NEW BBC drama The Trick follows the real-life story of climatologist Phil Jones who was at the centre of the 2009 Climategate scandal.
Jones was accused on falsifying global warming reports, but what happened to him? Here's what we know.
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Phil Jones will tell all in The Trick Credit: Rex What happened to Phil Jones?
Phil Jones temporarily stepped aside from Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009 following a controversy over stolen emails.
The email controversy, known as Climategate, saw the CRU servers hacked and emails and computer files stolen and published.
A review led by Sir Muir Russell examined "email exchanges to determine whether there is evidence of suppression or manipulation of data".
A House of Commons inquiry followed and concluded that there was no case for Jones to answer, and said he should be reinstated in his post.
He was reinstated in July 2010 with the newly created role of Director of Research, after the review by Russell found no fault with the "rigour and honesty as scientists" of Jones and his colleagues, although finding that the CRU scientists had not embraced the "spirit of openness" of the Freedom of Information Act.
The university said that the new position was not a demotion and would enable Jones to concentrate on research and "reduce his responsibilities for administration".
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What was the 2009 climate scandal?
In 2009, Professor Philip Jones was subject to a barrage of hate mail and death threats that pushed him close to suicide.
It was claimed that emails, hacked from his laboratory, proved climate change research was a fraud.
Now Jones faces a repeat of that grim onslaught when the BBC One film, The Trick, is screened on Monday, October 18, 2021.
It will tell the story, sympathetically, of his tribulations at the hands of climate change deniers.
Jones was head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in Norwich in 2009 when hackers stole thousands of documents and emails from its computers.
Their contents were then carefully selected and used by climate change deniers to promote the idea that scientists were falsely alleging fossil fuel emissions were warming the planet. Subsequent inquiries rejected all these allegations.
Owen Sheers, screenwriter of The Trick who is known for books such as The Dust Diaries, said: "“It was a manufactured controversy.
“There was a definite strategy at work and a massive disinformation campaign. Yet, when I talk to those who remember any of it now, most still think a scientist really did get caught tweaking the figures.
“In fact, thousands of documents were stolen and a few extracts were pulled out in an expert way that became the bullets that did the damage.”
Some experts even claim the furore triggered by Climategate – as the hacking affair was later dubbed – played a key role in the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks in December that year.
What has Phil Jones said about it?
Jones told the Observer: “At the time, the mail was awful.
"Everyone was attacking me and I couldn’t deal with it.
"I got Christmas cards filled with obscenities and, to this day – on the November anniversary of the hacking – I still get a couple of offensive messages.
“After The Trick is screened I expect there will be a new wave of abuse. However, I accept the risk because this is a story that needs to be told.”