A Global-Warming Crack-Up

Here's a smattering of the stories come out recently surrounding the Hack of the Decade: First Things has a piece by Stephen Barr of Modern Physics, Ancient Faith fame. Snip:

Ideologues who would trample down legitimate scientific questions raised by their entirely qualified colleagues are risking terrible damage to science in the long run. If it turns out, as it might, that the global warming fears are overblown or ill-founded, the credibility of the scientific establishment will suffer a grievous blow from which it will be hard to recover. It will open the door for all the real kooks and purveyors of pseudoscience, who will be that much harder to resist in the future. And what if at some point in the future an environmental catastrophe looms about which there really is a solid consensus in the scientific community? And what if at that point it really is only kooks who deny it? Won’t non-scientists be disposed to say, “We’ve heard that all before?” We believed you the last time and you led us astray?

Small Dead Animals has a great run-down of the consequences of a media black-out on the subject:

It's been 14 days since the cork was pulled from FOIA 2009.zip

And as it turns out, the concerted efforts of a protective mainstream media to ignore the scandal turned out to be worst possible course of events for the University of Anglia's motley CRU and their supporters in the wealth distribution industry.

They gave us something very powerful - 14 days of time. Time, while scores of bloggers and thousands of readers put in uncountable man hours of dissection and analysis.

Time for those who'd been discussed and copied in the leaked emails to confirm that there was no evidence of tampering.

Time for programmers to sift through Harry's now famous code line by line, to test it for themselves.

Time for members of the academic community to get their outrage and condemnation on the record, and on their own terms. Time for those who'd been targeted to retell their stories.

Time for opinion columnists and talk radio to break ranks and take on the job their news editors refused to do, to disseminate the facts gathered, checked and analyzed by bloggers to a wider audience.

Time for the comments sections of every online newspaper in the western world to fill with angry demands from their readers to cover the damned story. Not because they were needed anymore, but because we wanted the stupid charade to end.

So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn't watch to find out what's contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we'd read it for ourselves.

We only watched to see if he had.

McMillan has a bunch of other links. This shall be an interesting meeting at Copenhagen.