Bishop Hill has dug into the hacked and leaked documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit mentioned yesterday. The indefatigable John Hindraker at Powerline has also waded into the document morass.
Before the analysis, some caveats:
- Hacking other people’s computers is bad, mmmkay?
- Downloading hacked files is of dubious legal/ethical standing.
- What has been released is purportedly only a small sample of a much larger stash of documents. What has been released has certainly been cherry-picked, and there’s no guarantee that it’s actually representative, hasn’t been altered, etc.
- Anytime you see the inner workings of any organization, there’s going to be distasteful aspects of seeing how the sausage get made, discussion of how to play up strengths, hide or ignore weaknesses, etc. It’s naive to think that science, however lofty tried and true its means or lofty its goals, is going to be immune.
All that said, what is here is more damaging (and damning) than previously suggested. There’s still no smoking gun (i.e. “We all know global warming is fake, so stop crunching those number and join us at the big taxpayer-funded hooker and blow party tonight at Gordon Brown’s flat!”), but there are dozens, if not hundreds, of guns that are at least a little warm.
What these emails show is sustained, coordinated attempts to massage, cherry-pick, and skew data to support a consensus of anthropocentric global warming, and to downplay or ignore any evidence of global cooling over the last decade or, failing that, the significance of same.
In the meantime, they complete institutional investment of certain groups of climate scientists (and their non-scientific followers) in presenting AGW as Sacred Truth immune to criticism is a good reason for continued skepticism, and for all their data to be released. It’s also another good argument (of many) to hold off on expensive, big government boondoggles like the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” bill until the science can be verified by dispassionate observers (or, better yet, hostile critics).
I’m sure there are a lot more revelations to come.
Tags: Climategate, Global Warming, hacking