OT ~ Orwell and the Global Warming Crowd
Carl A. in FL
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Settled Science?
Computer hackers reveal corruption behind the global-warming "consensus."
By JAMES TARANTO
"Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on
Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the
police had been brought in to investigate the breach," the New York
Times reports. "They added, however, that they could not confirm that
all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic." But some
scientists have confirmed that their emails were quoted accurately.
The files--which can be downloaded here
[http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U44FST89]
surely have not been fully plumbed. The ZIP archive weighs in at just
under 62 megabytes, or more than 157 MB when uncompressed. But bits that
have already been analyzed, as the Washington Post reports, "reveal an
intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack, and
eager to punish its enemies":
In one e-mail, the center's director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania
State University's Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of
academics that question the link between human activities and global
warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which
represents the global consensus view on climate science.
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,"
Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have
to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic
journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they
disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this
journal," Mann writes. . . .
Mann, who directs Penn State's Earth System Science Center, said the
e-mails reflected the sort of "vigorous debate" researchers engage in
before reaching scientific conclusions. "We shouldn't expect the sort of
refined statements that scientists make when they're speaking in
public," he said.
This is downright Orwellian. What the Post describes is not a vigorous
debate but an attempt to suppress debate--to politicize the process of
scientific inquiry so that it yields a predetermined result. This does
not, in itself, prove the global warmists wrong. But it raises a glaring
question: If they have the facts on their side, why do they need to
resort to tactics of suppression and intimidation?
It is hard to see how this is anything less than a definitive refutation
of the popular press's contention that global warmism is settled
science--a contention that both the Times and the Post repeat in their
articles on the revelations: "The evidence pointing to a growing human
contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked
material is unlikely to erode the overall argument," the Times claims.
The Post leads its story by observing that "few U.S. politicians bother
to question whether humans are changing the world's climate," and that
"nearly three years ago the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change concluded the evidence was unequivocal." (As blogger Tom Maguire
notes, this actually overstates even the IPCC's conclusions.)
The press's view on global warming rests on an appeal to authority: the
consensus among scientists that it is real, dangerous and man-caused.
But the authority of scientists rests on the integrity of the scientific
process, and a "consensus" based on the suppression of alternative
hypotheses is, quite simply, a fraudulent one.
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Carl A. in FL
http://sky.prohosting.com/chainfl/index.htm