Potentially trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are at stake with any Congressional push to regulate or tax carbon emissions. Shouldn’t the science be not just sound but as true a law as gravity itself? Of course, it’s beyond that too. Even if climate change were occurring (it isn’t), and even if it were antropogenic, or man-made (it’s not), the final question would be one of cost effectiveness — as noted even by Greenish lefties like Bjorn Lomborg, why spend trillions of dollars to combat global warming when the next volcanic eruption would undercut any possible influence by man, and when such money could give every man, woman and child on the planet clean drinking water, not to mention any other number of problems worth solving.
The proponents of global warming have always seemed incredibly desperate to “act now,” and so averse to any other considerate or debate. Their “cure” has always — especially in terms of economics — seemed far worse than the “problem” itself. Every so often we’d get a peek as to why that was — first termed “global warming,” then “climate change,” wasn’t so much about really solving a climate problem as social and economic engineering. Such as some media outlets got hold of a letter from NASA’s James Hansen asking President Barack Obama to use the threat of climate change to redistribute wealth. A recently leaked United Nations document urged similarly.
Now, with the theft and publishing of more than 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England, the reasons for this “act now before it’s too late,” Day After Tomorrow nonsense are clear. The data, which has never been subject to peer review outside of cherry picked proponents, is simply fudged or fabricated.
[WSJ] The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.
According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the “peer-review” process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges from critics outside this clique are dismissed and disparaged.
This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: “Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.” Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.
As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted in a March 2003 email, after the journal “Climate Research” published a paper not to Mr. Mann’s liking, that “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature’. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal!”
Mr. Mann went on to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.” In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.
A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:
“This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”
The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science. The proof for this is circular. It’s the best, we’re told, because it’s the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature. The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim.