Some thoughts on Climategate

It is likely that some readers of this blog are totally unaware of the controversy now boiling (how appropriately) in the “global warming” community and dubbed, naturally, Climategate. For those who are, a Google search on the word Climategate currently returns about 371,000 results. (When I started this post an hour ago, the tally stood at 289,000. Wow!) However, according to the Media Research Council, the topic has not been broached EVEN ONCE by any of the US alphabet networks; meanwhile, it is prominently reported in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere.

I have to ask the question: is this not prima facie evidence of bias on the part of the mainstream news media in this country? Katie Couric reads her poem about global warming on the CBS “News” web site. Brian Williams and his colleagues constantly warn of the imminent catastrophe on all the network news shows. But there is not a story, not a word, not a syllable about a significant debate on the veracity of the research forming the basis for their hysteria.

Why?

Disclaimer: I am not a professional scientist or a Ph.D. in any discipline. I did grow up wanting to be one, though, and I know the professed goal of scientists is to identify and document the truths that explain what happens in the natural world. They use what’s called scientific method to test hypotheses, publish them in peer-reviewed journals, debate the findings, and – sometimes – come to an agreement over whose conclusions best explain the phenomena at hand.

Here’s what I, as an admitted layman, see happening in the climate change world. One side of the healthy debate has managed to wrest control of the dissemination apparatus away from the other side. Global warming dissenters have been blocked from having their articles published, and then the alarmists claim their side must be right since their opponents have not published any contrary articles. The e-mails obtained reveal this is the case. They also demonstrate a troubling pattern of “massaging” the raw data using “tricks” and other means. There is now considerable evidence that the iconic “hockey stick” graph alleging a dramatic rise in global temperature in the last century is a fraud.

I do not know which side is right. I do know that the apparatus I mentioned in the above paragraph includes most of the mainstream news reporting outfits in this country. They are “all in” on the notion that human-caused climate change is settled science, and their reporting on the topic reflects that bias. So most Americans do not even know there is a disagreement in the science, while at the same time many tend to be skeptical of the predicted disaster in the face of anecdotal evidence such as current record low temperatures and snowfalls. And, quite disturbingly, the Canada Free Press now reveals the fingerprints of John Holdren in the controversy. Holdren is the director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Meantime, the above-referenced White House is proceeding to disrupt our entire society on the basis of this unsettled science. The President has announced he will go to Copenhagen next month to address the climate change summit, whose organizers aim to transfer massive amounts of wealth from industrialized nations to less developed ones who are not guilty of trashing the global environment. He also strongly supports the “cap and trade” bill which managed to pass in the House earlier this year. In a candid moment last year, candidate Obama admitted that under such a policy, “electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket.”

Let’s stop all this nonsense and get the science figured out before we wreck the greatest economy in the history of the planet, for the purported reason of saving the planet.