Nov
29
This Is Climategate: Shining a Light (and Turning Up the Heat) on Climate Change Alarmists
For those who somehow missed this news item from several days ago, hundreds of email messages & other documents (some as old as 13 years) from the UK’s University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit were “leaked” to the public. Though illegally obtained (i.e., hacked), they have so far proven to be genuine. The correspondence between prominent climate change activist scientists are quite enlightening and damaging to the global warming / climate change cause.
As Paul Driessen discusses in his recent Townhall.com article, “They reveal an unprecedented, systematic conspiracy to stifle discussion and debate, conceal and manipulate data, revise temperature trends that contradict predictions of dangerous warming, skew the peer-review process, pressure scientific journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to publish alarmist studies and exclude dissenting analyses, and avoid compliance with Freedom of Information requests.” Serious accusations, but Driessen gives examples in his piece.
Now, no one is saying that EVERY scientist pushing the pro-global warming agenda is involved in some giant conspiracy to grab power and make fortunes while destroying jobs, ruining the world economy, etc. Many (perhaps most?) have simply been duped by fellow scientists & politicians, pressured by idealogues, and/or are guilty of sloppy science. (For example, programming their computer models with certain cause-and-effect assumptions that have not actually been firmly established, or leaving out / glossing over certain inconvenient data.) And the skeptic should, as always, take care not to overstate the impact of any particular statement or finding that seems to favor his case or discredit his opponent’s. But, anyone with a modicum of intellectual honesty must admit that these current revelations, regardless of how or when they came out, cast doubt not only on the integrity of those directly involved in these particular communications but on the validity of the whole Gore-ite argument for catastrophic, man-made global warming / climate change.
There is an excellent “companion” article from Christopher Booker at the The Telegraph. After laying out the significance of exactly who is involved in the scandal (e.g., CRU Director Phil Jones, Penn State’s Michael “Hockey-stick” Mann, etc.) and what they did, Booker concludes “Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.”
If you want to read more material that is not the typical alarmist propaganda, I recommend books by people like Christopher C. Horner, Roy W. Spencer, Patrick J. Michaels, and Steven J. Milloy. They explain what the scientific evidence really says and what the consequences of following the alarmist agenda will be for America and the world if people don’t wake up and STOP it!
