Climategate II: Three Different Responses

The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, in “Is the global warming scare the greatest delusion in history?”, rightly explains that the modern, awarmist cult of CAGW is suicidally irrational:

While our Government remains trapped in its green dreamworld, similar horror stories pile up on every side, from that UBS report on the astronomically costly fiasco of the EU’s carbon-trading scheme, to our own Government’s “carbon floor price”, in effect a tax on CO₂ emissions rising yearly from 2013. This alone will eventually be enough to double the cost of our electricity, and drive a further swathe of what remains of UK industry abroad, because we are the only country in the world to have devised something so idiotic.

All this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.

It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors, such as Michael Mann, are no ordinary scientists: they are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.

We see how they torture the evidence to support their theory—even to the point where some of them seem to lose faith in the story they are trying to tell.  And we also see how rattled they were as soon as their work was challenged by expert outsiders such as Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who exposed the methods used to create Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature graph, which the IPCC had made Exhibit A for their theory.

Again and again we see them trying to defend the indefensible, giving vent to wild personal abuse of the enemies of what they call their “cause”, and stopping at nothing to keep their critics’ evidence out of IPCC reports and scientific journals, and prevent dissenting views from getting media attention.

This is no longer science worthy of the name.

The Australian, in an editorial, titled “Rational approach on climate” explains that the paper still accepts—without bothering to explain why it accepts—the completely discredited awarmist, alleged consensus—without realising that consensus is not science—whilst “stringently” analysing those bogus claims:

This newspaper always supports a rational approach to climate science, accepting the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet, and supporting market mechanisms to reduce emissions—while favouring stringent analysis of alarmist claims.

The Age, in denial that CAGW has been completely discredited, and taking a little time out from trying to scare its few remaining readers that the world must be doomed, and soon to be destroyed by more or fewer droughts and floods, more or fewer storms, and the loss of the last remaining wild herds of lovely unicorns, chooses to rely, in “Climatologist speaks out after new leak”, on the self-interested analysis of Prof. Phil Jones, a corrupt, incompetent scamming pseudo-scientist who (inter alia) fails to understand basic statistical methods:

The British climatologist ensnared in a major new email leak has taken his case to the public, arguing that he and his colleagues' comments have again been taken out of context.

UPDATE I:  see Shub Niggurath’s “Climategate II: Contradictions and Hypocrisy”.

UPDATE II:  in comments at Bishop Hill, Richard Drake provides useful definitions:

a) To take an email in context – to ignore it.

b) To take an email fully in its context – never to have heard of it.

c) To take an email out of context – to read it.

d) To take an email grossly and willfully out of context – to tell someone else about it.

UPDATE III (18 December):  see Cristopher Booker’s “The BBC’s myth makers serve up a double helping of propaganda”.