Update: 12:41 a.m.: I missed this earlier. Penn State has announced it will investigate Professor Michael Mann, one of the scientists involved in the CRU email exchanges. Mann has been suspected of fudging the numbers before, as outlined by Iain Murray in 2003.
Also, Jonah and a reader on the “lost” climate data and the South Park gnomes.
Update: 10:42 a.m.: Australia’s right-of-center leader and climate “reformist” goes down. Has Climate-Gate claimed its first political casualty?
And Hot Air calls the global warming scam “the crime of the century…with a dollar value that dwarfs the sins of Bernie Madoff or Enron”
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The climate-gate story continues to, as it were, heat up in the blogoshpere, even as the mainstream media collectively covers its ears and hums loudly, praying it will go away.
At the heart of the story is the potential triumph of political ideology over sound science, on display in the hacked email exchanges of luminaries in the climate science community, who now appear to have done everything short of translating the scienfitic record into Newspeak to tilt the debate on global warming. If the politicized suppression of data and method, of dissent, and of the truth, evident in the emails doesn’t amount to a conspiracy to sell the world on anthropogenic warming, it’ll do until the real conspiracy gets here.
Meanwhile, all the AP doesn’t mention the scandal–or climate skepticism at all–in a story on the “momentum building” among world leaders in advance of the Copenhagen climate conference, which President Obama has elected to attend. Indeed, the reaction to Climate-gate of the Obama administration’s energy and climate change czar, Carol Browner, was a mere shrug.
Here at the Corner, however, the response to Climategate has been rather robust. Jonah Goldberg sees in the media’s (lack of) coverage the same “tribalistic journalism” that lead to Rathergate. Here is Mark Steyn on perhaps the most egregious sin of the scientists at the Climate Research Unit: the wholesale deletion, without backups, of the raw climate data on which the Unit’s climate change calculations are based. (Here’s AEI’s Charles Murray on the same, and more from Steyn here)
In the same vein, Greg Pollowitz rounds up some of the glaring flaws in the CRU’s climate change models, on which the EPA and other regulators “heavily” rely for guidance. In one CRU programmer’s own words, the model contains “botch after botch after botch”.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Steve MacIntyre’s Climate Audit is doing an excellent job tracking the good, the bad, and the ugly of science behind the controversey. (visit the mirror site here for less traffic). RealClimate does much the same. At the Wall Street Journal, Richard Lindzen breaks down climate skepticism for the layman.