the (figurative) death of Mann, Jones, and the reputation of scientific peer review

Gary North at LewRockwell.com on ClimateGate, the New York Times and its [implied] hypocrisy, and peer review...

A generation ago, Daniel Ellsberg stole thousands of documents from the Rand Corporation [The Pentagon Papers], photocopied them, and gave them to the New York Times, which began publishing them. Ellsberg was prosecuted by the government. So was the Times. The defendants won...This led to Nixon's decision to stop the leaks with the Plumbers squad. That led to his defeat...

Fast-forward a generation. Because of the World Wide Web, the stolen "Climategate" emails were on-line within hours. The mainstream media did their best not to promote the story, but it could not be stopped. The perpetrators' careers are finished. Jones has left the institute that had flourished as a promoter of global warming. Mann is under investigation by his employer, Penn State University.

The details of the science are beyond you and me. So are the details of just about everything. The world is complex and growing more complex. What we do understand is deliberate chicanery by experts with a political agenda...[Mann and Jones] are now pariahs. They did the unforgivable in any ideological movement. They got caught....These academic con men got their hands caught in the cookie jar. This has undermined the #1 myth of the global-warming crowd: the myth of peer review....

Peer review is the central issue of Climategate – not temperatures. The peers reviewed, then suppressed. The scientific peer review mantra has died for this hotly contended political issue....

As for the perpetrators of the fraud: Jones, Mann, etc., "Bernie" Madoff got 100 years for stealing or loosing a few billion dollars from a few thousand people. The climate mob have ripped off or wasted ten times as much with billions of victims....