I didn't want to write dozens of posts about the ClimateGate although this event almost certainly deserves them. But there are 12 million pages about the scandal on the Internet and some of them are better than what I could write.
There's much to say but I won't say much. Let me hope that you are watching the developments on Google News and elsewhere. Instead, let me just mention a rather irrelevant non-event. Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, wrote an article called
The global warming emails non-event (click)in which he argues that you shouldn't look at the documents because there's nothing to see.
The article became the locus of a huge comment activity on his blog, receiving 100+ comments in a few hours. That's not bad for such a non-event. ;-) And most readers actually disagree with Plait and give him decent and thoughtful arguments why the ClimateGate is something one should be concerned with.
Of course, not all readers are climate realists. The following comment is a good representative of the quality of the opposing side's - the new deniers' - thoughts:
T_U_T says:The other alarmists' comments are analogous and I think that every single one of them uses the word "denier" or "denialist". ;-)
holy !$!%f ! What a crop of denialists here. Even the arch-crank Motl crawled out of his fetid sewer. Seems every sorry piece of reality denier comes out of the brushwork now.
The gap in the intellectual quality between the two sides couldn't be more stunning.
Of course, I have known Plait's far-left political fanaticism for quite some time. Several years ago, we exchanged a few e-mails, learning that we liked the blog of the other. When I suggested we would trade the links, he answered that it was inconceivable that he would ever link to a blog with right-wing blogs on its blogroll.
I was really surprised that someone who is interested in astronomy - or at least pretends so - may be so blinded by an idiotic ideology and so thoroughly unable to separate politics from science and other parts of life. He looked like a guy who was advised by a new "Stalin" not to do inconvenient things. In reality, he has always been a prototype of the totalitarian atmosphere in the contemporary left-wing scholarly circles.
Well, as environmentalist George Monbiot has said, those who claim that the ClimateGate is no problem are the new deniers.
They think that if they won't look, the problem won't exist. Well, while I feel that the ClimateGate is already evolving at a slower pace than the Velvet Revolution did 20 years ago, it is surely continuing and when the dust settles, people will find out that the majority convinced that the case for AGW is not scientifically reliable will be so huge that any projects to regulate the climate will become politically unrealistic.
However, the dust hasn't yet settled.
P.S. FoxNews just reported that since 2007, the United Nations have wanted to establish UNEP, an environmental watch dog, to push environmentalism as a replacement of religion, "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity." Whoops.
I wonder how these things are going to be established e.g. in the Czech Republic where religious officials are considered "black asses" ("černoprdelníci") by the overwhelming (atheist) majority of the population and where the environmentalists are indeed going to follow the religious example. ;-) Also, we have a bill that outlaws "movements attempting to suppress basic human rights and freedoms."
The United Nations, come to visit us in Czechia, you will be kicked into your black asses, too. ;-)