What Do Climate Change and Health Policy Scholarship Have in Common? Nothing, We Hope.
Stolen e-mail messages among some of the leading climatologists are deeply disturbing. Rather than reflect a desire to discover truth, they reflect a desire to use scholarship and journal articles to convince the public of the scientists’ predetermined points-of-view. Among the topics: How to present data to mislead the readers, how to keep articles written by skeptics out of print, and even how to damage the reputation of scholars who are not on the global warming bandwagon.
Some selected passages with highlights are available here.
For more on the controversy, including links to the searchable data base containing the emails and computer code, visit Watts Up With That, Climate Depot, The Bishop Hill blog, and the Climate Audit Mirror Site.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the bête noirs of those promoting global warming, has announced its intention to sue NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies for refusing to provide documents requested under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
Disgusting.
Disgusting squared.
Their big problem at the moment is that we have been experiencing global cooling for the past decade and they cannot explain why.
Adherence to a religion requires blind faith in things than cannot be seen or proven. Man-made global warming has become a religion to these people. Just because data does not support their theories does not mean they will abandon their faith.
When Bush administration officials “edited” climate reports to downplay the risks posed by warming, the NY Times excoriated the administration, allotted very little space for the administration to answer the charges, and asked hard questions, not about whether the documents were leaked illegally but rather why they made particular edits, what they meant by this or that change, etc… http://bit.ly/4EWb5f
They give scant attention, a few paragraphs at most to the actual problems uncovered by the e-mail – suppression of inconvenient data, using tricks to change the reported outcome, suppression of dissent, undermining the peer review process. By contrast they give most of the space –- multiple paragraphs — to the scientists whose malfeasance was uncovered allowing them to say it not as bad as it seems, we “really” didn’t commit fraud, and that nothing contained in the e-mails was really important. It’s like the wizard in the Wizard of Ox saying “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” when in fact, the real action is going on behind the curtain.
Paul Krugman was on ABC this morning trying to defend the email writers. He did a lousy job. But how do you defend the indefensible?