The Secret Reason Copenhagen Failed

In the spring of 2014, I was having lunch with one of my heroes, Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and his head of the Environmental Protection Bureau, Lemuel Srolovic. We were discussing the special climate summit that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon had called for September 23rd, where all the world leaders were to discuss their plans for the coming Paris summit in 2015. We were also discussing the possibilities of a state Attorney General suing oil and coal companies for being implicit in causing climate change. Through a friend, I found a few, obscure studies from some major universities showing links between the two. Then, the conversation turned to ClimateGate. In November of 2009, an event occurred that would change the course of climate activism around the world. The huge servers of the University of East Anglia were illegally hacked into, and more than 1,000 emails and documents were stolen and used as a tool for climate-change deniers to take scientific information out of context and create a smear campaign, accusing climate scientists of intentionally lying and miscalculating their work. ClimateGate happened a few weeks before the Copenhagen climate negotiations began in 2009. Even though we now know that those talks were pretty disastrous. They began, I've heard from many who attended, with a group of very positive, optimistic environmentalists who truly believed they would come away with a meaningful treaty. These were people who cared de...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news