hcap
07-08-2010, 05:45 AM
http://www.salon.com/news/env/environment/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/07/07/gene_lyons_climategate
..Cherry-picked and quoted out of context, almost 20 years of informal, occasionally bitchy communications among scientists were cited as evidence of fraud. Nor were Hannity and Fox News the only ones pushing the alleged wrongdoing. CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC News, everybody joined the party. "NBC Nightly News" host Brian Williams was typical:
"Climategate they're calling it," he reported on Dec. 4, 2009. "A new scandal over global warming and it's burning up the Internet. Have the books been cooked on climate change?"
Pundits spoke glibly of "fudging the numbers," "massaging the data," and like phrases making climate researchers look as crooked as Wall Street accountants. Even that well-known philosopher of science Sarah Palin contributed a Washington Post column charging that the "e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals."
If anything, the British press was even more censorious. But were any of these allegations true? Concerning the most widely cited example, a 1999 e-mail from professor Phil Jones to his American colleague Michael Mann of Penn State, charges of wrongdoing appeared nonsensical on their face.
......
..Cherry-picked and quoted out of context, almost 20 years of informal, occasionally bitchy communications among scientists were cited as evidence of fraud. Nor were Hannity and Fox News the only ones pushing the alleged wrongdoing. CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC News, everybody joined the party. "NBC Nightly News" host Brian Williams was typical:
"Climategate they're calling it," he reported on Dec. 4, 2009. "A new scandal over global warming and it's burning up the Internet. Have the books been cooked on climate change?"
Pundits spoke glibly of "fudging the numbers," "massaging the data," and like phrases making climate researchers look as crooked as Wall Street accountants. Even that well-known philosopher of science Sarah Palin contributed a Washington Post column charging that the "e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals."
If anything, the British press was even more censorious. But were any of these allegations true? Concerning the most widely cited example, a 1999 e-mail from professor Phil Jones to his American colleague Michael Mann of Penn State, charges of wrongdoing appeared nonsensical on their face.
......