Climategate

In November 2009, a large collection of emails and files taken from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit was published online. Selected phrases were then used to allege that climate researchers had manipulated evidence or obstructed scrutiny.

No, multiple reviews found no evidence that the episode overturned the scientific case for human-caused climate change. Some inquiries criticized openness and responses to information requests, but they did not establish that the core temperature record had been fabricated.

The phrase concerned the divergence between some tree-ring proxy measurements and observed temperatures after the mid-20th century. It did not refer to hiding a measured decline in modern global temperature, although the wording and presentation became a major focus of the controversy.

The files appeared only weeks before the December 2009 COP15 conference in Copenhagen, when international attention on climate policy was unusually high. That timing amplified their political and media impact, although the identity and motive of whoever obtained the files were not conclusively established publicly.