On the Warmergate scandal, the Settled Scientists seem to be settling on Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit, as the designated fall guy. George Monbiot in the Guardian:
It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them… There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.
But . . .
I’d skip the “But . . .”. It’s dreary and pro forma stuff. Meanwhile, fellow Settled Scientist Tim Flannery is sounding . . . kinda unsettled:
We’re dealing with an incomplete understanding of the way the earth system works… When we come to the last few years when we haven’t seen a continuation of that (warming) trend we don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate…We just don’t understand the way the whole system works… See, these people work with models, computer modelling. So when the computer modelling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem… Sure for the last 10 years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.
Really? Golly, when I said as much a few months back, the excitable lads in the George Soros typing pool at Media Matters denounced it as a “false claim.” Apparently, it’s now safe to say it in polite society.