In retrospect, what Climategate did was to give the media a story that it was socially OK to run with. The social pressures against running an article about problems with alarmist science were enormous, but a scandal allowed them to make an end run around these social norms. Scandals and meat and potatoes for the news media, and they could run with the scandal story without feeling like they were getting a huge social black mark from their peers. And once the scandal story ran, it was the shock that allowed many silent doubters to see that in fact they were not alone and marginalized (as they have been told time and time again in the media) but actually a sizeable population.
To this end, the Hal Lewis letter may be even more important.
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