Climate change: When scientists play dirty

“For believers in a science that supposedly is ‘settled,’” global-warming advocates sure spend a lot of time trying to squash dissent, said The Washington Times in an editorial. Last week, climate scientist Peter Gleick confessed to using a false identity to steal documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank skeptical of man-made climate change. Gleick then distributed the Heartland documents to environmental blogs, hoping to discredit the group’s work as “bought and paid for” by big business. But “that particular line of attack is especially pathetic,” as Heartland’s annual budget is just $6 million—compared with $26.1 billion in climate-change programs in President Obama’s stimulus bill alone. By using “Watergate-style tactics,” climate alarmists have revealed the weakness of their own argument. Gleick apparently added a faked “confidential strategy memo” to the stolen documents to make Heartland look bad, said Robert Tracinski in RealClearPolitics.com. That “compels honest observers to ask: If the warmists were willing to deceive us on this, what else have they been deceiving us about?”

If anyone is guilty of deception, it’s Heartland, said Leslie Kaufman in The New York Times. The documents show that Heartland was using a $100,000 pledge from an anonymous donor to develop a school curriculum that would teach kids that there is a “major scientific controversy” over whether greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet. That’s simply not true: The overwhelming majority of climate scientists believe the link is clear. Gleick might have lied to get this information, said James Garvey in the London Guardian, but it was the right thing to do. Heartland deliberately set out to muddy public opinion and stop governments from taking vital action on climate change. Thanks to Gleick, the inner workings of the climate-skeptic lobby have now been exposed for all to see. “Perhaps more scientists should play dirty.”

What a terrible idea, said John McQuaid in Forbes.com. The conspiracy theorists who claim that climate change is a hoax have no facts to rely on; instead, they insist there’s a conspiracy to fool the public, perpetrated by scientists, scientific bodies, and the government. But the low standards of the skeptics mean that scientists—and anyone who wants to honestly explore what’s happening to the climate—“must maintain the highest standards.” Otherwise, the lines between fact and political argument start to blur—“an ideal environment for ‘hoax’ stories to flourish.”

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