The scourge of the right reveals the truth about Climategate

Larry T. writes:

The nutty Charles Johnson’s take on Climategate:

” … the CRU theft was a criminal attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen climate summit, and the entire right wing blogosphere is complicit in the crime.”

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A. Zarkov writes:

Charles Johnson quotes David Hone,

“With regards the private e-mails posted on the internet, I think the story is a simple one and it could apply to any one of us. Think of all the e-mails you have written over the past 10 years. Now imagine that someone criminally breaks into your e-mail account and downloads all of them, handpicks a few and posts them on the internet to cast you in a particular light. We could all be shown to be saints or sinners or anything in between.”

Only the emails are not private. Anyone on staff at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) contractor laboratories such as Los Alamos and Livermore get a notification on their computer monitors that essentially tells them they should have no expectation of privacy. The equipment and everything the equipment produces belongs to the U.S. government. As such the emails are subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. On the other hand, emails anyone sends from his personal account are not subject to FOIA, and the only way to get them is by subpoena. I’m sure other government agencies here and in the UK have similar policies.

Rick U. writes:

The emails in the Climategate scandal are a red herring and play into the liberal spin on this issue. As I understand it, the emails account for about five percent of the information released and the remaining 95 percent was programming source codes and mathematical models the CRU was using. Apparently, whoever dumped this data on the public did so with some intent as most of the data is highly technical and cannot be subject to claims of context distortion by the left. This would seem to indicate a “whistleblower” rather than a hacker was responsible for the leak since it implies the individual(s) knew what to release to prove the models are biased and therefore not based on science. Check out this article for a brief example of the shenanigans.

When we fall for the “email hacking criminal” or the “emails taken out of context” argument from the liberals we are missing the point and will lose the argument because we are arguing on the left’s terms. The emails are akin to the frosting on the cake and we need to be talking about the cake.

Tim W. writes:

Johnson is in line with Barbara Boxer, who says Climategate should be seen as E-Mail Theft-Gate. It doesn’t matter to her that scientists were rigging data, but she’s really, really furious that someone revealed it.

Mike writes:

“Now imagine that someone criminally breaks into your e-mail account and downloads all of them, handpicks a few and posts them on the internet to cast you in a particular light. We could all be shown to be saints or sinners or anything in between.”

That Hone and Johnson use this defense says more about them than it does about the CRU researchers. Kind of like when the left pulls out the “everybody does it” excuse when one of theirs gets caught in an extramarital dalliance. You see, they’re not “hypocrites.”

I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing in my e-mail that would make me look like a member of a self-serving cabal bent on defrauding the global scientific community. But maybe that’s just me.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 05, 2009 01:55 AM | Send