- Update 11/29/09 - UK Times Online article: "Climate Change Date Dumped" (HT: Drudge)
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
Me: Oh great. Get a load of the comments on this article.
- (Original Post) - The idols of our time are falling with breathtaking rapidity. The oldline media has been revealed to be biased and unreliable. It suppresses information it doesn't want us to know, and pushes themes and stories it wishes to promote.
The idol of Congress has been smashed. Ordinary trust has been destroyed. How can senators and representatives retain the people's confidence when they vote on bills they haven't read, and saddle generations to come with debt that staggers the mind?
And what about groups supposedly devoted to helping the poor like ACORN, which when the stone is lifted show themselves immoral, vote-rigging, and power hungry arms of the democratic party.
And what about President Barack Obama? Rather than continuing to bask in his Messiahship ("change you can believe in"), more and more segments of the nation have come to question his judgment and regret giving him stewardship over this great land.
And now, our trust in "science" has been smashed, as we see scientists fudging data, withholding information, lying, converting journals into propaganda organs, and misleading the public. "Climategate" articles keep pouring from the press. An earlier one is Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate." John Hindraker over at Power Line has written a lot about the East Anglia emails, here, here, here and here. Viscount Monckton (the man who challenged Al Gore to a debate) expresses his anger.
See also James Lewis's "Climate-Gate: It's the Totalitarianism, Stupid." He pulls no punches. An excerpt:
Global warming was a fraud, and it has now been exposed.
That little fraud would have cost the taxpayers of the world trillions of dollars, not to mention wrecking their economies with carbon taxes and penalties.
But that’s not even the worst of it. The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money, your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the
victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.
Earlier the article described the relationship of climategate to machine politics:
So what about the Climategate fiasco, the Watergate scandal of our age and time? Well, the global warming fraud is simply machine politics on the international level. Mark Steyn has coined the word “tranzi” for the transnational left that runs the UN, the European Union, most European capitals, and both left coasts of the United States. Tranzis are the political machine of our time.
The good news is that “anthropogenic global warming” — the most costly and widespread scientific fraud in history — just crumbled to fairy dust. We have emails from some of the biggest malefactors to prove it.
This story will remain with us for a long time, for it calls into question an important area of "political correctness" that had achieved sacred status by the manipulators of public opinion. Even now oldline media organs are reluctant to carry the story.
How can a peson know when they are being sold a bill of goods? What are some red flags to warn a person that a cover-up is in progress? From an e-mail to Jonah Goldberg written by a scientist:
. . . there were numerous such clues that were available five or more years ago
which should have made people look much more carefully at the consensus.
Here are some red flags in the behavior of mainstream scientists that
could be used as prompts for examining more carefully the consensus
position.
(1) Consistent use of ad hominem attacks toward those challenging their
positions.
(2) Refusal to make data public. This has been going on in this area for
some time.
(3) Refusal to engage in discussions of the actual science, on the
assumption that it is too complicated for others to understand.
(4) Challenging the credentials of those challenging the consensus position.
(5) Refusal to make computer code being used to analyze the data public.
This has been particularly egregious here, and clear statements of the
mathematics and statistics being employed would have allowed the
conclusions to be challenged at a much earlier stage.
If one believes in the science one is doing, one should be willing to go
to great lengths to engage those who challenge it or fail to understand
it, and provide various explanations at various levels of technical
detail, rather than attempt to discredit others.