"The most costly and widespread scientific fraud in history"

Updates below

It's becoming clear that, despite the lamestream media's best efforts, the fraud now known as Climategate is too enormous to be covered up. There's an excellent article at Pajamas Media this morning: "Climategate: It's the Totalitarianism, Stupid." The leaked emails "are just the tiny tip of a very large and dangerous iceburg that is even now ripping the rivets off  your Titanic," writes James Lewis to the "scientists" that have been pushing this fraud like your friendly neighborhood crack whore. He warns that these people had better have tenure, because "this is going to get very bloody very quickly."

I honestly don't know how much of the details of what is happening in this scandal is making its way into the lamestream media, since I don't watch the network news, I don't read Newsweek or Time, I don't read the NYT or my local fishwrap paper. I'm sure those outlets are hoping we're all distracted by turkey, squabbling with extended family, and our obsession with Black Friday (how ironically well-named that day is) shopping. Here's the Cliff Notes version of the scandal: A hacker or possibly an insider whistle-blower broke into the servers at Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and published at least 61 megabytes of confidential data on a Russian website. [Nov. 28 update: It's now 128 megabytes of secret emails and other data, posted by someone calling himself "FOIA"--heh. One wag says that these emails are the equivalent of the Nixon tapes during Watergate, only far more accurate than John Dean's memory.

Who are the CRU and why do they matter? They are one of the primary information sources used by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC reports are widely cited in almost any "debate" related to climate change. [I put the scare quotes around the word "debate" because Leftists don't debate the issue--they use the phrase "settled science" and call anyone who disagrees with their point of view a "flat-earther." Typical Leftist debate tactics--call names because THEY'VE GOT NOTHING.] The IPCC is the same scientific intergovernmental body that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with ManBearPig Al Gore. Discrediting  the IPCC would call into question the very basis for the doom-laden predictions of rising sea levels and rising temperatures due to man-made CO2.

The emails are not just "a few emails trickling out" like Obama's esteemed Climate Czar, Carol Browner [scroll down to Update #2], is desperate for the lamestream media to report. Instead, the data being leaked is over a decade's worth of documents and emails (1,079 emails and 72 documents--so far). An Australian blogger [God bless bloggers], Andrew Bolt, says that the CRU may be guilty of "conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, private admission of flaws in their public claims, and much more."

That's what Bolt was saying last week. Today, November 28 (29 in Australia) he quotes Frank J. Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University, on the true significance of Climategate: "It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy."

Tipler says in his article that a number of scientists have been trying for years to get the data from CRU (that same data that has now been hacked) placed online, which the CRU is required by law to release. CRU has claimed that the raw data was "accidentally erased." For the love of God, the stupidity and arrogance of these people is simply mind-boggling.

Tipler writes: "The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up." Isaac Asimov wrote about the seriousness of scientists falsifying data in his novel, Whiff of Death. Asimov advocated execution; Tipler feels being dismissed from their jobs would be sufficient. I don't agree. I'd like to see something along the lines of a scientific Nuremberg Trial for these frauds and fakers, with appropriate fines and prison terms levied at the worst of them.

Tipler says he doubts that anything will happen to these traitorous frauds, since they are busy bringing in huge grants to their universities, and the salaries of the bureaucrats who run the universities are dependent on this grant money. Follow the money--it works every time. Returning to the Lewis article, Lewis concludes: The most important take home lesson is that the global warming fraud was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money, your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.

There are so many friends and acquaintances I want to say, "I told you so" to about this issue. I'm not saying, like they did, that the issue is "settled." Of course I want cleaner air and water and healthy food. I believe in stewardship and passing on a better world to my children and grandchildren just as much as any "green" agenda-holder. Working to make the world a cleaner place is a noble goal. However, I have never agreed with this man-made climate change hoax. Too many people were out chasing too much power and money for this thing to be real. However, so many of the people I know, a group of otherwise reasonably intelligent and educated people, have almost to a man or woman been absolutely unwilling to engage with me on this issue. Period. "Being green" has become like a religion for some of them; these global warmists seem taken over by the issue almost like the kool aid drinker-followers of Jim Jones. It's been truly disturbing to watch, mostly because they can't get out of their own way long enough to see how narrow and holier-than-thou they've become. They come at the issue of cleaning up the planet with a kind of intellectually and morally supior attitude that is distasteful. And it's not as if they say, "We're going to just have to agree to disagree." No, they simply will not concede that there might be another side to the issue. I used to try to get people on the globalwarmism side to at least admit that there might be a political agenda attached to their side of the argument, but even that slight concession has been beyond their ability or willingness to see because of the greener-than-thou blinders they wear. They've all been too busy changing their CFL light bulbs and looking down their noses at people who don't follow lock-step their green agenda--"changing the world, one light bulb at a time." Arguing with idiots, indeed.

We know that the spin is in--that people set up to benefit from this colossol hoax will be spinning like mad to discredit the information coming out about the systematic global warming / climate change fraud. Ignore the story (look at that shiny thing over there), trivialize the findings (a couple of emails), protect the revenue-producing projects, cover their collective ass. Watching this unravel is going to be an interesting ride. You could sell tickets.

Update. HotAir is reporting (Sunday, Nov 29) that East Anglia CRU (Climate Research Unit, the crew that feeds data to the UN's IPCC on which the UN Climate Change reports are based) THREW OUT THEIR RAW DATA. OK, is anyone out there a scientist? Or did anyone ever take a high school or college science class? When you wrote up the report on your experiment, did you tell you professor, "Oops, sorry, I threw out my raw data for this experiment." If you did, how did that go over? Big, I bet. Did your professor pat you on the head and say, "That's OK, Little Bobby, I'll give you an 'A' for effort anyway"? These fraudulent hacks are actually admitting that they threw out the raw data on which much of their theories on anthropogenic global warming are based.

Concludes Ed Morrissey at HotAir: The bullying atmosphere in Academia on AGW [Anthropomorphic Global Warming] has ruined the credibility of the effort — and not just at the University of East Anglia. Any PhD student in the field would have known on which side the bread would be buttered, and would be unlikely to commit career suicide by producing contradictory data. The actions of the IPCC authors created an atmosphere of groupthink, paranoia, and toadyism, not science or truth. Any results coming from this arena have to be entirely suspect. The AGW movement has been exposed as a religious belief and a political cash cow, not science.

Well said, Ed.

TigerHawk has more about the destroyed CRU data.

Update #2. From the UK Telegraph: "Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation"

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker.

This article is an excellent read, putting "Climategate" into context.

Update #3. More on the spin. Here's an article from guardian.co.uk: "Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away": opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.


Hi-larious. Image credit: iowntheworld.com.