Circling the global warming wagons

This report linked at National Review's The Corner blog--about Global Warming wagon circling, is hilarious: "The Perils of Groupthink, Cont'd" - Jonah Goldberg.

An Inconvenient Peer Review, cont'd

Findings - Fracas Over Hacked Climate E-Mail Shows Peril of Spinning Science - NYTimes.com:

"In fact, one skeptic raised [a concern about drawing conclusions from two sets of data grafted together] in a comment posted in 2004 on RealClimate, the blog operated by climate scientists. The comment, which questioned the propriety of “grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record,” immediately drew a sharp retort on the blog from Michael Mann, an expert at Penn State University:

“No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation Web sites) appearing in this forum.”

Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.

Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians. Yes, some of the skeptics have political agendas, but so do some of the scientists. Sure, the skeptics can be cranks and pests, but they have identified genuine problems in the historical reconstructions of climate, as in the debate they inspired about the “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past millennium."

I love how Mann writes "to our knowledge." Sounds like a press secretary's resort to plausible deniability.

Jim Treacher's friendly chat with the global warming evangelist who lives in his head

Jim Treacher has scripted what reminds me of most any on-line "debate" with a global warming alarmist. Here's an excerpt:

"Do you really think you know more than scientists? They're scientists.

Yes, and science is a wonderful thing. It's improved our lives in countless ways. It also has nothing to do with what these frauds, and the useful idiots who believed them, have been pulling."

ClimateGate criminal?

Robert Tracinski at RealClearPolitics discusses another aspect to the Climategate scandal: ("ClimateGate: The Fix is In"):

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It's the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being 'confused' by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

I am skeptical that this is a criminal act, but I guess that depends on assertions that were made in grant proposals and the intent of these "scientists." In all candor (and Tracinski implies as much), I'm inclined to say that these fools sincerely believed the crap they were espousing . . . it was moral relativism mixed with arrogance that motivated them to quash dissent and do whatever was necessary to "be right."

Aunt B oughta like this report . . .

Most Aggressive Dog Breeds - Photos - WFTV Orlando

Covering their tracks on global "warming"

I guess this report should come as no surprise given that leading global warming alarmists had always blown off FOI (UK, US: FOIA) requests ("Climate change data dumped" - Times Online):

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

More Climategate reactions from "scientists"

From the WSJ:

A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:

"This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science."

The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature. The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim.

Emphasis added.

Climategate in sum

Climategate is despicable on a host of levels . . . institutional censorship of opposing views, defamation, deception. Here's an excerpt from a great essay at Pajamas Media, "Climategate: The Skeptical Scientist's View":

As readers are now aware, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, the main climate research center in Britain, has had 128 megabytes of secret emails and other data placed online by someone calling himself “FOIA.” A number of scientists have been trying for years to get the raw data possessed by CRU placed online, filing requests under the British Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Although required by law to release this information, CRU has not done so, or has claimed that the data were accidentally erased. We now have proof in the emails that the illegal withholding of information was intentional, and that the erasure of data was also intentional.

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime — the real story of Climategate.

Emphasis added.

Tip o' the hat to Instapundit.

Meanwhile: here are some pathetic and almost humorous responses from Environmental Alarmists.

Wow, Arianna Huffington thinks we need to use more plastic . . .

Arianna Huffington has a post at her place entitled, "Will The Unemployment Disaster Be Obama's Katrina?". My first response (in my head, not audibly) was, "Of course not, Bush didn't cause Hurricane Katrina," but I figured that Huffington wouldn't share my perspective. As I read the essay, though, I realized how radically different was our difference of perspective. From the article:

His economic team's resistance to a second round of stimulus, 'lukewarm' reaction to Congressional jobs legislation, and prioritization of deficit reduction over job creation certainly has the feel of a taking-in-the-damage-from-2,500-feet flyover moment.

Wow. Then again, I guess you could say that Libs view economics like bad meteorology . . . giving a convincing forecast and then hand out raincoats with your logo on them.