Too good to be true?

The day started off with awesome news. Our Report kicked off as we published it this morning (Charlie and Sam were working on it until 5 am), an we got massively positive feedback. A lot of people thought our report could have a great impact on the UNFCCC process and that we might actually change things for the better. I got to talk to John Vidal (the guardian reporter, who asked for some details for his article). I got a map for our figures from worldmapper- they were so helpful! During the day, we send out the report to all press in the UK, with a possibility of getting published in the independent etc. We started a massive media campaign and send emails out the whole day.

Kiribati send us to a whole bunch of meetings to take notes for them. I went to the one meeting where the IPCC was giving an update on the scientific findings since their 4th report, which was very interesting because I knew exactly what they were talking about! (thanks to the climate change summer school, Milena and Ben, maybe you are interested in reading my notes, I uploaded them on our website www.delegationsupport.wordpress.com, under transcript archive)

Kiribati said they found our website was very helpful and their secretary said they’d email it around to all of AOSIS states (small island states block) as well as to the LDCs (Least developed countries). The African block also signaled interest. Awesome! :)

Then, just as we thought things couldn’t get better, a German journalist wrote us an email and asked us on what kind of data we’ve been basing our report on. We checked and it turns out that we - at the very beginning of research - had made a mistake and downloaded the list of delegates to COP 3 instead of COP 16! Instead of checking it, we just went along and used this list for a lot of our arguments. You cannot imagine the agony we felt when realizing this. The report, which had already been send out to EVERYBODY, maybe even worse: with many important people quoting it; was factually wrong.

A lot of our arguments were unaffected since they are based on surveys and not the number of delegates, but the discrepancy of the number of delegates was what really grabbed media attention, and of course it really damages our credibility and is a very big embarrassment.

It’s been 6 hours ago since we realized this and we immediately informed everybody to hold the report. We’ve been recounting the actual number of delegates (Brazil alone has 635 delegates, imagine counting all the UN countries, and this time the number HAD TO BE RIGHT!!!) and are going to rewrite the report tonight so everyone will have an updated version in their inbox by tomorrow morning and with a bit of luck, no major newspaper will have written about it yet. Crap :(

I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening!