No Hole in the Blogosphere: Tracking Climate-Gate
By Daniel Foster
National Review Online
Update: 12/2 5:12 P.M.: Senator Inhofe's press office has released YouTube video of Senator Boxer's comments on ClimateGate hearings (noted below).
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Update: 12/2 4:40 P.M.: Prominent Congressional Republicans have sent a letter to EPA head Lisa Jackson requesting an overhaul of environmental regulations in light of ClimateGate.
Update: 12/2 4:07 P.M.: Embattled Penn State Climatologist Michael Mann responds to the East Anglia email allegations here. He calls the outing of the emails a "vendetta."
Senator Barbara Boxer calls it something else:
<<< "You call it 'Climategate,' I call it 'E-mail-theft-gate,'" she said during a committee meeting on Wednesday. "Whatever it is, the main issue is are we facing global warming or are we not. I'm looking at these emails, that, even though they were stolen, are now out in the public." >>>
Boxer also said—perhaps in an attempt to head off Senator Inhofe—that any hearings on ClimateGate would include treating the hacking of the emails as a criminal matter.
On the other side of the Capitol, House Democrats are calling ClimateGate a non-controversy, and then some. Said House global warming committee chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass) of his Republican colleagues:
<<< "[They] sit over here using a couple of e-mails to (tell us) how to deal with a catastrophic threat to our planet....There is no alternative theory that the minority is proposing, other than that we know has been funded by the oil, by the coal industries that want to continue business as usual." >>>
Update: 12/2 2:29 P.M.: The Business and Media Institute posts that ABC, CBS, and NBC failed to mention ClimateGate once on any of their morning or evening news shows.
Update: 12/2 2:17 P.M.: The Australian parliament has rejected a version of "cap-and-trade" legislation on carbon emmissions. As with the ouster of the (classically) Liberal party leader yesterday (noted below), this seems to be at least casually tied to ClimateGate.
Update: 12/2 12:58 P.M.: All of the East Anglia emails are available in a searchable database here.
Update: 12/2 12:48 P.M.: In advance of potential Senate hearings (noted below), Senator Inhofe has told Malcolm Hughhes, a prominent University of Arizona climate scientist who cowrote papers on the "hockey stick" theory of global warming, not to destroy email exchanges with two other scientists involved in the scandal.
"Please note that there are severe civil and criminal penalties, federal and state, for the destruction of certain materials," Inhofe said in a letter to Hughes.
The Senator reportedly sent similar letters to a number of other researchers named in the emails.
Update: 12/2 11:26 A.M.: Jon Stewart ripped into the ClimateGate scientists (and Al Gore, for good measure) on last night's Daily Show:
And Jonah has more on climate science groupthink here, including a concrete example in which a typo in a climate change report came to be the conventional wisdom.
Update: 12/2 11:18 A.M.: Reason magazine's science correspondent Ronald Bailey provides a sober, even-handed assessment of the facts of the ClimateGate case that is great for anybody just catching up. In the second half of the piece, Bailey suggests steps that must be taken to reform the way climate science is practiced.
Update: 12/2 10:13 A.M.: Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has asked Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif) for hearings on whether ClimateGate represents evidence of a "conspiracy" by climate scientists to distort the debate on anthropogenic global warming.
In a letter to Boxer, Inhofe worries that the Climategate scandal
<<< "...could have far-reaching policy implications, affecting everything from ( to name a few ) cap-and-trade legislation, state and regional climate change programs, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202( a ) of the Clean Air Act,” the US Global Change Research Program, global climate models used by federal agencies, the Department of Interior’s coordinated strategy to address climate change impacts, and international climate change negotiations. " >>>
The same Hill story reports that the scope of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) investigation (which led to Director Phil Jones' temporary resignation, noted below) will be limited to "data security, an assessment of how we responded to a deluge of Freedom of Information requests, and any other relevant issues which the independent reviewer advises should be addressed." In other words, it will focus on the hacking and not the science.
Update: 12/1 5:48 P.M.: The Atlantic's Megan McArdle comes around, just a bit and at great length, from dismissal of climate change skeptics to a position that could be called climate change skeptic skepticism.
Update: 12/ 1 4:44 P.M.: Over at the Enterprise Blog, Jay Richards wonders whether the religious/evangelical environmentalist movement will take a second look at the "consensus" on global warming in light of the CRU emails. (Update 12/2 11:22 A.M.: Over at the First Thoughts blog, Thomas Sieger Derr takes a measured step in that direction).
Update: 12/1 4:35 P.M.: Phil Jones, director of CRU—the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit—is stepping down pending an investigation. Here is the original announcement from CRU's site. Allahpundit at Hot Air reacts here.
Update: 12/1 3:36 P.M.: The Greenies over at HuffPo have come up with a counternarrative on ClimateGate. They're calling it "SwiftHack".
Update: 12/1 2:36 P.M.: NRO's editorial; Derbyshire's level-headed defense of science against the scientists; White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dismissed the notion that the CRU emails put the science of climate change in question. Here's the video.
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Update: 12/1 12:41 A.M.: I missed this earlier. Penn State has announced it will investigate Professor Michael Mann, one of the scientists involved in the CRU email exchanges. Mann has been suspected of fudging the numbers before, as outlined by Iain Murray in 2003.
Also, Jonah and a reader on the "lost" climate data and the South Park gnomes.
Update: 12/1 10:42 A.M.: Australia's right-of-center leader and climate "reformist" goes down. Has Climate-Gate claimed its first political casualty?
And Hot Air calls the global warming scam "the crime of the century...with a dollar value that dwarfs the sins of Bernie Madoff or Enron"
* * *
The climate-gate story continues to, as it were, heat up in the blogoshpere, even as the mainstream media collectively covers its ears and hums loudly, praying it will go away.
At the heart of the story is the potential triumph of political ideology over sound science, on display in the hacked email exchanges of luminaries in the climate science community, who now appear to have done everything short of translating the scienfitic record into Newspeak to tilt the debate on global warming. If the politicized suppression of data and method, of dissent, and of the truth, evident in the emails doesn't amount to a conspiracy to sell the world on anthropogenic warming, it'll do until the real conspiracy gets here.
Meanwhile, all the AP doesn't mention the scandal—or climate skepticism at all—in a story on the "momentum building" among world leaders in advance of the Copenhagen climate conference, which President Obama has elected to attend. Indeed, the reaction of the Obama administration's energy and climate change czar, Carol Browner, to the revelations of ClimateGate was a mere shrug.
Here at the Corner, however, the response to Climategate has been rather robust. Jonah Goldberg sees in the media's (lack of) coverage the same "tribalistic journalism" that lead to Rathergate. Iain Murray agrees.
Here is Mark Steyn on perhaps the most egregious sin of the scientists at the Climate Research Unit: the wholesale deletion, without backups, of the raw climate data on which the Unit's climate change calculations are based. (Here's AEI's Charles Murray on the same, and more from Steyn here).
In the same vein, Greg Pollowitz rounds up some of the glaring flaws in the CRU's climate change models, on which the EPA and other regulators "heavily" rely for guidance. In one CRU programmer's own words, the model contains "botch after botch after botch".
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Steve MacIntyre's Climate Audit is doing an excellent job tracking the good, the bad, and the ugly of science behind the controversey. (visit the mirror site here for less traffic). RealClimate does much the same. At the Wall Street Journal, Richard Lindzen breaks down climate skepticism for the layman.
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