Settled Science? Computer hackers reveal corruption behind the global-warming "consensus."
Ubiquitous
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 [1]--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.
[1]: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U44FST89
--
"Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem.
Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an
overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a
predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and
how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."
-- Al Gore acknowledges exaggerating the dangers of "global warming"