Another enterprise that is taking on water is the global warming orthodoxy. The defenders of that orthodoxy are working overtime to deny that the East Anglia e-mails have any significance for the scientific case about global warming, but what they don't realize is the electrifying effect the Climategate revelations have had on the global warming "skeptics," who are endowed with a new confidence and who have gained enormous new credibility with the public and even with parts of the press.
The main link below, an insightful blog post from someone who writes under the name "Doctor Zero," captures that sense among the skeptics that they are vindicated and that the warmists have just had the ground collapse from beneath them.
The global-warming establishment continues to exude the sense of a corrupt enterprise that cannot stand up to critical questioning and therefore does not tolerate it. The latest: in Copenhagen, Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider's staff sicced UN security guards on a journalist who dared to ask a question about the East Anglia e-mails. Check out the priceless video, which shows Schneider squirming as he tries to evade the question, while his staffers panic and cut off the line of questioning.
If the global warming establishment can't handle inconvenient questions now, it's not going to get any easier for them. That's especially true as the skeptics begin to make some inroads into the mainstream media—particularly the English-speaking media outside the US.
At the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Ian Plimer offers a scathing description of the Copenhagen conference and describes an alternative conference at which he and other scientists presented evidence that refutes the global warming myth.
In London, the Daily Mail has a terrific new article summing up the Climategate revelations and their significance.
And in Canada, the newsmagazine MacLean's—their equivalent of Newsweek—has a friendly profile of Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre, the man who famously "broke the hockey stick" by exposing the fraudulent method behind Michael Mann's claim that recent warm temperatures are historically unprecedented.
Particularly interesting is this description of how McIntyre's suspicions about the global warming establishment came from his experience sniffing out fraudulent claims in the mining industry.
To McIntyre, a scientist's data and code stand in the same relationship to a finished paper that drilling cores do to a mining company press release. "If you're offering securities to the public," McIntyre observed in a May 2008 talk at Ohio State University, "there are complicated and expensive processes of due diligence, involving audits of financial statements, independent engineering reports, opinions from securities lawyers and so on. There are laws requiring the disclosure of adverse results." Peer review in scientific journals is good, he suggested, but it is limited and vulnerable to compromise. "There is far more independent due diligence on the smallest prospectus offering securities to the public than on a Nature article that might end up having a tremendous impact on policy."
This is why McIntyre—and not the various villains from the East Anglia e-mails—is actually the central figure in this scandal. He is the one who is going to follow up on the scandal by providing ruthless independent scrutiny of the data at the base of the whole global warming scare. And the more he digs into this basic data, the uglier the scandal is going to get.
"A Memo to the Global Warming Cult," Doctor Zero, HotAir.com, December 12
Dear global warming fanatics,
Please. Stop. You're embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Climagate are only making you look foolish. The con job you've been running for the last thirty years is busted forever….
You aren't going to frighten the world into reducing the human population. You're not going to succeed in terrorizing free people into embracing totalitarianism, to fend off a phantasmal catastrophe that no democratic nation has the discipline to combat….
We'll never be foolish enough to allow a band of fanatics to use "peer review" to rule all dissenting opinion out-of-bounds, then declare themselves the proud owners of a mighty consensus. You global-warming fanatics underestimate how much you needed those tactics to gain power. You'll never have that kind of unchallenged authority again, because we will never stop demanding the raw data, and we'll drown you in laughter when you mutter something about deleting it by accident. We will never forget that you began with a conclusion and sought to harvest data that supported it—the exact opposite of the scientific method….
Your status as "scientists" is on probation. It will take years of faithful adherence to the scientific method, and rigorous efforts to test and disprove your hypotheses, before you can regain the trust of thoughtful men and women. Until you have accomplished this, the attitude we expect from you is humility and contrition. You have much to answer for. The time for you to issue pompous lectures is over. The time for you to give sworn testimony may soon begin.
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