ClimateGate extravaganza

Wow...a lot of good stuff from TownHall.com the last few days on this amazing story.

As someone who has thought and written about politics as a means to various ends, I find it fascinating to consider the use of illegal means to air out unethical and illegal behavior.

Here are some of the TownHall nuggets that got my attention:


From Jonah Goldberg at TownHall.com...

By now you might have heard something about the scandal rocking the climate change industry, though you can be forgiven if you haven't, since it hasn't gotten nearly the coverage it should...

The Climate Research Unit [CRU] is one of the world's leading global warming data hubs, providing much of the number-crunching to global policymakers on climate change. And, boy, can they crunch numbers.

In a long string of embarrassing e-mail exchanges, CRU scientists discuss...how to manipulate the data they want to show the world, and how to hide the often flawed data they don't....the researchers don't object to just inconvenient truths but also inconvenient truth-tellers. They contemplate and orchestrate efforts to purge scientists and journals who won't sing the same global warming hymnal.

In one instance, Phil Jones, the CRU director, says a scientific journal must "rid (itself) of this troublesome editor," who happened to publish a problematic paper. In another, Jones says we "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

First, the climate change industry is shot through with groupthink (or what climate scientist Judith Curry calls "climate tribalism")....These e-mails show that what's really at work is a very large clique of scientists attempting to excommunicate perceived heretics for reasons that have more to do with psychology and sociology than physics or climatology.

Second, the climate industry really is an industry. Climate scientists make their money and careers from government, academia, the United Nations and foundations. The grantors want the grantees to confirm the global warming "consensus." The tenure and peer-review processes likewise hinge on conformity. That doesn't necessarily mean climate change is untrue, but it does mean sloppiness and bias are unavoidable....

Can anyone imagine the [New York] Times being so prissy if such damning e-mails were from ExxonMobil, never mind Dick Cheney?...

From Jonah Goldberg (again) at TownHall.com...

Next week's Copenhagen summit on climate change already seems doomed to failure, and voices on both sides of the global-warming debate are trying to pin the blame on Climategate....

"Climategate," aka warmerquiddick, aka the CRUtape letters, aka the Mother of All Publicity Disasters, refers to the leaking of vast numbers of e-mails and other documents from a leading British global-warming outfit, the Climatic Research Unit. The e-mails show, depending on your outlook, anything from sloppiness, pettiness and dishonesty to outright fraud among some of the world's leading climate scientists.

The e-mails don't show that the scientists don't believe global warming is real. Rather, they show that the scientists believe in global warming so much, they think they're justified in doing anything to fight it...

Climategate is a big deal, but we should be clear: It's not why cap-and-trade should be scuttled, and it's not why Copenhagen will produce nothing, save enormous expense-account submissions for cookie-pushing climate diplomats (and a massive amount of greenhouse gases; the U.N. estimates the 12-day "green" confab will produce 40,584 tons of CO2 equivalents, roughly equal to Morocco's carbon footprint in 2006).

Here is one simple, inconvenient truth: No developing country with significant and remotely accessible stocks of fossil fuels will agree to leave the stuff in the ground....

It was often said that President George W. Bush "refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol." This is technically true -- because Bush couldn't sign Kyoto. It was already signed during the Clinton presidency (Bush didn't sign the Treaty of Versailles either). The important point is that Clinton immediately shoved it in his desk drawer because he knew it would never be ratified by the Senate. Indeed, the Senate voted 95-0 to not even consider ratifying it so long as developing countries like China were left out of the scheme....Barack Obama has opted to stay out of the Kyoto system for the same reason....

While it's great fun -- and entirely worthwhile -- to make a big stink about Climategate, it would be a shame if people believed that Copenhagen's inevitable failure hinged on this one scandal. Even if the CRU researchers were the model of scientific dispassion, these schemes are pointless. Indeed, even if global warming is the threat the alarmists claim it is, it makes no sense to waste trillions of dollars on "fixes" that will do little to fix the alleged problem....

From Ann Coulter at TownHall.com...

Am I just crazy from the heat or were [the CRU "scientists"] trying to deceive us?

Global warming cheerleaders in the media were quick to defend the scandalous e-mails, explaining that, among scientists, the words "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage" do not mean "trick," "hide the decline" and "garbage." These words actually mean "onion soup," "sexual submissive" and "Gary, Ind."

Also, of course, the defenders said that the words needed to be placed "in context"...I have placed the words in context and it turns out what they mean is: gigantic academic fraud....

CRU was regularly cited as the leading authority on "global climate analysis"...received more than $23 million in taxpayer funds for its work on global warming....

The way this episode is unfolding, the environmentalists may be forced to drop their phantom threat of global warming and go back to the phantom threat of global cooling....

It's always the same thing with primitive people -- voodoo practitioners, rain dancers and liberals. In lieu of facts, debate and a weighing of the evidence, religious fanatics respond to all counterarguments by invoking a higher authority...

This is precisely what liberals accuse Christians of doing, but which Christians never do. We don't cite the Bible as authority -- and then refuse to let anyone read it. We certainly don't claim to have "lost" it, so you can't check for yourself. But that's exactly what the CRU has done with its secret data allegedly showing a warming Earth....

Even if the Earth were warming -- which apparently it is not -- the idea that humans using energy-efficient lightbulbs would alter the temperature of the globe is approximately as plausible as the Aztecs' belief that they were required to wrench the beating heart out of living, breathing humans in order to keep the sun on its path....