MNN.COM > Earth Matters > Climate Change

Media Mayhem: The real Climategate

A spurious debate over purloined e-mails overshadows evidence that climate change is worse than we thought.
By Ken Edelstein
Tue, Dec 01 2009 at 7:25 AM EST
Read more: CLIMATEGATE, GLOBAL WARMING, MEDIA MAYHEM, SKEPTICISM

Photo: esnaolo/iStockPhoto
There’s nothing people like more than a good fight. How else to explain that e-mails stolen from a climate research center in Great Britain warranted, in just a few days, more than 15,000 blog comments, wall-to-wall cable coverage and a front page article in the New York Times, while the most comprehensive review of actual climate change research since 2007 went virtually unnoticed?
 
First, allow me to tell to you what -- if you judge by the small amount of ink spilled on the subject -- shouldn’t concern us: That comprehensive review of recent studies shows that climate change is worse than scientists previously thought it would be by now. Glaciers are disappearing at record rates. Sea levels may rise seven feet by the end of the century. Storms and droughts are getting more extreme. And action needs to be taken now or we won’t be able to stabilize the climate for generations.
 
Hey, what’s the big deal? The real news is that the e-mails purloined from that research center show that some scientists are, well, catty. They’re not fond of people who make a living calling them liars. They support scientists who agree with them and undermine those who don’t. Sometimes they’ll go to great lengths not to share their data -- especially from critics.
 
 
Yes, “Climategate!” That’s what skeptics have dubbed revelations that popped up on the web Nov. 19 in the form of a link from a blog to hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. No superlative was too grand to describe it.
 
“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” exclaimed Patrick J. Michaels, one in a handful of climate scientists who are skeptical of human-caused climate change.
 
The fevered fingers of typing skeptics pounded out vindication with every keystroke. One post on WattsUpWithThat.com drew 1,574 celebratory comments at my last count. Climate Audit, the most authoritative of the skeptics’ blogs, got so busy that its operator needed to move it temporarily to a “mirror site.” And the Air Vent, the less-trafficked blog that first published some of the stolen e-mails, became a hotbed of anti-warming discussion, with at least 11 posts and nearly 2,000 comments in its first five days on the subject.
 
“This is a scandal with proportions that reach past all of the imaginations of a skeptics mind,” the Air Vent’s publisher, who writes under the pseudonym JeffId, declared. “... These many e-mails demonstrate that climate science is absolutely not a natural consensus but a forced one with leftist governmental goals, manipulated from the IPCC on downward to give the impression of certainty of knowledge.”
 
You know how it goes from there. Loud noises on the blogosphere translate into story lines for talk radio and Fox News. Then, the other cable and news stations, the national newspapers, and the wire services amplify the story.
 
Ever vigilant to defend the integrity of science from dismantled communists, Rush Limbaugh spent much of his week, including his entire Nov. 24 show, on “Climategate.” He reminded listeners what he’s been warning us for years: “It’s the biggest lie, the biggest scam, the biggest fraud in the history of the world.”
 

 
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., rushed onto Fox to announce an investigation of agencies and scientists that “all along have been trying to hide the real, avoid the real, science about this notion of global warming.”
 
One little catch: Amid the maelstrom, it’s difficult to say whether anything in the climate unit’s 13 years of e-mails should change anyone’s understanding of the actual science behind climate change.
 
Bare-knuckled academic politics certainly is on display in the e-mails. One scientist appears to have celebrated the death of an adversarial colleague. Another tries to get an unfriendly scientist kicked out as editor of a journal.
 
In many cases, the scientists corresponding with each other on the e-mails come across as hunkered down against skeptics in the battle for public opinion -- plotting where to release a bit of information or how to avoid giving the skeptics ammo.
 
It seems that one leading scientist -- Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) -- engaged in an ill-advised effort to avoid releasing documents to the public under Great Britain’s Freedom of Information law. University officials argued that was because much of the proprietary data was acquired from third parties on the grounds that it would remain private. But Jones also appeared to want to keep the inner workings of his colleagues’ work out of the hands of skeptics. He feared they would comb over every detail to find points that could be twisted out of context for political purposes.
 
Now, Jones’ fears have been realized -- and then some. The hack of CRU’s emails appears to have been a sophisticated job. Using a computer in Turkey and a server in Russia, the e-mail hacker posted just over 1,300 of what must have been far, far more e-mails among CRU scientists and their colleagues around the world in 13 years. Then, the hacker posted a link to the e-mails on comments to the Air Vent and other blogs.
 
Skeptics’ blogs spent the next week plucking out the e-mails with nefarious-sounding wording as supposed evidence that the overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change had been undermined. The phrasing that has grabbed the most attention was this sentence from a 10-year-old e-mail sent by Jones to three other scientists: “I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
 
At first, glance that looks pretty deceptive. But there’s a legitimate explanation for the words “trick” and “hide.” Jones himself, as well as other scientists, explained that he was using the words colloquially, to shorthand a perfectly acceptable and publicly discussed approach to correcting a well-known glitch in a specific data set.
 
That explanation didn’t make it onto dozens of skeptics’ posts and comments. Nor did it move Fox News conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, who read it in measured, knowing tones before declaring:
 
“This is what appears to be going on behind the scenes, and literally trillions of dollars of policy decisions are being based on what these guys are telling us. ... We told you what was going on without proof because we listened to our gut. You’d never believe me, but once again here we are with yet another brand new reality.”
 

 
But there’s “new reality” and then there’s new reality. Beck didn’t talk about the real new reality, which was released the next day in the form of “the Copenhagen Diagnosis,” a review by 26 climate research scientists of peer-reviewed studies since 2007.
 
They found that “global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40 percent higher than those in 1990” and that the rise in global temperatures over that time has pretty much tracked what climate scientists’ models have been saying would occur if emissions continued to rise.
 
They also reported that:
 
*The glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheets all are melting at an increasing rate.
 
*Sea levels have risen nearly twice as fast as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected in 2007 -- about an inch-and-half a year for the last 15 years.
 
*Chances are increasing that the climate system will reach “tipping points” where a cascade of changes become irreversible.
 
*And, finally global, emissions must peak in the next decade and must be followed by steep declines if we’re to avoid global temperature increases above 2 degrees Celsius, which many scientists fear would serve as a point beyond which changes will become unmanageable.
A problem from the mainstream media’s perspective is that we’ve heard all that before, or at least something like it. According to the old journalistic saw, “when a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."
 
News by that definition is less a reflection what’s important than what’s novel, which makes it susceptible to the manipulation of those who can come up with the freshest story line. And when an entire community is built up around feeding that story line to the media, the manipulations can eclipse the truth quite regularly.
 
The less dramatic truth about the purloined e-mails is that, in 13 years of e-mails, there was so little evidence of the manipulation of science. It seems to me that climate skeptics undermined their credibility by overstating what they’d found. The real “Climategate” is the failure of the mainstream media to discern what is true and significant from what is petty but dramatic, and the complicity of many in the media in outright lies.
 
That’s not to pretend that the e-mails amount to some sort of coup for those who want to see climate action. Jones’ apparent effort to skirt the Freedom of Information request and the nasty treatment by leading climatologists of colleagues who disagreed with them underscore that both diplomacy and openness are crucial in a debate that has become as political as it is scientific.
 
One scientist whose e-mails show up in the CRU cache predicts the controversy will blow over and ultimately vindicate him and his colleagues. That’s wishful thinking.
 
Regardless of its accuracy, a myth about the CRU e-mails already has been established. Fox’s David Asman encapsulates it this way: “New e-mails from global warming theorists appear to show that they have been covering up evidence that the Earth isn’t warming as much as they thought it was. In fact, it might actually be cooling a bit. Furthermore, there’s not as much evidence that man is responsible for climate change as has been claimed by Al Gore and others.”
 
That myth -- unsupported by the e-mails that so far have come to light -- now joins other shibboleths of climate skeptics: temperatures have dropped over the last decade; data linking carbon increases to rising temperatures has been discredited; Americans are being asked to sacrifice more than anyone else; and so on. Repeated often enough by skeptics and their friends on Fox and talk radio, they are then treated in the news media as one legitimate side in a debate -- even though the facts say otherwise.
 
The resulting confusion won’t stop us from dealing with climate change. Reality -- in the form of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, massive refugee problems, and other catastrophes -- will force us to respond in some fashion. Eventually. But the confusion will slow and weaken our response.
 
“Climategate” hasn’t created a mushroom cloud. But it has thickened the fog surrounding the debate that has caused us to wander far too slowly toward action.
 
Also on MNN:
 
Journalist Ken Edelstein writes the Media Mayhem column for the Mother Nature Network. From various coffee shops in Atlanta, he publishes an environmental news site at MyGreenATL.com.


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Comments(97)

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Posted By Bob Trueman - Mon, Dec 28 2009 at 11:00 AM EST

Eco journalism

The emotional nature of many folks' responses to the possibility of "climate change" makes all comment rather difficult.

Would it be too much to suggest that anyone who has chosen to believe that a dangerous degree of planetary warming is occurring because of anthropogenic CO2 releases is doing their cause less than justice, if a) they scream too stridently, or b) they issue narratives which are not substantiated by empirical findings?

Mr. Edelstein is a journalist. He writes.... More

Posted By Mariss - Wed, Dec 16 2009 at 7:29 PM EST

This Dog Won't Hunt Anymore

No matter what words you use, you cannot get away from the fact AGW "science" is now shown to be corrupt. The spell is broken and the global warming scare stories don't work anymore.

Come to terms with this reality: They lied to you and they made it all up. Shame on them, shame on you for believing it. There is no man-made global warming and there never was. There is only Mann-made global warming (as in Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann).

Posted By Alan - Mon, Feb 01 2010 at 5:52 AM EST

You didnt answer my question

so how are we not pollutiing our planet are face masks in China cities just a ploy too? Is lung disease another ploy or do I need to be pittied and looked down on for being put under a spell, shame on me? dont deride a serious question with pity to make yourself sound like some friggin intelect.

Posted By Charles.U.Farley - Wed, Dec 02 2009 at 4:10 PM EST

Incredible

Yes incredible.

That people still argue the peer review science angle.

The big problem with it ( as ive said before) is simply if you base your theory on flawed or fraudulent data then you can crow the peer review process until youre a deep shade of purple but the fact will remain- you based your theory on trash and it will be wrong and have no substance to it.

The logic quite simply must follow that the data cannot then be trusted.
But trust is a true believers.... More

Posted By Alan - Wed, Dec 02 2009 at 10:46 PM EST

Bad Idea

I know a few people in the field of this study personally im not a scientist, but i've followed so much on it that to claim the whole thing is a conspiracy theory is bunk, I also read a whole chunk of the e-mails too and found nothing that gave into these guys covering up anything other than the fact that they had to redo their calculations because new data and measuring techniques were inadequate or wrong in representing the true effects.
If you want to say its just a tax to screw.... More

Posted By Alan - Tue, Dec 01 2009 at 11:45 PM EST

Missing the point

This is a serious case of missing the forest for the trees, we know in many of our planets cities our air is no longer fit to breathe, our food no matter where we source it from it tainted with pesticides and derivitive chemicals from plastic's that make it not fit to eat, cancer rates in fossil fuel based usage and mining areas are catastrophic for the the inhabitants, our biosphere's capacity to produce living organisims is collapsing under toxic stresses and morbid human over consumption,.... More

Posted By gord - Tue, Dec 01 2009 at 11:24 AM EST

Meet the new religion: same as the old one

Five years after Bush was proven a liar over WMD's in Iraq, people still believe him. It seems we have the same thing happening here. Who are the deniers now? I find human nature amusing as fringe elements from the left or right are far more similar than they would like to accept. Consider this myth "busted".

Posted By Solarguy - Mon, Nov 30 2009 at 8:23 PM EST

JOB S

Whoever listens to Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck are complete idiots. Of course since its not pro oil, then there not making money. Do something else invest in renewables. Ride the wave baby. . So hypothetically even if Climate Change is a hoax, how many jobs are you taking away from people that are turning to this for there future? Why would anyone want to take this away from an honest, hard working, law abiding citizen? Obviously these people have never had to make a living in the construction.... More

Posted By M Btok - Mon, Nov 30 2009 at 3:58 PM EST

Cancell Copenhagen Summit & Treaty

I believe the Copenhagen Treaty Summit should be cancelled! How in God's name can this be considered a legal agreement when a "Huge Amount" of the basis for the "Climate Change Data" has been found to be "Fraudulently Sabotaged" and absolutely "Inaccurate"? This is signing a contract or agreement Document that has "No Legal Foundation" of Realistic conditions or elements due to "Inaccurate and Manipulated Data" as described and therefore, anything stated on this "Copenhagen Treaty Document".... More

Posted By algour - Sun, Nov 29 2009 at 4:53 PM EST

Media Mayhem: the Real Climategate

Will everyone opposed to our gathering in Copenhagen please calm down.

The MSM is on notice not to rock the boat. This just can't be postponed. It's about redistributing wealth among countries and into the pockets of a select few Co2 czars. Oh, I know it appears now that there is much uncertainty into man’s contribution to climate change now that the CRU research has been uncloaked. What is certain by my calculations is that billions of $$$$ will change hands and a fortunate few will.... More

Posted By NucEngineer - Sun, Nov 29 2009 at 12:43 PM EST

Can B e Copied

Anyone that would like to copy and repost may explaination of ClimateGate may do so.

Cheers.

Posted By NucEngineer - Sun, Nov 29 2009 at 12:36 PM EST

What ClimateGate Means to AGW

An easy explanation of what ClimateGate means,

ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.

ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views,.... More

Posted By NucEngineer - Sun, Nov 29 2009 at 12:31 PM EST

And if ClimateGate is True?

I downloaded and read the Copenhagen Diagnosis. That was the most rediculously scary propoganda for politicians I have ever seen. You know most of those politicians are so scientificaly challenged they, well, they haven't a clue.

That propoganda piece throws out mud wherever possible, most of which has already been debunked (like hurricane intensities vs. time, the ACE).
The current rate of sea level rise, 12-inches per century, isn't scarry when you consider Toronto Canada is.... More

Posted By brave_dot - Sun, Nov 29 2009 at 8:52 AM EST

More apologies

Yawn, yet another "article" that ignores the extremely anti-science behavior of the so-called scientists. Any real scientist should be outraged by the attempts to suppress dissenting views, and the refusals to share data and methodologies. Perhaps it's too much to expect the vast majority of the population who have no scientific or engineering training to understand this. It is clearly too much to expect most journalists to understand this.

Posted By Joh Q. Public - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 3:34 PM EST

Climategate

Climategate

Let's see:

a) subverting the peer review process
b) stacking the UN IPCC
c) obstruction of the Freedom on Information Act
d) breach of university and state ethics codes

... and we haven't even talked about the data yet.

Climate Science - the new Ponzi scheme!

p.s. - Is this what Science is all about? Meet the new boss (science), same as the old boss (religion). When are they issuing funny hats to scientists?
p.p.s. - Who needs Wall Street when you have.... More

Posted By Albert - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 11:45 AM EST

Step aside, Ken

Step aside, Ken. You're obviously nothing more than a shill for the AGW pseudo-scientists. Perhaps you would do well to refresh yourself on the subject of science, particularly the scientific method. You will find it woefully absent from the so-called research by the alarmists. Computer modeling is all they have and any real scientist knows that computer modeling may be a good tool for developing hypotheses, but it is not enough on its own to prove anthing.

Posted By Jon - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 11:34 AM EST

Emperor Ken

Time to look down....you have NO CLOTHES

Posted By Truth Hurts - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 10:37 AM EST

Peer Reviewed Science

I think it is pretty clear how credible your peer reviewed science is. This is like arguing with someone about their religion.

Posted By BudinOK - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 9:35 AM EST

Why not?? There is money to be made in Climate Control.

Ask Al Gore. I heard he has made over a $100 million on pushing this climate control.

Posted By Danthrax - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 5:21 AM EST

I'm GLAD you wrote this!

Keep up the stonewalling. Keep up the obfuscation. The Truth is now coming out, and nothing is going to stop it. These emails and other data show quite clearly, despite the risible attempts to lie it all away, that raw data was manipulated and that programming deceit was used to give the desired answers, rather than to show what the data actually supported. I am a programmer with 30 years experience and a degree in Physics--you cannot deceive me about what these programs were doing! You.... More

Posted By Andrew26 - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 6:13 AM EST

Thank you

I KNEW the world was flat.

Finally the truth cannot be supressed.

Posted By yaridanjo - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 5:18 AM EST

Media Mayhem: The real Climategate

First, Lord Rees – formerly Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal – is very much of the catastrophist mindset which helped launch the whole AGW scare in the first place. Five years ago, he declared:

“I think the odds are no better than 50/50 that our present civilisation will survive to the end of the present century.”

And he is right! But the threat is not Global Warming, it is Global Cooling from a comet or meteor strike.

.... More

Posted By joseph marcucilli - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 5:18 AM EST

climategate

My fater-in-law recently returned to his boyhood home in Salem, Mass.Their was a pond there where the ice company would cut thick blocks of ice for years.He was shocked to discover that pond had not been frozen over for the last 7 years.That's not an e-mail that is reality.Enter your comments here

Posted By mike peck - Fri, Dec 25 2009 at 10:04 PM EST

great lakes

hey Joe, our great lakes region was under 2 miles of ice 12000 yrs ago or so, it melted, does this mean wooley mammoth farts melted it? come on get a grip

Posted By Joe Somebody - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 8:16 AM EST

anecdotal evidence?

Aren't we told that anecdotal evidence of a few years doesn't count in climate science? If its good enough to claim the skeptics are wrong, then its good enough to claim that you don't know anything either.

Posted By Andrew26 - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 5:53 AM EST

climategate

He wasn't honestly shocked, he was lying to himself..and his eyes were part of a mass optical political conspiracy.

Duped by empirical evidence once more. tsk.

Posted By Joe - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 4:08 AM EST

Shrud!

"...At first, glance that looks pretty deceptive. But there’s a legitimate explanation for the words “trick” and “hide.” Jones himself, as well as other scientists, explained that he was using the words colloquially, to shorthand a perfectly acceptable and publicly discussed approach to correcting a well-known glitch in a specific data set...."

In Science, as well as in Journalism, scrutiny is what makes the subject "perfectly acceptable and publicly discussed approach" in.... More

Posted By mike peck - Fri, Dec 25 2009 at 10:06 PM EST

legit explanantion?

then why did they destroy the records Joe, your in denial buddy

Posted By RUSS - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 3:05 AM EST

WHERE IS SANY BERGER WHEN YOU NEED HIM

We need a man with Bergers connections to pull the heist of the century.

Posted By Anonymous - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:58 AM EST

Why hide data?

I'm sure it's been said before, but if the data really does show that humans are a major and/or primary cause of climate change, why would you go to lengths to hide it?

That's really the question these emails raise. Why do skeptics need to go to such lengths (hacking into a server and stealing emails, etc) to get a straight answer from these people, if they data undeniably shows that humans really are causing irreversible climate change?

If you really wanted people to agree with.... More

Posted By Andrew26 - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 3:09 AM EST

why hide it?

People had to comb through years of emails to find this Jones character's -and a few other's- "smoking gun."

In the larger picture the "smoking gun" is really a mirage.

...find a few bad apples and use it as an excuse to throw years and years of reasoned research out - and people eat it up because it confirms their deeply held predjudices.

...Just like the "fake" (governor-confirmed )Hawaiian legal copy of the birth certificate.

I don't know if the (signifcant).... More

Posted By Joe Somebody - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 8:20 AM EST

Faked Research

You do realize that news has just come out that New Zealand researchers faked their research, don't you?
Its also interesting that they "lost" the original data that the climate models were based on, so the skeptics weren't allowed access to the original data. And of course, if only the 'worked' data was available, then every paper using them is plausibly useless.

Posted By Andrew26 - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:57 AM EST

conspiracy

The birthers also have plenty of "confirmed data" to back up their claims.

The republicans who currently tend to leave impassioned posts on the message-boards seem to think they have some kind of magical window into the "truth" of everything that no debate or new information from outsiders can alter.

Scientists have, historically, been biased, been wrong, "Man cannot fly", is a good example. Some scientists continued to say this, even after photos began to appear in newspapers.... More

Posted By NucEngineer - Sun, Nov 29 2009 at 2:01 PM EST

Everyone else (90%) relies on this GIGO

And Winston looked at the sheet handed him:

“Adjustments prior to 1972 shall be -0.2 degrees and after 1998 shall be +0.3 degrees.”

Winston wondered at the adjustment to the data. At this point, no one even knows if the data, prior to his adjustments, was raw data or already adjusted one or more times previously.

It didn’t matter. All Winston was sure of is that one of the lead climatologists needed more slope to match his computer model outputs. He punched out.... More

Posted By Andrew26 - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:59 AM EST

conspiracy

*don't

fixed.

Posted By Joe Somebody - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 8:29 AM EST

Not a conspiracy

I don't believe that 90% of the scientists were in on a conspiracy. That is an absurd idea that conspiracy theorists love.

I believe that some scientists worked together to squash opposing viewpoints and manipulated research (there is plenty of evidence of THAT in the emails), possibly to continue that they would have a job (not get rich, I can't imagine government grants allow that). In the process, they released faulty data and duped hundreds of other scientists that used their.... More

Posted By Albert - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 11:49 AM EST

Most scientists have been duped

All those scientists have been duped just like the rest of us since they have based their consensus largely on the massaged data from Jones and his cabal.

Posted By Javelin - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:54 AM EST

A sad day for science

You may nit be able to fool mother nature, but after Reading the emails you realise that the climate scientists have been trying to fool the public and politicians. Worse than that they have been fooling themselves into thinking they are doing real science. From what I have seen they have (1) been making the results fit their theories (2) been corrupting the peer review process and (3) been breaking the Freedom if Information Act.

If you read the emails you realise these guys are.... More

Posted By Aaron - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:30 AM EST

Edelstein = Moron

Yet another global warming "scientist" proves himself to be unable to see logic and read data right-side up. Way to go, Edelstein.

Hey, I have an idea. Why not get together with your buddy Mann over at RealClimate and make a new hockey stick based on all of your past articles and this shining piece of dung here and look at the comment numbers. I'm sure that the dumber your post, the higher the numbers will go.

Who needs tree rings? Mann can help you with the TRICK to make.... More

Posted By John A. Jauregui - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:30 AM EST

Stop Bitching and Take Action

Stop all donations to the political party(s) responsible for this fraud. Stop donations to all environmental groups which funded this Global Warming propaganda campaign with our money, especially The Environmental Defense Fund. Write your state and federal representatives demanding wall to wall investigations of government sponsored funding and coordination of this and related propaganda campaigns and demand indictments of those responsible. Write your state and federal Attorneys General.... More

Posted By Novareason - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:21 AM EST

Comprehensive review?

Anyone who has read the emails, perused the code, read the documents (especially harry_read_me.txt) is hardpressed to not come to a conclusion of conspiracy. From discussing how to keep anti-AGW papers from being published, to outright asking for climate scientists to boycott the Climate Research journal for posting articles that don't toe the party line, there has been a systematic attempt by people in power amongst climate researchers to squelch any data that doesn't show alarmist results. .... More

Posted By Joseph Mama - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:08 AM EST

The real question is:

Why are these scientists attempting to hide _anything_ at all?

The data these scientists collect, the methodologies they employ, and the formulas they use to correlate atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with climate CHANGE (notice it's neither COOLING nor WARMING anymore) should be able to withstand the scrutiny of public review from peers.

This is not a game of poker where you don't have to show your hand if the opponent doesn't match your bet. The MOST important job of a.... More

Posted By Novareason - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:24 AM EST

Don't make spurious comments, the truth is enough!

[i]However, the global warming/cooling/change freaks are crying doomsday over a POSSIBLE, but unproven 5ft rise in the sea level. Trust me, the people living in affected areas have the money to relocate.[/i]

Poor people living in island nations do not always have the money to move. Don't make a spurious statement to attempt to deflect the possible ramifications of real global warming. Further research, by independent groups and transparent to review by the world will be the only way to.... More

Posted By Jeff - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:08 AM EST

YOU ARE A TOTAL MORON

If ALL of you idiots would focus on the actual data that suggests there is global warming INSTEAD of the **** in this blog you would see that it is all predicated on age rings from ONLY 12 TREES IN SIBERIA

Posted By Jake - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 2:07 AM EST

An inconvenient lie...

Let us all remember that Ken Edelstein (the author) has supported the biggest heist in the history of the world.

Posted By Alex - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 1:08 AM EST

Left-leaning Media needs to get in front of this story

Actually, I think the Left-leaning Media needs to get in front of this story - and take it way from Limbaugh and Beck. We should be rejoicing CO2 is really a problem of minor importance of which we no longer have to fight with all our resources. The earth has plenty of problems with pollution and poisons entering the environment (like nitrogen run-off into the oceans). These clowns have stolen the show for nothing but vainglory and power.

Posted By Warren Bonesteel - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 12:05 AM EST

warren.bonesteel@gmail.com

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5171206

searchable database located here:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php

Go. Read, Learn. Don't take anyone else's word for granted, not even mine.

Do your own research. Think for yourself.

...but, imo., what Mann, Jones and the IPCC, et al, have done is not science and their actions completely ignore the scientific

Posted By Bill Thomson - Fri, Nov 27 2009 at 11:38 PM EST

Media Mayhem: The real Climategate

I am glad to see that others have already given you a thorough verbal thrashing for this drivel.

This is a really lame attempt at defending the indefensible. The fact is that the very foundation of global warming "science" has been destroyed.

We all care about the environment, but when you care more about ideology than truth you'll never have the truth.

Posted By Larry - Fri, Nov 27 2009 at 9:35 PM EST

Media Mayhem: The real Climategate

" the Copenhagen diagnosis" states "sea level has risen 5 centimeters over the past 15 years". Ken Edelstein has the sea rising at " about an inch-and-half a year for the last 15 years". It appears Ken is having a problem getting the correct "proprietay" data from Phil Jones.

Posted By Paul - Sat, Nov 28 2009 at 3:06 AM EST

Media Mayhem: The real Climategate

OK, I reread it, italics would have been nice on the "a year", what is the truth on this one?

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