This story was updated Wednesday, Feb. 3.

BERKELEY, Calif. -- The case of the pilfered climate e-mails could affect elections as skeptics use it to turn the public against science-based policies, researchers said last week at a panel here on the topic.

University of California, Berkeley, economics professor Maximilian Auffhammer, one of the scientists whose work was disparaged in the e-mails from the University of East Anglia, said the episode could have impacts far beyond the damage done to individual scientists' reputations.

A paper that Auffhammer wrote with Korea Energy Economics Institute senior research fellow Seung Jick Yoo and Berkeley economics professor Brian Wright was among those that scientists considered how to suppress in the e-mails, written in 2003. The paper challenged the reconstruction method used by some researchers to estimate past climatic conditions by studying tree rings.

"A rejected paper that you spent months writing is fine if the research is bad," Auffhammer said at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business earlier this week. "But it seems to be an insular, small, contained set of individuals that kept this paper from being published and making it into the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report."

"If published as is, this paper can really do some damage ... it won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically," one scientist wrote to another whose research Auffhammer's paper appeared to dispute.

Auffhammer said he worried that opponents of climate legislation would use the e-mails to influence public opinion of science. A ballot initiative slated for the November election in California would delay implementation of A.B. 32, the state's global warming law, until unemployment falls below 5.5 percent (ClimateWire, Jan. 27).

'The damage is done'

The initiative's backers are indeed citing "Climategate" as evidence of scientists' personal bias in favor of global warming.

"In recent weeks the 'Climategate' scandal has revealed some very disturbing e-mails and information from the environmental science community," state Rep. Dan Logue (R) wrote in a recent op-ed. "These leaks have revealed that reputable scientists and universities doctored their statistics and withheld evidence contrary to their own theories. They silenced dissenting opinion for political gain. In short, the 'science' that [the California Air Resources Board] has based its decisions on has been found to be fraudulent."

"The damage is done," Auffhammer said. "We will find out through the scientific process about this, but in terms of policy -- the election in Massachusetts, federal policy's certainly in question. Given this latest ballot initiative, maybe even state-level legislation is in question."

Another result of "Climategate," he said, is the general public's strengthened belief that scientists are either climate "believers" or "skeptics."

"I don't like this notion that you have to signal which side of the aisle you sit on," he added. "I'm neither. I'm a scientist. I ask questions. Sometimes they support what people believe to be the truth. Now, every time I step up because of this tree ring paper I have to say, 'I am not a skeptic.'"

But other scientists said that "Climategate" might be the tip of the iceberg. Berkeley physics professor and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Rich Muller pointed to the so-called "Glaciergate" scandal, in which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted earlier this month to having erred on estimates of glaciers' melting rates in its 2007 report.

Science or 'decisions from the gut'?

Scientists who identified the mistakes said the IPCC report relied on news accounts that appear to misquote a scientific paper that estimated the glaciers could disappear by 2350, not 2035 (ClimateWire, Jan. 21).

"This is also shaky," Muller said. "This means people are going to examine every statement in the IPCC report and say, 'Which do we believe?' and that's not a good thing."

Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business, said climate science was already facing a hostile environment before the scandals. "Over the last 10 years, there's been a deintellectualization of public policy," he said. "We have gone from believing there are specialists who can tell us these things to believing we have to make decisions from the gut, because that's what we can really trust. This just makes it easier for politicians who don't want to do these things to say 'No, we don't believe the research.'"

This public skepticism might result in policies that de-emphasize science, said Margaret Torn, head of Lawrence Berkeley's climate and carbon sciences program.

"It's possible to design policies that are very science-intensive, and it's also possible to design ones that are less so," she said, citing the low-carbon fuel standard, with its calculations of land-use changes in other countries, as an example of the former.

"Requiring best-available technology or some regulatory mandate may not require the same level of scientific understanding," she said. "We can choose policies that are cognizant of where we are in scientific ability."