Political and media reactions to Climategate

November 26, 2:31 PMEnvironmental Policy ExaminerThomas Fuller

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Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers, and happy Thursday to those arriving from elsewhere.

Climategate has not improved anybody's intelligence. Politicians and commentators who were spouting nonsense (on both sides) before emails were released from the Climate Research Unit in the UK are still spouting nonsense today.  Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo are insisting that the release of materials showing the corruption of peer review, an organised effort to defeat the UK's Freedom of Information Act, and combining data from different sources to hide a decline (a divergence of proxies from actual temperature readings) don't change anything. Meanwhile, commentators who are willing to pick up any stick to beat their political opponents have happily grasped onto this one and are putting their opinions into the public record  using words they can't even pronounce (It's Anglia, Glen, not Angilla).

So, so far at least, Climategate has changed little, which is why I did my 'document dump' of nine articles last week. I think what has happened so far is prelude, and that the real story will emerge after further analysis of the documents and code that accompanied the released emails.

The major political event of the week was in Australia, where five ministers resigned their cabinet positions rather than support the government's efforts to push through their version of a  Cap and Trade package. Climategate may have had an impact on that. The major scientific event of the week was the release of uncorrected temperature data from New Zealand that clearly diverges from the adjusted series that shows significant warming. And the major non-event of the week was a release in advance of the Copenhagen summit that reworks and rehashes some scary scenarios about climate warming, some of which are based on fantasy.

My hero of the week is Gavin Schmidt, who has worked night and day replying to critical comments on Real Climate, and who is being thanked by being sued for doing so. The lawsuit is a travesty (a word we've heard frequently this week) and should be tossed out summarily. I disagree with Schmidt on so many things that I doubt if we could stay on the same train for more than an hour, but I have a lot of respect for what he is trying to do this week.  He probably wouldn't approve of my second place choices, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, who I hope is taking a well-deserved rest, and Jeff Id, who I really hope is not--I want him chasing down the code in the released documents.

Since the only person in the public eye who has changed their position even slightly as a result of this is George Monbiot, an alarmist who has called for the resignation of one of the scientists involved in the scandal, I think we should all take note that opinions are more or less fixed on this in the public realm. It is only the general public that seems amenable to persuasion. What an ironic development.