When I woke up and sat down with my morning bowl of cereal and read about all of this I thought it was a hoax … it just seemed to good to be true. I though for years that global warming advocates were scaring the shit out of people using questioable climate models nut I could have never imagined that they were intentionaly and systematiclay misrepresenting their data.
Its like something out of Michael Criton’s “State of Fear”.
This must have taken them by surprise because the damage control has been weak and hastily put together. A blog titled Real Climate, where many of the individuals discussed in the database congregate, has posted their best attempot at a response to this:
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of
any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate
research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global
warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching
orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid
will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.
There’s not much else of any substance in the response except to repeat that they did nothing wrong.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. The emails detail many disturbing behaviors including:
- collusion between the researchers to destroy and/or hide information subject to FOIA requests
- organized efforts to block publication of contradictory scientific papers
- discussions on how to conceal data sharing with critics
- discussions on how to conceal and dilute inconvenient data points
Some of these will surely be investigated further and with regard to the destruction and concealment of FOIA requested data, criminal charges are a real possibility.
And the most wonderful thing is we have only scratched the surface of what’s been made available.
For anyone interested, a searchable database of the data can be found here.
