Media Missing the Plot on ‘Climate Gate’: It’s the Fraud, Stupid!

To the credit of the New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post — reliable outlets for promoting global warming alarmism, protecting those who craft it and marginalizing those who point out its weaknesses and excesses — they all ran stories in the past 48 hours addressing the documents somehow obtained from the computers of a UK university serving as the warming movement and industry’s Mother Ship. My great surprise is even greater because these outlets have demonstrated a pattern of only giving ink to embarrassing controversies after a week or so, once it appears that damage control is needed and the alarmists have gotten their story straight.

I documented this pattern in a book published one year ago this month, subtly titled “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.” The title says it all, including all that surely seems to have been affirmed by the documents posted, by “anonymous” on a Russian server and otherwise covering his tracks.

Since this affirms, not “reveals”, the scandal that so many have been explaining is the global warming industry, it also raises the issue of how can each of these media outlets still miss the plot? Well, they are doing so in a fashion so uniform, and in the face of such outrageous exposition of the scandal that is unfolding, that I conclude it is nonetheless yet another exercise in damage-control.

The emails, let alone the data still being combed over by the pointy-heads, plainly affirm everything I wrote, in detail, about the scams being run by the booming industry of Big Academia and Big Science suckling at the teat of the “global warming” panic they are also fostering.

I was by no means without company, but I did name and go into detail about all of the stars of this alleged correspondence, and how they are engaging in everything these documents appear to confirm. None of them lawyered up to challenge what I wrote. I suspect, however, that each and every one has retained counsel in the past few days, and not because they plan on suing anyone. They — rightly in my opinion — fear legal consequence as a result of what has been revealed. And not for writing nasty emails about people who disagree with them.

Yet the media have defined the story down, focusing on sideshow issues such as conspiring or hateful commentary about those who cause problems for the authors. Think of the wisdom of that approach: whose emails do not somewhere include such things? Surely this will also be proved with more emails stolen from skeptics’ computers, dispatching the story with an “everybody does it” narrative that entirely elides the meaning of the far more important admissions. Heck, Greenpeace used to peddle emails taken from my trash to the press, and got the Guardian and others to excerpt sections, out of context, with phony context padded around them and without calling me before running their “story”. That’s how they roll. They’ve no room for outrage. Still, that poses no resemblance to what’s going on now.

How it is possible that these media outlets’ regular “issue” reporters do not recognize the import of the fraud admitted to in the emails which, broadly, have been acknowledged as genuine?

Incidentally, also note how all of these outlets emphasize as fact, up front, that these documents, codes, data and emails are the product of “hackers” (this has grown from “a hacker” when the story first ran, though no outlet has offered any explanation for that change let alone evidence of the hacking). They simply accept that the University of East Anglia’s computers were hacked, on the word of people who are shown by what was hacked to be liars and charlatans and who have an interest in making the story be something other than the substance of the material.

I do not know if the computers were hacked. I do know that there is just as much reason to suspect that the documents were posted by someone on the inside who still possesses a conscience, a “whistleblower”. Remember that this incident occurred after the most recent and audacious twist in the university’s Climatic Research Unit refusal of access to basic raw data and other material necessary to validate their claims serving as the basis for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol (and Kyoto II), “cap-and-trade”, and so on. This was a four-year campaign to hide material — a campaign whose tactics were also admitted to in the alleged emails now made public.

After running out of excuses, in September CRU’s Phil Jones simply claimed that he had lost the data so, sorry, no, no one can check it. Implausible beyond comprehension. And if the emails are real and any indication of the way this group operates, deeply dishonest.

Soon thereafter someone went and downloaded material that, again if real, says enough, you are scandalizing and perverting “science”. This shall stop. Someone took it upon themselves to enforce a UK freedom of information act that its targets allegedly and apparently admit to subverting.

No matter how many stories seek to distract you with the shiny objects of prurient dialogue between sniveling, petulant and nasty global warming alarmists, that isn’t the story. The story is the exposition . Not the revelation, in fact, but merely the revelation of their affirmation of it.

I’m told by a cable news producer that, across the board, the green pressure groups, the supposedly “Concerned Scientists” (they even have a Union!), all of them are refusing to come out and speak to the issue. That could be because they understand that what is out is described by the material’s anonymous source as “a random sample.” There could be many more shoes to drop. Why hitch your organization further to the anchor threatening to sink a $7 billion per year (that’s just federal taxpayer-funding) industry? Live to fight another day. There will always be a new Man-as-agent-of-doom theory attracting college kids, Statists and wealthy elites.

This cannot simply be a three-day story about titillating emails. The edge seems to have been turned up on information proving everything we have been saying, often in great detail if to no media interest, for years. Kyoto II, “cap-and-trade” and EPA must all be stayed, at least so far as the U.S. is concerned, until the truth is outed and admitted to.

Posted Nov 23rd 2009 at 8:38 am in Environment, Media Criticism, News | Comments (103)

Graph via Steve McIntyre

My syndicated column today looks at the global warming cultists in the Obama administration who are working overtime to paper over the ClimateGate scandal. Yesterday, Phil Jones, the head of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia stepped aside while the university investigates. Penn State prof Michael Mann, purveyor of the infamous hockey stick graph of spiking global temperatures peddled by Al Gore, is also under investigation. GOP Sen. James Inhofe, vigilant watchdog over global warming shenanigans, wants Babs Boxer to investigate. As Obama heads to Copenhagen to crusade for massive interventions to stop global warming, a new Harris Poll shows a significant shift in public opinion away from the cult of climate change. Jonah Goldberg dissects the groupthink that has gripped the global warming industry and its media enablers. Ed Driscoll takes you on a tour through global warming evolution in six and a half minutes. Well now: “Moderate” (liberal) GOP candidates/lawmakers led by GOP cap-and-tax 8′er Mark Kirk are running as fast as they can from the global warming hot mess.

Hide the decline, hide the decline…

Oh, and just a reminder:

Former Vice President Al Gore had four White House meetings in April. The records suggest these were not social calls for Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work to curb global warming. Two of the meetings were with John Holdren, Obama’s top science and technology adviser.

***

All the president’s ClimateGate deniers
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

“The science is settled,” we’ve been told for decades by zealous proponents of man-made global warming hysteria. Thanks to an earth-shaking hacking scandal across the pond, we now have mountains of documents from the world’s leading global warming advocacy center that show the science is about as settled as a southeast Asian tsunami. You won’t be surprised by the Obama administration’s response to ClimateGate.

With pursed lips and closed eyes and ears, the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra: The science is settled.

Never mind all the devastating new information about data manipulation, intimidation, and cult-like cover-ups to “hide the decline” in global temperatures over the last half-century, they say. The science is settled.

Never mind what The Atlantic’s Clive Crook, after wading through the climate science email files of the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, called the overpowering “stink of intellectual corruption” — combined with mafia-like suppression of dissent, suppression of evidence and methods, and “plain statistical incompetence” exposed by the document trove. The science is settled.

Never mind the expedient disappearance of mounds of raw weather station data that dissenting scientists were seeking through freedom of information requests from the Climatic Research Unit. The science is settled.

In March, President Obama made a grandiose show of putting “science” above “politics” when lifting the ban on government-funded human embryonic stem cell research. “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s also about protecting free and open inquiry,” he said during the signing ceremony. “It’s about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

Yet, the pro-sound science president has surrounded himself with radical ClimateGate deniers who have spent their entire professional careers “settling” man-made global warming disaster science through fear-mongering, intimidation, and ridicule of opponents.

*Science czar John Holdren, who will testify on Capitol Hill this week at a hearing on ClimateGate, infamously hyped weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich. He made a public bet against free-market economist Julian Simon predicting dire shortages of five natural resources as a result of feared overconsumption. He lost on all counts. No matter.

Holdren’s failure didn’t stop him from writing forcefully about mass sterilization and forced abortion “solutions” to a fizzling, sizzling, overpopulated planet. And it didn’t stop him from making a living making more dire predictions. In 1986, Ehrlich credited Holdren with forecasting that “carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.” He went on to Harvard and the White House. On the David Letterman show earlier this year, Holdren fretted that his son “might not see snow!”

Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball notes that Holdren turned up in the ClimateGate files belittling the work of astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division. Holdren put “Harvard” in sneer quotes when mocking a research paper Baliunas and Soon published in 2003 showing that “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” First, deny. Next, deride.

*Energy Secretary Steven Chu picked derision as his weapon earlier this year when peddling the Obama administration’s greenhouse-gas emission policy. “The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Chu. He dismissed dissent by asserting “there’s very little debate” about the impact of “green energy” policy on the economy.

There’s “very little debate,” of course, because dissenters get crushed.

*The Obama team’s chief eco-dissent-crusher is climate czar Carol Browner.

As I’ve reported and reminded over the years, she oversaw the destruction of Environmental Protection Agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve its records during the Clinton years.

Over the past year, the EPA has stifled the dissent of Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, who questioned the administration’s reliance on outdated research on the health effects of greenhouse gases – and also sought to yank a YouTube video created by EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams that is critical of cap-and-trade. Browner reportedly threatened auto execs in July by telling them to “put nothing in writing…ever” about their negotiations with her.

And she is now leading the “science is settled” stonewalling in the wake of ClimateGate. “I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists,” she said. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.” Book-cookers are good at making it seem so.

In any case, last year, more than 31,000 scientists — – including 9,021 PhDs — signed a petition sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine rejecting claims of human-caused global warming.

But hey, who’s counting? The science is settled.

***

Australia rejects a massive cap-and-tax bill.

Richard Lindzen: No, the science isn’t settled.

Paul Driessen: Time to cancel Copenhagen.

Ron Bailey on the scientific tragedy of ClimateGate:

How can the world of climate science recover? First, carry out independent investigations of the activities of the researchers involved. Pennsylvania State University has announced that it will investigate the activities of researcher Michael Mann who worked closely with the CRU and several times expressed in the leaked emails his desire to stifle the scientific work of researchers with whom he disagreed. In Britain, Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has called for an independent investigation of the CRU. Tireless journalistic global warming scold George Monbiot has declared, “It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow…. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.”

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