Climategate and the Big Green Lie - Clive Crook - Politics - The Atlantic
The disaster called 'Climategate' has besmirched the good name of science. The inquiries were worthy of Orwell or Tolstoy. And now some of the principals involved, like Mann and Jones, are hitting the media trail to rehabilitate their reputations without acknowledging the egregious errors in judgement that caused their fall in the first place.
Instead of exposing the dark wrongdoings in a timely fashion, the climate science elite are being dragged kicking screaming and lying into the light. Every inquiry has left a set of lies and evasions that are exposed as soon as they are made public. There have been inquiries into the inquiries, and there will be more to come. I wish honour and integrity were more important to the scientists involve but I find it incomprehensible that institutions like UEA and Penn would be willing to abase themselves by trying to whitewash the problems away.
By way of preamble, let me remind you where I stand on climate change. I think climate science points to a risk that the world needs to take seriously. I think energy policy should be intelligently directed towards mitigating this risk. I am for a carbon tax. I also believe that the Climategate emails revealed, to an extent that surprised even me (and I am difficult to surprise), an ethos of suffocating groupthink and intellectual corruption. The scandal attracted enormous attention in the US, and support for a new energy policy has fallen. In sum, the scientists concerned brought their own discipline into disrepute, and set back the prospects for a better energy policy.
I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.
The disaster called 'Climategate' has besmirched the good name of science. The inquiries were worthy of Orwell or Tolstoy. And now some of the principals involved, like Mann and Jones, are hitting the media trail to rehabilitate their reputations without acknowledging the egregious errors in judgement that caused their fall in the first place.
Instead of exposing the dark wrongdoings in a timely fashion, the climate science elite are being dragged kicking screaming and lying into the light. Every inquiry has left a set of lies and evasions that are exposed as soon as they are made public. There have been inquiries into the inquiries, and there will be more to come. I wish honour and integrity were more important to the scientists involve but I find it incomprehensible that institutions like UEA and Penn would be willing to abase themselves by trying to whitewash the problems away.
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