Kevin E. Trenberth Receives 2013 Climate Communication Prize: Response

Abstract

I am delighted to be recognized with this prize. I want to first thank AGU and the prize committee and, especially, Nature's Own for establishing this prize in a field that has become contentious and highly political. It did not used to be this way. Following the media frenzy with the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, there was hope at the 2009 Conference of Parties meeting in Copenhagen that an international framework agreement on climate change might be achieved. It was not to be. Planned actions to address issues of climate change were undermined by huge funding of misinformation by vested interests. It was not helped by so‐called “climategate” in which many emails illegally hacked from a computer server at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom were released, cherry picked, distorted, and misused by climate change deniers. Minor errors in the IPCC report were blown out of all proportion and ineffectively addressed. I was caught up in all this, and one of my many emails went viral: the “travesty” quote in which I bemoaned the inability to close the global energy balance associated with short‐term climate variability but which was misinterpreted as saying there was no global warming. These examples highlight failures of communication.