Climate change: Hacked e-mails rile the debate

Global warming’s “blue-dress moment may have arrived,” said Chris Horner in National Review Online. Just as Monica Lewinsky’s stained garment irrevocably busted Bill Clinton as a philanderer, an anonymous hacker last week published thousands of incriminating e-mails from leading climate researchers exposing the “long-running fraud” behind the “climate-change scam.” The files were taken from the influential Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia. In one e-mail, said The Washington Times in an editorial, we find the professional climate alarmists lamenting “the lack of warming at the moment.” In another, CRU director Dr. Phil Jones boasts of using a statistical “trick” to “hide the decline” in actual global temperatures. Republicans in Congress have rightly called for an investigation into “Climategate.” But these damning revelations should have an immediate and “cooling effect on global warming hysteria.”

Sorry, said Nate Silver in FiveThirtyEight.com, but there’s no smoking gun here. To anyone literate in statistics, it’s clear that when the scientists mention using “tricks” to “hide the decline” in temperatures, they’re not talking about actually faking data, but simply about “sexing up a graph” to make a trend in the data more visually eye-catching. You can question the ethics of that, said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as well as of what seems to be a genuine effort to delete files and data that might be used as ammunition by climate-change skeptics. But in this highly contentious field, it really only proves that “scientists are human.” In the final analysis, “it’s the totality of data that matters,” and the evidence is still overwhelming that man-made climate change is all too real, and accelerating.

These e-mails may not prove to be outright fraud, said James Taranto in WallStreetJournal.com, but they do call into question the idea that global warming is “settled science.” Climate-change skeptics are derided as “idiots” in one e-mail. In another, Dr. Jones promises a colleague to block publication of some unhelpful papers, “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is.” On another occasion, Jones proposes a boycott of a journal deemed to be overly open-minded on the climate-change issue. Taken together, this “downright Orwellian” behavior raises an inescapable question. If so-called scientific “consensus” on global warming is as solid as we’re constantly told it is, why do the scientists who promote it “need to resort to tactics of suppression and intimidation” aimed at anyone who begs to differ?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up