Thank God for the alternative media. And a pox on the mainstream media. The former has done wonders in running with the Climategate story while the latter has shown its true colours as a censorious, bigoted and biased bunch of ratbags.
Thanks to the alternative media, the Climategate scandal is everywhere being talked about. Google the term – as I just have – and you will find well over 12 million search results. That is a lot of web activity devoted to this story – perhaps the most important story of the decade.
And the more we learn about Climategate, the uglier it looks for the Chicken Little brigade. It is not at all pretty. No wonder the MSM is involved in such a massive cover-up, just like the scientific community has been. Once the average Joe starts to hear the truth about all this, there will be a lot of anger and resentment out there.
We have been conned big time it seems, both by parts of the scientific community, and by large parts of the MSM. Now that some truth is starting to emerge, the true believers are going ballistic over this. They are using every trick in the book to cover up this story, and to shoot the messenger.
Indeed, they are the real sceptics, the real deniers, and the real danger to society. They are foaming at the mouth about those who question climate change. As one great example of this, see “Ed Begley, Jr. Loses Control Over ClimateGate”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIl2gdDtbCg
In the meantime, some important articles have been penned about Climategate. Of course they mostly appear in the alternative media, but that’s OK. The AM is well on the way to displacing a discredited and out-of-touch MSM. Consider three recent articles. They all deserve some wide promotion here.
Christopher Booker argues that “this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”. He starts by noting the magnitude of Climategate: ‘The reason why even the Guardian‘s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated. What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
This is damaging stuff for several reasons: “There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.”
He continues, “They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based. This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got ‘lost’. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.”
His entire article is well worth reading. So too is the piece by Bruce Walker. He recalls earlier cases of scientific fraud in his valuable article, “The Ghost of Lysenko”. Says Walker:
“The imaginary science of man-made global warning can now be entered into the infamous history of politicized science, the results of which have threads in our lives today. Consider the residue of such frauds as Rachel Carson, Alfred Kinsey, and Margaret Mead. Carson’s invented findings and unscientific methods led to the banning of DDT, which in turn cost the lives of tens of millions of children in undeveloped nations. Kinsey’s tortuously doctored ‘sex research,’ as Dr. Judith Riesman has so amply demonstrated, was not only invented to sate his perverted lusts, but created scientific myths about normal and abnormal behavior which haunt us to this day. Mead also simply invented research to fit her idea of what the science of anthropology ought to be in order to justify her own immature and immoral behavior. Carson, Kinsey, and Mead had an agenda before they did any research, and this agenda governed everything else.”
He continues, “Science is supposed to be the impartial blend of data with theory that allows human knowledge to go wherever the evidence leads. Serious science must be firmly grounded in moral absolutes. This sounds untrue to modern ears because we have been indoctrinated with a false history of science. Without faith in an ordered universe according to discoverable principles, science cannot exist. The assumption that life and the universe are rational is religious in nature. There must be a belief in ultimate truth – a faith, something which religion brings that is not found in a man-centered mindset. If man is all there is, then why can’t truth be relative?”
Walker reminds us of the infamous case of the Soviet scientist Lysenko, “the man who ruled the life sciences of Soviet Russia from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. He had a theory which fit Marxism perfectly: acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is not true, of course, but Lysenko had the Politburo and Stalin behind him. It was science that fit the political needs of the Bolsheviks, and so it was science backed by the awful power of the party and the state.”
He concludes, “The ghosts spawned by Lysenko still haunt us today. The ‘science’ of a modern Lysenko — Albert Gore, Jr. (son of the famous racist, Albert Gore, Sr.) – is totalitarian nonsense. The only question is this: How many good men must be consigned to the gulag before the dulled consciences of the administrators of academic ‘learning’ smell Lysenko’s stench?”
Finally, Mark Steyn shows us how spurious the entire “peer-reviewed” process is in the light of Climategate: “The more frantically they talked up ‘peer review’ as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science.
“The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: ‘How To Forge A Consensus.’ Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s ‘peer review,’ climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mr. Mann and Mr. Jones insisted they and only they represent the ‘peer-reviewed’ ‘consensus.’ And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.”
He concludes, “Looking forward to Copenhagen next month, Herman Van Rumpoy, the new president of the European Union and an eager proponent of the ecopalypse, says 2009 is ‘the first year of global governance.’ Global government, huh? I wonder where you go to vote them out of office. Hey, but don’t worry, it’ll all be ‘peer reviewed’.”
Yes, what a pity for all the gloom and doomists assembling soon in Copenhagen. Climategate could not have happened at a worse time for these zealots. And with Tony Abbott just elected the new leader of the Liberal Party here in Australia, and the defeat of the ETS now looking quite likely, it seems there is hope yet.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_ghost_of_lysenko.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/30/censoring-contradictions/?page=2
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