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Human development, inspiration, invention, and aspiration have resulted in a rapidly growing population, with each generation aspiring to greater wealth and well-being, so having greater needs than the previous generation. Amongst the resulting negative impacts are over-exploitation of planetary resources and the build-up of gases in the atmosphere and oceans to the extent that they are changing earth’s climate and ocean chemistry (IPCC 2007). However, the history of humanity’s relationship to the environment has shown that, if threatened, society can respond rapidly to environmental risks, introducing better practices, controls, regulations, and even global protocols, for example the reduction of city smog, the move from leaded to unleaded petrol, and reduction of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) production to reduce loss of the ozone layer. Nearly all of these changes have led to direct and obvious positive gain to human health and well-being which has been a driving force in the production, agreement and implementation of the policies and laws that have brought them about. The spatial scale or ‘ecological footprint’ of these risks has increased with time, such that international agreements and protocols, like the Montreal Protocol for CFCs, have been increasingly necessary for reducing them. Along with the globalization of agriculture, business, industry, and financial markets and the expansion of the human population goes the globalization of risk to the environment. Climate change and ocean acidification are global issues with solutions that are only possible through global agreements and action. Substantial proportions of nations’ gross domestic product (GDP) were used to secure the banks and major industries in the economic crises that have swept the world in the last few years, far greater than the 1 to 2% per annum estimated to be required to mitigate climate change (Stern 2006). However, the response to the economic crisis does show that global society can react rapidly when it believes it is necessary. The question is, when do society and governments deem it necessary to act, and to act together? One issue may be time, the perceived immediacy of the crisis.

This chapter takes a look at the real story behind the so-called climategate. On November 17, 2009, a hacker operating via an anonymous server located in Turkey, uploaded a large file, FOIA.zip, to the RealClimate site. The title was a thinly veiled allusion to the barrage of frivolous and vexatious Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demands issued against the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the months preceding. The hacker released a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents via e-mail. This chapter discusses the allegations and disinformation campaign launched by climate change deniers based on the CRU hacking incident and how climategate became a vehicle for a more widespread and sustained smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, including the author.

In this chapter, the author focuses on the scientific community's fightback against the assaults of the climate change denial movement. Each of the investigations launched in response to the climategate affair ultimately proved exculpatory, not only for the author but also for the scientists of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), and indeed all of the scientists who were embroiled in the scandal, as well as for the underlying science of climate change itself. By spring 2010, climate change deniers had lost some ground. The author narrates his clash with Ken Cuccinelli, the newly elected attorney general of Virginia, that arose when the latter demanded that the University of Virginia turn over essentially every e-mail, record, or document it had that related to the author during his time on the faculty there from 1999 to 2005. He also discusses new revelations that shattered the myth of the Wegman Report, along with the impact of the climategate and Cuccinelli affairs on the climate change denial machine.

Chapter 1 introduces the interpretive stases as a neglected rhetorical method that could be productively employed by scholars to analyze debates over the meaning of texts in virtually any sphere. The chapter begins with a debate over one of the leaked 2009 “climategate” emails, which seriously damaged the credibility of climatologists, to illustrate the far-reaching consequences of interpretive arguments. A brief sketch is provided of the interpretive stases’ history, from their origins in ancient Greco-Roman legal theory to when they were dropped from rhetorical manuals in the seventeenth century. The chapter explores the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics—philosophical, literary, legal, and religious—and argues that no school of hermeneutics offers a general method for analyzing the argumentative push and pull involved in the interpretation of any text. The final part of the chapter outlines the six interpretive stases and discusses how they frame textual interpretation in terms of argument and persuasion.