‘Climategate’: The end of a scandal?

For the phony “Climategate” scandal, it’s “three strikes” and out, said John Healey in LATimes.com. Last week, yet another independent review panel—the third so far—exonerated the climate scientists whose hacked e-mails were used to launch last year’s trumped-up Climategate affair. Climate-change skeptics, you’ll recall, claimed to have found smoking-gun proof in hundreds of e-mails stolen from researchers at Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that man-made global warming is a hoax. But as three separate investigations have now concluded, while the scientists did refuse to share results with contrarians, they faked none of their data and were guilty—at most—of paranoia and secrecy. Maybe now we can put this “manufactured controversy” behind us, said The New York Times in an editorial, and return to the rather more pressing business “of actually doing something about global warming.”

The coverup continues, said Patrick Michaels in The Wall Street Journal. The “supposedly independent” authors of this latest “Climategate whitewash,” like the authors of the previous two, have strong, long-standing ties to the CRU and its scientists, and their bias screams out from every page. They didn’t even investigate the CRU scientists’ admission that they had deliberately “deleted loads of e-mails” to keep them from the eyes of their critics. This panel of climate cronies clearly tried to make the scandal go away, said Lawrence Solomon in the Toronto National Post. But in a finding that much of the media ignored, they had to concede that there is a “real and legitimate” debate over the truth, cause, and seriousness of climate change—which is what we skeptics have been saying all along.

Sadly, that’s not true, said The Economist. There are indeed ongoing debates about how severe climate change will be. But there is a solid scientific consensus that the planet is indeed warming, primarily because of man-made CO2 emissions, and that unless we reduce those emissions there is “a far from trivial chance of things turning catastrophic.” Many people in the U.S. and Europe no longer believe that, said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com, and for that, you can blame the CRU scientists’ foolish attempt to keep any damaging data from their critics. The “lasting lesson” of this sorry affair is that in the Internet age, there is simply no way “to keep the rest of the world out of your business,” and so you may as well just let it in.

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