Dramatic developments in Climategate
This comment was sent by M. Mason on November 26 and was not posted, but its contents are still timely and very interesting:
M. Mason writes:
These are some of the most recent developments:
(1) Computer programmers who have looked at the code in the CRU data files are appalled by what they have found, saying it will be shown to be garbage and that the results were predetermined. One poster on a science blog that is following the story closely remarked when asked about the possibility of starting over and making a completely independent temperature record from the data:
“Judging by the state of the databases with a seemingly unmanaged history and no “method” in use to ensure integrity, it would be literally impossible to make sense of it all in a second pass. I now understand why they resist the release of code and data so strongly. It isn’t that they can’t, it’s that they’re just plain embarrassed by the hideous mess that would be exposed.”
(2) A government petition has been started at the official site of the Prime Minister’s Office “to suspend the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia from preparation of any Government Climate Statistics until the various allegations have been fully investigated by an independent body.” How much good it will do, though, is open to skepticism because …
(3) Another big question is the political angle of the story and how high the cover-up about AGW really goes, for there have been very serious allegations concerning the BBC swirling around about this, and possibly UK Government ministry involvement as well. We now learn that Paul Hudson, a weather presenter and “climate change” expert for the BBC, revealed on his blog two days ago that he was forwarded the chain of CRU emails on October 12th, more than a month before they were made public.
The Beeb is essentially downplaying the entire scandal as a “trial-by-internet” story, and moderators on their blogs have refused to permit commenters to quote from the damaging CRU emails, or link to them. They’d much rather divert their readers’ attention to propaganda draped with tearful emotional imagery which claims that African conflicts go up when the weather is warm, (thus showing that global warming is to blame for the continent’s miseries in more ways than one) and even blaming the Darfur fighting on carbon dioxide too. According to one quoted UK Professor of African Studies “it strengthens the argument for ensuring we compensate the developing world for climate change, especially Africa.”
(4) And this just breaking—it seems the New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is now under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that didn’t exist. Concern is beginning to mount that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 30, 2009 12:30 PM | Send