ClimateGate continues to bubble along. It’s no surprise to see those on the right critical of AGW, but when a dyed-in-the-wool far lefty like The Nation‘s Alexander Cockburn calls it a farce, that’s pretty notable. (Evidently Cockburn has been a long-time skeptic of AGW, but I was unaware of it. Readers may apportion blame for this either to my own laziness, or the mainstream media’s insistence on framing AGW skepticism as an exclusive attitude of the right, as they see fit.)
Some quotes:
Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.
And this:
The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention – geoengineering – could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it’s a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it’s a terrible tragedy.
The first thing all those on the left and right should agree on is respect for a scientific method unthered to political influence. Sadly, ClimateGate proves that we are very far from that when it comes to climate research.