“…the air has gone out of the climate-change movement”
Margaret Wente offers up a pretty good analysis and smackdown of the climate change alarmists who, in recent month, have seen basically all of their credibility undermined by revelation after embarrassing revelation that their work and conclusions have been based on dishonest data manipulation, distortion and bullying in the peer review process, and word-of-mouth claims unsubstantiated by actual research.
The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do –- a global deal was never in the cards. As [Walter Russell Mead] writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.
And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.
Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper the Guardian — among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Meantime, the IPCC — the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science — is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, [Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC] dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.
Do read the whole thing, good reader.
