the conduct of climate scientists and science communication. By this point, Ward was already one of the more influential and visible climate communicators in the UK, appearing regularly in print since 2005, when in his former role as comms director for the Royal Society he called for ExxonMobil to stop misrepresenting climate science. He was also something that most senior climate scientists were not – available and willing.

In the hours and days after the story broke, Ward almost single-handedly filled the vacuum left in the UK’s TV and radio studios by the majority of the UK’s climate scientists and official climate research agencies. All day long, the screens in our office showed him going from Sky, to the BBC, to ITN, defending climate science and doing battle with the sceptics. I don’t always agree with Ward, and a few eminent climate scientists have queried his credentials as an expert speaker on climate science. But he took to the studios back then because not enough climate scientists were willing to do so, and because he feared climate science would pay a high price for leaving an empty chair. I always felt Ward was driven by that fear rather than his ego – a suspicion strengthened a few years later when we invited him to speak at an event for scientists new to media work. Ward showed the 200-strong audience a clip of an interview he had given during that period, where he visibly lost his temper in a discussion with Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator. His self-deprecating advice for the audience? ‘Never lose your temper live on air – it’s not a good look.’

The hacking of Jones’s email account came at a time of open warfare between the climate science community and climate sceptics – a period covered in Fred Pearce’s excellent book The Climate Files, which shows how years of obsessive or malicious Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from climate change deniers had taken its toll on researchers like Jones. As Pearce puts it:



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