Instead of targeting high-profile science communicators, climate deniers are now encouraging mistrust of those who collect and interpret global warming dataThe theft and web publication by climate change deniers of private emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is an extremely worrying development in the tortured politics of global warming.Although high-profile individuals have been targeted and unfairly vilified before – Pennsylvania University's Michael Mann comes to mind, with his "hockey stick" palaeoclimate graph – most of the ire of the denial movement has so far been reserved for big-hitters like Al Gore. Gore can take it. Politics is his job.But the "exposure" of private correspondence from a much larger group of scientists – and the out-of-context quotation of certain sentences as "revealing" some hidden subterfuge – suggests a dangerous shift in strategy. Instead of targeting the science communicators (myself included), the deniers are now declaring war on the scientists themselves. Like the creationists they unconsciously mimic, they make no distinction between the political and the scientific sphere – it is open season in both.And the strategy is simple. Given that scientists are one of society's most trusted groups (unlike journalists or politicians), the climate denial movement has begun a battle to undermine public trust in climate scientists themselves. No more will the legions of anonymous researchers who collect and interpret data from meteorological stations, satellites and ice cores be considered above the fray – they now run the risk of personal attacks, exposure of their private lives and vilification.It is important to understand the significance of this. Scientists are not politicians. They are not used to communicating publicly. They trust in their objectivity, the objectivity of their peers, and the rigour of only citing work published in learned journals. They will have private views, but a ...

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