The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg

The Wall Street Journal, DECEMBER 8, 2009, 7:20 P.M

The opening days of the Copenhagen climate-change conference have been rife with denials and—dare we say it?—deniers. American delegate Jonathan Pershing said the emails and files leaked from East Anglia have helped make clear "the robustness of the science." Talk about brazening it out. And Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and so ex-officio guardian of the integrity of the science, said the leak proved only that his opponents would stop at nothing to avoid facing the truth of climate change. Uh-huh. (link)

Comment

I admit that until the climategate scandal broke I had been guilty of being dismissive of climate warming skeptics. I had reached the conclusion some time ago that global warming theory was correct and that the science was settled. Global warming theory is a complicated scientific question and I am not a scientist so I deferred to the experts.

I have been guilty of closing my mind to the arguments of the skeptics and I derisively referred to skeptics as “deniers.” I put the “deniers” in the same camp as creationist and flat-earthers of a previous era. I will say the “deniers,” however, often did not help their case. The leading spokesmen for the skeptics were often people like Rush Limbaugh and other ideologues and “scientist” who were often no more than TV weathermen.

Since the climategate scandal broke however, I have taken a fresh look at the evidence. I still do not know if global warming theory is correct or not. It very well could be. A few things are clear however. Not all skeptics are uneducated ideologues. The science is not as settled as we were led to believe; the “consensus” is not as firm. There has been a conspiracy to deny skeptics a voice and the data has been fudged. Another thing that is clear and is reported in this article is that there has been a relentless effort to keep scientific data from being scrutinized. There has been a consistent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests.

If the science is so firm, why do the advocates of global warming theory feel it is necessary to hide the data? Why are they afraid to engage in open scientific inquiry? When scientific fraud is exposed, does not the burden of proof shift to those who advocate the theory which is in part based on that fraud? Instead of defending the science, why are the proponents of the theory circling the wagons and refusing to answer their critics?

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