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No one noticed when the thief broke into the University of East Anglia in the autumn of 2009. The mystery hacker penetrated the computer systems belonging to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and stole thousands of emails and documents.

In November, the perpetrator sent the emails to bloggers. The emails were used to make it look as if the case for climate change had been falsified or exaggerated. That set off a global media storm that engulfed the university.

The story of the human impact of the hack was told in the recent ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One drama, The Trick, featuring Jason Watkins playing Professor Phil Jones, the former director of the CRU. “We had some of the national press outside. And my wife was dealing with a lot of that because I, just then, wasn't really up to it,” the real Professor Jones told me. The lowest point, he recalls, was a few weeks later when he received a Christmas card with a death threat in it.

Inquiries would later clear the scientists of wrongdoing regarding the data, but only after intense scrutiny that left deep scars.

A Second Chance

At one point in the TV drama, a character asks why the media coverage is focusing on questioning the science rather than asking who carried out the hack. "Where are the Security correspondents," they ask?

I remember the story emerging back in 2009 when I was a Security correspondent. But I didn’t cover it. It was left to science colleagues to pick apart the implications. It is only in hindsight that I can now see its real significance. So, when the writer of the drama, Owen Sheers, came to me to see if I could help work out who was responsible, I jumped at the opportunity. It is not often you get a chance to make up for missing a story.

This was, I realised, a cold case – even if it was about global warming. The police had investigated the hack but had stopped in 2012 without finding a suspect. So, the first step was to talk to them.

High stakes – fighting wildfires, one of the effects of global warming. And an appropriate metaphor for an uncontrollable media storm.

When I tracked down the officer who led the investigation, Julian Gregory, he recalled how the case initially went to Norfolk police’s Safer Neighbourhood team – which usually deals with things like graffiti and anti-social behaviour – before being passed to him. He says he recalled thinking that "dark forces" might be at work. But his investigation ended with the same range of suspects they started with. “Our hypothesis at the outset, which remained throughout the investigation, was that the perpetrators could be anywhere on a spectrum, from a single lone individual – a lone wolf, if you like – with no particular affiliations, right the way through to significant commercial or even state interests linked with espionage.”

What new could I learn? One route was tracking down some of the original forensic data, another talking to spies, hackers, and investigators to pursue some of the leads which spanned the world.

One theory held that Russian intelligence might be responsible – partly because of the similarities with the so-called "hack and leak" of emails in 2016 in the middle of the US presidential election.

“It was a test run for what was deployed by Russia in the 2016 election," scientist Michael Mann says. “Those of us who have been in the climate debate for decades understood terms like fake news and alternative facts years before they became part of our popular lexicon.” But the parallels don’t necessarily mean Russia was behind it.

Another theory has pointed to shadowy corporate interests determined to undermine the case for climate change and maintain their business model based on fossil fuels. One thing I learned was that perhaps the exact identity of the hacker mattered less than what was done with the stolen emails.

Changing The World

What did become clear was the world-wide impact of what happened to the small team in East Anglia. The "Climategate" saga had a significant impact on opinion, especially in the US, maintaining an aura of doubt about the science longer than would otherwise be the case and therefore setting back efforts to deal with global warming.

But it also foretold a future in which information would be hacked, leaked and weaponised by different actors across social media and in which doubt would be encouraged and science questioned – all very modern themes in political debate and over COVID-19. And that’s why I really do think it was the hack that changed the world.