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The real crime in Climategate
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While some are checking the statute books regarding the different treatments of hackers versus whistleblowers, and others are checking conspiracy laws regarding damaging careers through perversion of the peer review process and suborning editors to exclude unpopular opinions, I would like to say what I think the real crime is in Climategate.
The criminals are not limited to The Team, the climate scientists and paleoclimatologists whose emails and files were leaked to the public.
A section of politically active scientists, policy makers, politicians and NGOs in effect put on white coats and told us that our planet was gravely ill, and that we needed to follow their prescriptive advice to save ourselves from a deadly disease. That's really how they framed the discussion, and they classified everyone who disagreed as a denier, like a smoker dismissing his cough and waving away the X-Rays.
That's not a crime. But it's pretty close to it to change the readouts on a patient's condition to convince him to undergo expensive treatment, label other doctors as quacks if they disagree with the changed diagnosis, and to refuse to show the patient the data underlying the charts.
They may protest that the diagnosis is too technical for the patient to understand and that their actions are for the patient's good. They may even believe it. But I call it quackery.
And the crime is malpractice. Deliberate and conscious malpractice. And since they arrogated the power unto themselves to diagnose the disease and prescribe a cure, they might also be charged with practicing medicine without a licence.
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- thomaswfuller3 at gmail dot com
