In November 2009 journalist Andrew Revkin described it in The New York Times as "a popular skeptics’ blog" run by McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining consultant.
[3] In 2010, a Nature article described the site as part of the "climate change skeptic community" alongside the Air Vent and the Blackboard.
[4] In 2004 Stephen McIntyre blogged on his website climate2003.com about his efforts with Ross McKitrick to get an extended analysis of the hockey stick graph into the journal Nature.
[10] After the UK Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) came into effect in 2005, Climate Audit readers were asked to make FOI requests to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) for the raw data from weather stations used in developing instrumental temperature record datasets, for copies of agreements under which the raw data was obtained from meteorology institutions, and also for email correspondence relating to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report.
"[16] Louise Gray wrote in The Daily Telegraph, "Climate Audit was one of the first to post up the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia that led to the 'climategate' scandal".
In one e-mail cited widely on blogs including Climate Audit, Phil Jones writes about completing “Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temps” in order to hide the decline.
"[18] According to Antonio Regalado writing in Science Insider, Jones wrote e-mails stating that he convinced the university's FOI managers to not release data to "greenhouse skeptics" because Jones believed that they planned to harm the UEA or setback climate science by drawing scientists into disputes, wasting research time.
[21] "If a single person can be credited with setting the stage for Climategate, it's Stephen McIntyre, the retired mining consultant behind the popular skeptic blog Climate Audit," wrote Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones in 2011.