They're Calling It Climategate Now

I like Scientists Behaving Badly much better than Climategate. We don't really need another X-gate. Although this "gate" is more like the original than some of the other "gates" that have been christened as such. Anyway, here's a round up of facts and opinion on the revelations in the hacked emails and data from University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most of these I picked up from Instapundit.

• Climate cuttings 33, summaries of some of what's in those hacked CRU files.


• Climategate, Coal Mine Deaths, Air Pollution and Coals assault on human health. I'm not sure I would agree with everything this blogger concludes about coal but this is certainly true, "The over reaching on the science and over aggressive tactics are now blowing up in face of the pro-global warming side."
  
  This from the comments section regarding claims about climate conditions in the earth's past also rings true, "How can you trust that these conditions even existed? Ice cores? Tree ring data? We now have no reason to believe any paleo climate data. Some 40 or 50 'scientists' have been cooking the books with the collusion of influential journalists. Until all that data has been independently audited, all those assertions are out the window for all but the most faithful."


• Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’
  

  This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

  The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.



• Climategate: When Scientists Become Politicians
  

  Over thousands of years, at each step, the response of the scientists was to continually adjust and refine their theories to conform to the data, not the other way around. This is how science is done and how we developed the knowledge that has given us such tremendous and accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs in the past century. It is occasionally reasonable to throw out a bad data point if it is in defiance of an otherwise satisfactory model fit, as long as everyone knows that you’ve done so and the rationale, but a deliberate and unrevealed fudging of results in an attempt to make the real world fit one’s preconceptions is beyond the scientific pale. Journal articles have been thrown out for it; PhD candidates have lost their degrees for it.
  

  Many in the climate change community have condemned what they call “skeptics,” often to the point of declaring them de facto criminals and assigning them to the same category as Holocaust deniers. They tell us that “the science is settled” and that we should shut up. But every scientist worthy of the name should be a skeptic. Every theory should be subject to challenge on a scientific basis. Every claim of a model’s validity should be accompanied by the complete model and data set that supposedly validated it, so that it can be replicated. That is how science works. It is how it advances. And when the science is supposedly “settled” and they refuse to do so, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why.

  Well, now we know.



• NYT Policy on Illegally Acquired Documents, "Hasn’t the Grey Lady published illegally obtained documents on national security and other matters in the past?" I must confess that I find the New York Times' reluctance to publish any of the leaked/hacked/whatever information snort worthy for exactly that reason.


• More on the NYT's selective squeamishness about handling leaked information, All The News That’s Fit To Bury


• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too: Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions
  

  Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.



• And the wheels of capitalism keep turning, WEAR THE DECLINE! Lots of links and updates with this one.