Climategate: The CRUtape Letters

The first book on Climategate to be published is now out by Stephen Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller: Climategate: The CRUtape Letters (a clever, and fitting title in many ways). Here's Anthony Watts at Watt's Up With That, the best blog covering the coverup:

Climategate, written by Steve Mosher and Tom Fuller, is an account of the events leading up to the leaking of over 1,000 emails and assorted files that exposes the unethical and perhaps illegal practices used by the Hockey Stick Team to protect their turf as well as their information. These rock star scientists dined with the elite and feasted on government grants, but it was all predicated on ‘hiding the decline:’ Making sure no-one saw how shaky their data, analysis and conclusions actually were. Hide the decline didn’t refer to temperatures–it was worse. It was a decline in the quality of their data they were trying to hide. This book puts it all into context–and in context it is worse."

Climategate denialism in Copehagen

Stephen Schneider, a global warming proponent, at a Copenhagen meeting dealing with Climategate the only way they can: denying it:

56 newspapers you can't trust on Global Warming

Fifty-six newspapers have, in the face of Climategate, signed a statement indicating that they have drunk the Global Warming Kool-Aid and are experiencing the last twitches of alarmist-induced dementia.

Save us from people who are trying to save us

Marcie Smith, a 2009 Transylvania graduate from Richmond, calls for world leaders to deliver on remedies for supposedly man-made global warming at the Copenhagen conference, which she is attending. Here is Smith in the Opinion/Ideas section of today's Lexington Herald-Leader:

Atmospheric scientists are worried that their initial projections vastly underestimated the speed at which climate systems are deteriorating.

Actually what they're more worried about right now is that their credibility is shot after e-mails were made public which appear to show them manipulating data to make it look like like global warming was caused by human beings in the first place.

Heaven help us if humans ever do attain the power over the earth's climate like well-intentioned young people who think they are doing the public a service by publicly fretting over environmental conclusions that have been thrown into doubt hope they get. Then we can really start to worry.

Climategate: the Emperor's nakedness acknowledged

With the exception of a small handful of deniers whose faith in global warming science is quite literally unshakable, just about everyone now seems to admit that Climategate, while not disproving global warming, has so shaken the credibility of global warming science that the myth of human-induced global warming as a settled scientific issue has effectively been shattered. The mantle of impregnibility that the small community of global warming scientists had cloaked themselves in is in shreds.

Few times in the history of public debate has there been so colossal a turnaround. It is almost as if a rabbit had been discovered in the pre-Cambrian strata and Darwinism refuted, so complete has been the discrediting of the strength of the case for human-induced global warming. And it isn't just the so-called "denialists" who see it: The scientific corruption revealed by the Climategate e-mails is now acknowledged by all but a few pitiful mainstream media voices.

Go right now and open up another browser screen and Google "global warming". Then Google "climategate." What you will discover is that, to "global warming"'s 12,100,000 hits, there are 13,800,000 for "climategate".

When the credibility of one side in the debate has been so thoroughly demolished, the debate is essentially over. The debate will now have to be completely refashioned. The global warming computer will have to be completely rebooted. What the result will be, no one knows.

But then, maybe I am underestimating the craft and determination of the Ministry of Fear that lies behind the apocalyptic impulse of these people. It's happened before.

Here's the Canadian Broadcast Corporation's Rex Murphy with what is now the representative mainstream view on Climategate.

HT: Watt's Up With That?

A Shakeup at the Ministry of Fear: Scientist involved in "Climategate" steps down

The AP is reporting that Phil Jones, one of the authors of controversial e-mails at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia that suggested Global Warming advocates were playing fast and loose with data and suppressing dissent, is stepping down from his post:

Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.

Professor Jones said: “What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible. After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director’s role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support.”

Read the rest here.

Charles Murray on Climategate: That ain't no way to handle data

Social scientist Charles Murray weighs in on Climategate, indicating, once again, that the people who give all those preachy lectures to the rest of us about respecting science don't respect it themselves:

I don’t know anything about global warming but I know a lot about quantitative data analysis. The little secret—not dirty, exactly, but akin to the reasons it’s best not to watch how sausage is made—is the number of judgments that have to occur during the course of data analysis.

... That brings me to Climategate. The thousands of temperature measurements used to prove long-term warming cannot be treated as-is (“60 degrees Fahrenheit at 6:30 AM, 15 May, 1895, Cotswold station”). That “60” has to be treated in the context of time, date, location, local effects on the background temperature—and on and on—when it is analyzed.

The people who made those adjustments are, we now know, desperately invested in proving the truth of man-made global warming. And they lost the data. That’s more damning than anything else in the emails. If you’re doing important work that you know will be controversial, you don’t lose the data. You document everything you did to the data. You make the data available to others. If you don’t do all of those things, people are right to ignore anything you have published about the data. And that’s what we should do with everything these men have published about man-made global warming.

Read the rest here.

Where is the Scientific Integrity Patrol on Climategate?

The Scientific Integrity Patrol, which blew up over the appointment of Francis Collins as the head of the National Institutes of Health because he was a Christian, has been noticeably silent about Climategate. The silence of the Jerry Coynes and P. Z. Myers of the world doesn't even ascend to the level of a double standard, as pointed out nicely by Michael Egnor at the Discovery Institute:

Compare the pro-science blogosphere’s silence about fraud and scientific misconduct in climate science to another recent controversy in science: the appointment of Francis Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins is a scientist of the highest professional and personal reputation. His scandal, according to the science blogsphere, is this:

He’s a Christian who publicly talks about his belief in God.

Read the rest here.