There have been numerous, ostentatiously pathetic efforts to distract from what Climategate has not revealed, but affirmed, in the principals’ own words — and this mewling is getting increasingly pathetic.
Sitting in the chair waiting to participate in what proved to be an embarrassingly slanted CNN program Monday night largely dedicated to the issue (or, rather, dedicated to diminishing it — though to the channel’s credit, they at least booked me and Steve McIntyre), I listened to the program’s lead-in. It included the childish boast that the program will have “scientists and skeptics” (good grief), but also reflected a remarkably insistent emphasis — with nothing whatsoever to back up the claim — that the exposed material were “hacked e-mails” (with no mention of computer code, annotations, and other documentation contained in the exposed trove); now that’s some serious bias.
There is nothing in the record to suggest a hacking. Indeed, there is tremendous reason to suspect a whistleblower, tracing back the evolution of the demands for the information, the denials, and the information’s path into the public realm. However the material became public, it changes nothing about its substance — all of which is subject to the UK’s freedom of information act.
Which raises the second, ultra-whiny complaint: sniffing about “private e-mails.” In the ongoing examination of the CRU documents, I have yet to find — nor have I seen anyone else point to or cite from — a personal e-mail, but instead just hundreds and hundreds of e-mails discussing taxpayer-funded projects and professional advocacy (again, all subject to the UK’s freedom of information act). Where exactly are the personal e-mails?
Then comes the substance-free handwringing about the pre-Copenhagen timing of this involuntary compliance with transparency laws — which could have been accomplished years earlier if only the hucksters weren’t hiding and destroying the evidence — and the suggestion that we all better just ignore it because the wrong kind of people must be behind putting this material out into the open. Oh.
The BBC has admitted it had the material six weeks before others stumbled onto it — which, given the history of how U.K. whistleblowers work, suggests someone sought to get the material out in response to Phil Jones’s latest effort to avoid providing the raw data. Jones claimed, if you recall, that he lost the data (which doesn’t pass the red-face test for several reasons — not least of which is there are no “oh, snap!” e-mails by these alarmists expressing concern that they had looked for and realized they had lost the raw data they had refused to release for years, using a host of various excuses.
But the most revealing tantrum comes to me today in an e-mail explaining that the fraudster-funded DeSmogBlog wants to take the discussion in the following direction: the skeptics, and particularly the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had the information before saying anything about it. If so, that would somehow indicate we have some involvement in whatever process it was — hacking, whistleblowing — that forced at least partial compliance with long-obstructed requests under the UK’s freedom of information act. Because apparently that would change the substance of what the now-public information affirms. Their evidence is that we were able to see right away what this material signified. It is that self-evident. But nothing is easy for the alarmists. Just as with climate that’s always changing, they are able to see nefariousness behind the simplest observation.
But they are confusing us with the BBC, who had the information on October 12 but sat on it until others let the nasty kitten out of the bag — at which point the guy who had received it in early October said he had been busy and would figure out what to say about it soon. This is somewhat similar to what happened at CEI — except for that six-week lag. I’ve checked with my colleagues, and their experience was like mine. I received an e-mail notifying me that the materials were posted on an obscure site on Wednesday November 18. Then I received another the next day, and posted an item here saying to keep an eye on what develops.
The alarmists recognize full well what threat these affirmations pose. The substance terrifies them. It is so damning that they’re flailing about to assign some miscreance to its provenance in order to tar it. They want to do everything they can to avoid addressing the substance. Because the substance dooms them.