5 years ago today, a cache of emails was dropped into the lap of several Climate blogs, including WUWT. Paul Matthews has a great writeup on it:
On 17th November 2009, comments appeared on a number of sceptic blogs such as here at the Air Vent. The comment started with the text:
“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.
We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.
Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.
This is a limited time offer, download now:”
This was followed by a link to the file of emails and a brief summary of some of the contents.
What I think is the most succinct quote from Paul’s article is this:
“To me, the real scandal was not so much that two or three climate scientists behaved badly, but that virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong”
More here: https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/climategate-anniversary/
On November 19th, WUWT broke the story, and I’ll have some reflections on the past 5 years in a couple of days.
h/t to Barry Woods
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Doug Allen,
Clear it is you do not have the heart, courage, mean streak needed to do in these climate thugs/liars/criminal cult of money and therefore stand back as there are those like me and Catherine who will get the ugly job done. It will be a real back alley knock down drag out, the evil is great, organized, and well funded by gold and supported by great evil. Your sort of smart to stay out of the line of fire.
Had we fought this hockey stick fraud data for gold fight when needed the Obama care lie and fraud would never have been possible.
John Boehner is a leader of the coward nation operation, of not much use to U.S..
The fight is near, the fight must be.
Too, Mr. Allen had you been the one with the ability to release the Climate Gate e-mails looks like we would never have had them released.
It is like that seems to some.
Good morning Catherine,
Your “Obama is a Marxist, a tyrant” bla bla bla is as counterproductive as it is absurd. Words have meanings. Sure, there will be many here who share the same motivated reasoning and even believe Obama is a Muslim bla bla bla. It’s the counterproductive that I want to address, not the refusal to to be reasonable. BTW, I appreciate your many good comments and references on the global warming/climate change which I agree with. Unfortunately, you and many others here (but not Anthony or Curry at her blog) undermine the important message of CAGW fiction with over-reach as great as the CAGWers.
I teach a global warming/climate change class in the Osher Life Long Learnring program at a nearby university. The students are mostly retired professionals or successful businessman- scientists, engineers, teachers, economists – college graduates interested in continued learning experience. They are mostly woefully ill informed about climate science and its data. They have not visited climate blogs (fewer than 5%) and have no knowledge of Delingpole and his watermelon hypothesis. They are pretty mainstream who read their liberal or conservative news sources with the amount of skepticism you’d expect of well educated, successful persons.
My class is data centered, but does begin with Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and its critics, the movies and videos, back and forth with the CAGW and the critics. This is a conscious effort to deprogram those (most of the students) who have strong, but poorly informed opinions, before we start studying the history of climate science and then the science of climate science emphasizing the data. I have found that introducing students to the many informative climate blogs is counterproductive because of the extremism of political commentary by the liberal “greens” and by the conservative “reds” who use climate science as a proxy for their culture wars. Even someone as hypocritical as Lewandowski is at least partly right about the extremists on both sides, himself included. My students who view political comments like yours, Catherine, are very apt to discount everything you say about climate science which I already said I appreciate and agree with.
The counter-productive point is well -made.
Climate Science is not simple. Providing an easy short-cut to understanding will be grabbed by most people who aren’t actively engaged with the topic.
Most Green Policies are regressive and should be opposed by the Left (I am on the political left). But as a short-cut to understanding the Left believes in cAGW and the Right doesn’t. So the Left supports Regressive policies – that’s mad.
If the science was sound it wouldn’t be a political issue. We would all agree something need to be done and we could move on to the policy debate as to “What to do?”.
But the science is at best unproven. So the science needs to be engaged with. And that’s impossible if you think that ‘to doubt high climate sensitivity’ means you must subscribe to ‘a covert Communist takeover of the Whitehouse (by Muslims)’.
You may believe that. Who knows, you may be right to believe that. But it doesn’t help. It is not persuasive.
Or on the other hand, by believing that ‘the Koch brothers and Jewish bankers secretly control the world’ (I know that my side, on the Left has, its unpersuasive wing too).
Interesting. All worthy (or, at least, worthwhile) causes have the usual percentage of crazies.
P.S., As a (very devoted) RINO, I am not on the “political” left. I am an apostate. But I am a liberal and will always be one. I was immersed in dialectic, tutored in deconstruction. I don’t think a lot of the commenters here can claim they were assigned Other Voices Other Rooms (Truman Capote) or Death in Venice in High School. It has been hard-wired. I am regarded more favorably by conservatives than liberals. But I am not of them. They are not my people. And when I fight, I use the weapons, tools, and tactics of the left, because those are the weapons I have — and know how to use.
Evening… I’m a long-time reader here posting specifically to agree with this point, as it irks me hugely. I am British, a psychology graduate, and left-wing enough that I’d imagine most of you would regard me as a diseased hippy.
Regardless, this is about lying and the wholescale abuse of science, statistics and manipulation of the public. I see that as something that should transcend all political allegiences.
For what it’s worth, I’m generally a supporter of gradually moving over to renewables but primarily for geopolitical reasons (ie. to end the stranglehold that repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia have on the rest of the world). Clearly, reduction of air pollution is a worthwhile goal but not because we’re all going to drown or anything ridiculous. None of that excuses outright lying, fabricating data and abuse of the scientific process.
The fact that so many otherwise extremely intelligent people I know are taken in by it, along with the almost total collusion of all the major mainstream media outlets. No warming for 18 years, CO2 increases, ergo hypothesis falsified… plus, it’s been a lot warmer than this before. It seems pretty simple. Real science is not conducted by “consensus”.
It saddens me that I know people who have wasted time studying for an MSc in “Climate Change Policy” – http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cabot/postgrad/msc-ccsp.html
We’re all on the same side. Please spare a thought for those of us “over here” who are isolated and can’t speak out for fear of abuse, ad hominem, and sadly, losing friends. As much as I feel strongly about this, it’s not worth falling out with half the people I know over. I know I’m not the only one.
Thank you for the breath of sanity.
– a Leftie
Evening… I’m a long-time reader here posting specifically to agree with this point, as it irks me hugely. I am British, a psychology graduate, and left-wing enough that I’d imagine most of you would regard me as a diseased hippy.
Regardless, this is about lying and the wholescale abuse of science, statistics and manipulation of the public. I see that as something that should transcend all political allegiences.
For what it’s worth, I’m generally a supporter of gradually moving over to renewables but primarily for geopolitical reasons (ie. to end the stranglehold that repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia have on the rest of the world). Clearly, reduction of air pollution is a worthwhile goal but not because we’re all going to drown or anything ridiculous. None of that excuses outright lying, fabricating data and abuse of the scientific process.
The fact that so many otherwise extremely intelligent people I know are taken in by it, along with the almost total collusion of all the major mainstream media outlets astonishes me daily. No warming for 18 years, CO2 increases, ergo hypothesis falsified… plus, it’s been a lot warmer than this before. It seems pretty simple. Real science is not conducted by “consensus”.
It saddens me that I know people who have wasted time studying for an MSc in “Climate Change Policy” – http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cabot/postgrad/msc-ccsp.html
We’re all on the same side. Please spare a thought for those of us “over here” who are isolated and can’t speak out for fear of abuse, ad hominem, and sadly, losing friends. As much as I feel strongly about this, it’s not worth falling out with half the people I know over. I know I’m not the only one.
Thank you for the breath of sanity.
– a Leftie
There is a different understanding available.
There are many ideologically motivated climate focused scientists who support a crusading movement trying to give more credibility to the weak based theory of significant AGW from CO2 by fossil fuel. I do not think those supporters pretended that nothing was wrong with the CG scientists’ bad behavior. Instead, it appears to me, that such supporters thought it was a necessary postmodern justified scientific process that creates science to serve a predetermined ‘ideology based good’ for some social end. In other words the supporters look as if they think science should be subjectively based on human ideology instead of objectively based on reality. That is the metaphysical/epistemic approach of giving higher priority to ideas than reality. To me it looks like they (the supporters in the science community) did not ignore or pretended anything wrt CG bad behavior by a handful of scientists; it looks like they were fairly compliant to a certain subjectively based philosophy of science.
John
Doug Allen,
1. Obama is a Marxist… check
2. Obama is a tyrant… check
I constantly tell people: do not listen to his words! Watch his actions. Then you will know.
Usurping the legislative process is what a tyrant does. The excuses being made for giving a blanket free pass to millions of people who are here illegally — they are citizens of other countries who are deliberately violating the law by being here — and who are being invited to become permanently ensconced here, with no fear of, or repeal of our existing laws, is nothing but tyranny. Maybe your definition is different, but that’s mine. Tyranny is lawless rule by decree. That is exactly what we are seeing. Obama disregards and despises our laws.
Barry Obama was raised by Marxists; he attended a Marxist church with a Marxist pastor for more than twenty years, donating tens of thousands of dollars in the process. He is always surrounded by Marxists, who never criticize the path he is on. Rather, they cheer him on. You can have an opinion that he isn’t a Marxist, but my view is different. I look at his actions; I don’t listen to his words because he lies like a child caught with candy he shouldn’t have.
Just like the ‘carbon’ scare, where we ask folks what it would take to finally convince them that the purveyors of that scam are wrong, what would it take for you to see that Obama is a lying Marxist who deliberately violates the Constitution? To me, that is a tyrant. After that, the only thing we should be discussing is how much of a tyrant he is — and how much worse it will get.
November 19.
Stalingrad Day.
The Turning Point.
They did say the Tipping Point would come in 2009. didn’t they?