by Judith Curry
Climategate – where did this almost perfectly strategic — yet deeply unfortunate — catchphrase come from? Was the term the genius of a conservative think tank and industry-backed strategy or does evidence support an alternative explanation?
Matt Nisbet has an interesting post entitled “Student researcher tracks the origin of the ‘Climategate’ name.” The post draws from the Masters project of David Norton at American University, link to the full paper [here]. Some excerpts from Nisbet’s post that summarize the study:
Norton constructed a chronology of the appearance of the “climategate” term across blog comment sections, twitter feeds, legacy media blogs, and legacy media reporting.
Based on his research, it appears that the emergence of the term was more natural, interactive, and accidental than strategically planned, with discussants online trying to make sense of the complexity of the events in a way that resonated with history, popular discourse, and their worldview. In doing so, they turned to the well-worn “-gate” convention, a term used to describe more than 140 alleged scandals since Watergate.
It was only later, after the term was born of online discussion that advocates and ideological media began to take advantage of its interpretative resonance. As Norton also points out, environmentalists themselves — via Twitter — may have inadvertently fueled the spread of the term.
In this sense, it appears likely that the origin of the “climategate” frame device was a bottom up process, originating within the online discussion space that Judith Curry has memorably called the “climate audit” movement.
Timeline
Norton’s report provides the following timeline of key events:
Nov. 17, 2009 6:20 a.m. University of East Anglia’s RealClimate server hacked.
Nov. 17, 2009 7:24 a.m. Link to stolen data first posted to a blog, but immediately deleted.
Nov. 19, 2009 1:35 p.m. Initial links to stolen data reposted to two conservative climatology blogs: The AirVent and Watts Up With That (WUWT)
Nov. 19, 2009 3:52 p.m. WUWT commenter ‘Bulldust’ writes “Hmmm how long before this is dubbed Climategate?”
Nov. 19, 2009 4:11 p.m. WUWT commenter ‘Tonyb’ reposts the above comment.
Nov. 19, 2009 7:21 p.m. WUWT commenter ‘Mr Lynn’ recommends using “climategate” trope as a strategic framing device:
It’s nice that someone has dropped a big comb of honey onto this ants’ nest. But all of the inside chatter in these emails, revealing though it may be to those lapping it up, won’t mean a thing to the average news reporter,media outlet, and the public in general. What’s needed is a panel of unimpeachable individuals (i.e. no one named in this data drop) who can go through the file, vouch for its authenticity, and issue a quick white paper explaining its implications.The media are clueless. They need to be helped to understand the significance of —CLIMATEGATE! LEAK OF SECRET EMAILS SHOWS TOP CLIMATE SCIENTISTS ENGAGED IN MASSIVE FRAUD! GLOBAL WARMING WAS HOAX DESIGNED TO ENRICH POLITICIANS AND RESEARCHERS!/Mr Lynn
Nov. 20, 2009 8:08 a.m.;8:48 a.m.The first two tweets emerge referencing the “East Anglia” incident.
Nov. 20, 2009 9:00 a.m. James Delingpole, a blogger for Telegraph.co.uk, publishes an exposé-style post on his prominent blog. The post is entitled: “Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?
Nov. 20, 2009 9:13 a.m. BBC first reports hacking incident in article entitled “Hackers target leading climate research unit” (BBC New, 2009).
Nov. 20, 2009 10:00 a.m. –3:00 p.m. Fourteen tweets emerge referencing the incident, all referring to it as “climategate.” The hashtag #climategate first emerges.
Over the next several hours, the term “climategate” propagated through blogs and on Twitter, and began to supplant the proper noun “east anglia” as an indexical and referable moniker. With the early, near-ubiquitous adoption of such a straightforward snowclone, the incident became implicitly controversial and scandalous by its very name. Environmentalists challenging the nascent meme could do little to stop its spread, and in fact, may have inadvertently solidified its name as a framing device.2
Among the first fourteen tweets explicitly utilizing the “climategate” term — and in fact, the second and third Twitter users to deploy the #climategate hashtag — were two individuals opposed to the controversy’s sudden traction:
emergentorder: RE: #ClimateGate: What the fuck: supposed global scientific conspiracy.People, Wake Up! The Arctic ice cap has receded by 40% in 5 years!! on Nov. 20 at 2:09 p.m.
enviroknow: The #climategate story is out of control. Get the truth here:http://bit.ly/7RiSVK (Please RT) on Nov. 20 at 02:59 p.m.
The quandary, of course, was that to address the users responsible for the meme’s origination, environmentalists had little choice but to take up, reproduce, and thus reinforce the very term (and implicit frame) set into motion by climate skeptics. As “climategate” crystallized as the incident’s defining signifier, global warming skeptics had succeeded at narrowly crafting the terms and scope of rhetorical engagement; lexically, the proactive adoption of “climategate” as a referable, salient moniker framed the data leak as a necessarily scandalous — and therefore newsworthy — event.
Snow clones
So why was the term Climategate so effective?
Coined by Glen Whitman in 2004, snowclones are “multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase[s] or sentence[s] that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants” (Pullum, 2003). To clarify: “An example of a snowclone is ‘gray is the new black,’ a version of the template ‘X is the new Y.’ X and Y may be replaced with different words or phrases — for example, ‘comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll.’ Both the generic formula and the new phrases produced from it are called ‘snowclones’ ” (Wikipedia, 2010a). At their core, these formulations are necessarily intertextual phenomena, as snowclones emphasize “the use of a familiar (and often particular) formula and previous cultural knowledge of the reader to express information about an idea. The idea being discussed may be different in meaning from the original formula, but can be understood using the same trope as the original formulation” (ibid.). Memes that utilize snowclone constructs — such as the contemporary example of “Obamacare” (a permutation of “Medicare” and an earlier snowclone, “Hillarycare”) — are likely to reproduce and crystallize certain, shared associations within individual and social imaginations. As the following example illustrates, the semiotic logic of the snowclone applies to all culturally symbolic artifacts: characters, texts, icons, images, tunes, and so on.
From Norton’s conclusion
In late November 2009, the rapid acceleration of “climategate” within the microblogosphere should have forewarned environmentalists about the narrative’s imminent break as a mainstream news story. With the high-profile Copenhagen Summit just around the corner, “climategate” was a well positioned media anchor. If environmental groups had been monitoring this emergent discourse, they may have been better prepared to respond to the ensuing controversy.
The referability of 21 century signifiers — our potential to name, index, and associate Web-based discourses — means that activists have a nascent power to crystallize and propagate certain viewpoints, and even craft strategically-framed hashtags as a means of directing the circular flow of discourse (a process which then reifies partisan structures of participation and polarizes political expression).
My finding that the adoption of the term “climategate” on Twitter preceded offline usage suggests that viral, Web-based discourses should be taken seriously; moreover, the consequences of this particular meme demonstrate that activists should avoid reinforcing rival frames (like environmentalists who reiterated the #climategate hashtag directly after it was coined), and learn to strategically make use of real-time public insight.
Based on this assessment, this paper reveals the necessity of online issue tracking, particularly when it comes to complex issues (like climate change) that so often retain salience through a succession of“nanostories” — anecdotes that serve as narrative morsels (e.g. the stranded polar bear, yesterday’s record blizzard, today’s melting glacier). By understanding the theoretical principles governing the emergence and spread of viral discourses, and by monitoring the real-time ebb and flow of trending chatter, public communicators can become their own memetic engineers, and better respond to the unexpected….
My finding that the adoption of the term “climategate” on Twitter preceded offline usage suggests that viral, Web-based discourses should be taken seriously; moreover, the consequences of this particular meme demonstrate that activists should avoid reinforcing rival frames (like environmentalists who reiterated the #climategate hashtag directly after it was coined), and learn to strategically make use of real-time public insight.
JC comment:
When I first started this blog (almost a year ago), it was difficult to take the focus off Climategate, it seemed that everybody still wanted to talk about this, almost two years after the event. Lately, Climategate gets mentioned infrequently here, and I figured that at this point it would be pretty difficult to find a fresh angle on the Climategate story. But I thought this article provided a very interesting twist, the “radical implications of the blogosphere” and all that.