I’m urging you to look a little deeper and understand the complexity of the circumstances before making a judgement call on Climategate.

As the momentum of the so-called ‘Climategate’ saga gathers, I find myself wondering about the coincidental timing of the revelations. I don’t consider myself a cynic, nor a conspiracy-theorist, but I do find it uncanny that just weeks before the biggest global climate change discussion of the decade, the credibility of a group of scientists is called into question.

And these are not just any old scientists - they work for the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, one of the world’s preeminent research centres on climate change.

Idon’t know much about science, so I really can’t comment as to whether the allegations are significant or not. But having worked in the media industry for over 10 years, I do know a little bit about the media. What I know is that the media can be influenced - fed certain information that will generate news. The more sensational the information, the bigger the news.

There is no doubt that it is the media’s job to report unscrupulous behaviour, so if the boys at East Anglia behaved badly, the world needs to know about it. But it is also the media’s job to look a little deeper into the story.

Climate change is a topic fraught with political and corporate agendas. Whether we want to believe it or not, big business wields a big stick. We saw it in full swing in the US during the Bush era.

When so much is at stake for so many boys with big sticks, I think that being a climate change scientist in favour of the global warming theory is a tough place to be. I reckon you have to watch your back and cover your tracks, because those boys have deep pockets and you’re a potential spanner in their works.

So I’m sure that those scientists possibly did write the emails the media claim they wrote. There probably were results of experiments and data that went against their theories. But isn’t that often the case with science? Are scientific results always definitive with no room for question or doubt?

For me, the elephant in the room here is ‘context’. Do we really understand the full context in which those emails were written? Do we understand enough about the complexity of the science to know that what the scientists were trying to hide was truly significant, or why they were trying to hide it and from whom?

Nevermind about the science, do we have any idea about the context of being a climate change scientists in a world that doesn’t want to believe it is on the path to self-destruction? Can we even begin to imagine the reality of social, political and corporate pressure that these scientists live with every day?

I for one have had my fair share of corporate politics and power games. But what I have seen in my working years probably doesn’t have a patch on one day of reality for a climate change scientist.

So what I am saying is two fold: Firstly, I think these guys deserve the benefit of the doubt. When they respond to media enquiries with “I need to talk to my lawyer”, we should really try to understand the context of that statement: university-based scientists faced with some serious allegations, with corporate and political pressure bearing down on them. If it was me, I’d talk to a lawyer before anyone else.

Secondly, and even more significantly: it is less than two weeks to Copenhagen. Out of the blue, some clearly very talented hackers get access to a top university’s confidential emails - not about art or literature, but about the flaws in climate change science. The credibility of the very basis of global warming theory is being questioned.

Those emails find their way into the leading publications of the world. It’s just the stuff journalists love: high drama, highly controversial. But have any of those jouranlists asked how those emails found hem? Have they wondered at the coincidence of the timing? Do we know anything about the hackers that accessed them and their incentive schemes?

No. All we know is that a bunch of scientists are skating on ever-thinning ice, while we hypothesise about their motives for hiding the data, or worse, use the allegations as a justification for ‘business as usual’.

Maybe a couple of old-school journalists should investigate the story behind the story and give us some real news. But perhaps that is planned for later, to keep the story alive; one that no doubt will find itself a corner on page two.

And in response to that sad phenomenon, I can only turn the words of another; a great scientists, Albert Einstein who, in the early 1900s, said “we shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”