Myron Ebell: Climategate: Have They No Shame?

"It is clear that the tip-top scientists implicated in the burgeoning Climategate scandal have no honor, but it is also becoming apparent that they have no sense of shame either. Their strategy is to brazen it out and rely on the great global warming alarmist establishment and the mainstream media to circle the wagons. They have got their talking point and the environmental pressure groups are already repeating it over and over: 'The "global warming deniers" are cherry-picking a few unfortunately worded emails and then taking them out of context.' Well, they are some pretty big, juicy cherries and there are a lots of them.

"But it isn’t going to work. There is simply too much evidence that 'the world’s leading climate scientists' (as they are always described — at least up until a few days ago) at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were cooking the data. For those not up on technical scientific terms, 'cooking the data' means manipulating and falsifying it. Here are just two examples from one of the approximately 3000 files that were released — either by a hacker or (more likely in my view) a public-spirited whistleblower at the CRU who just couldn’t stand the fraud any more. These two examples are from the 'Harry Read Me' file (which can be found here) and are apparently the ongoing notes of someone charged with trying to fix the problems in one of the CRU’s temperature datasets. The first email:

"What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no )’supposed’, I can make it up. So I have … So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option – to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er, CLIMAT excepted). In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don’t think people care enough to fix ‘em, and it’s the main reason the project is nearly a year late.

"The second email:

"OH FU*K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found."