Global-warming bombshell

In what Michelle Malkin is calling "the global warming scandal of the century," emails hacked from a major British research center are being used to suggest that certain scientists have been over-simplifying the truism that humans cause climate change. Rival scientists, who question Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), pounced on this "evidence" as proof that the emailers have been cooking the research, squelching dissenting views, and committing ethical crimes. Is global warming a global conspiracy — or is this heated debate mostly just hot air? (Watch a report about hackers uncovering scientists' emails)

The emails reveal power-hungry fraudsters: The "scientific consensus" touted by "global warming alarmists" is apparently fiction, says Rob Port at Say Anything. Worse, these "scientists" were also deceiving the public to supply "phony, cooked research" to help politicians "enact a myriad of new taxes, regulations and a generalized expansion of government power."

“Washington Post publishes on hacked global warming letters"

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This is overblown — everyone massages graph data: Admittedly, says Nate Silver in FiveThirtyEight, one email suggests that key climate researcher Phil Jones was "sexing up a graph to make his conclusions more persuasive." That’s unethical, and inexcusable, but sadly quite common on both sides of the debate ("I'd include some of the graphs in [Al Gore's] Inconvenient Truth" in this charge.)

"I read through 160,000,000 bytes of hacked files and all i got was this lousy e-mail"

No, these actions are seriously unethical: The evidence that scientists have been censoring contradictory views is "horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice. This is unethical."

"Climate emails stoke debate"

Climate change is real, but man-made? There are "plenty of unanswered questions about AGW," says Rick Moran in Right Wing Nut House, without "non-scientists" mucking up the debate with political conspiracy theories. Global warming is real, but its causes aren’t clear—which is why we need all scientific points of view. If these "pretty damning" emails break open the cracks in angtropogenic climate warning theory, great. Maybe scientists will go back to "discovering facts."

"Hadley emails don’t ‘prove’ global warming a crock"

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