WaPo: Climate Schemers 'Under Attack' By Skeptics Who Dare to Question

Photo of Lachlan Markay.
  • Bookmark and Share

The release of internal emails from Britain's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit shows scientists plotting to ostracize and marginalize other researchers who question their assumptions on anthropogenic global warming. Yet the Washington Post finds that such a strategy is but a natural reaction to attacks on these scientists by climate skeptics.

The Post characterizes the CRU, and the larger circle of scientists pushing the global warming theory, as "an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack." Readers must be forgiven for their confusion about who exactly is being attacked, as the Post goes on to detail CRU communications calling for a boycott of academic journals that publish articles critical of the supposed "consensus" on global warming. (Noel Sheppard reported on these and other incendiary statements in a Friday post.)

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," CRU director Phil Jones wrote of two skeptical academic works. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Story Continues Below Ad ↓

"Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," wrote Penn State's Michael Mann, in reference to a journal that published works by climate skeptics. "I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replied.

So who exactly is being attacked? It seems from the Post's own coverage that it is the climate alarmists attacking the skeptics, not the other way around. In fact, the latter are doing what scientists do: present alternative views that must be disproved before they are cast aside. They are not attacking anyone, they are vigorously pursuing scientific truth. The CRU staff are the ones doing the attacking.

But the Post seems determined to portray the folks at CRU as victims of an ideological assault bent on ignoring the global consensus on human-induced global warming.

"It is incontrovertible" that the world is warming as a result of human actions, [Kevin] Trenberth said. "The question to me is what to do."

"It's certainly a legitimate question," he added. "Unfortunately one of the side effects of this is the messengers get attacked."

In his new book, "Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth's Climate," Stanford University climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider details the intense debate over warming, arguing that it has helped slow the nation's public policy response.

"I've been here on the ground, in the trenches, for my entire career," writes Schneider, who was copied on one of the controversial e-mails. "I'm still at it, and the battle, while looking more winnable these days, is still not a done deal."

This is the problem with approaching the issue as a win/lose scenario, rather than a quest to find scientific truth. The Post feeds into this unhealthy win/lose narrative. Since it has apparently picked sides, it is prone to seeing climate skeptics as "attacking" the CRU staff.

Were it to characterize debate as a healthy means of truth-seeking, the Post might conclude that skeptics were not attacking a consensus, but rather demonstrating that the consensus does not exist. If it did, there would be no skeptics. But the Post's chosen narrative--the one promoting the win/lose dichotomy--sees the CRU as trying to root out the hostile opponents of settled fact, not individuals posing legitimate arguments against the incontrovertibility of anthropogenic global warming.

The Post quotes Mann excusing the CRU emails as a form of "vigorous debate" among climate scientists. But debate about how to silence debate is antithetical to the scientific method. The Post has fed into this damaging characterization of the scientific discussion surrounding climate change by portraying those who would stifle reasoned dissent as victims of the skeptics' "attacks."


Comments Policy

All comments are owned by whoever posted them and are subject to our terms of use. They should not be assumed to represent the views of NewsBusters.

Viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

This is fun. The emails and

This is fun. The emails and code release didn't help them.

And the best yet is their attempts to minimize and explain away this thing.

Good going there Mike. Nice tricks. 

Poor poor picked on scientist, who a just trying to silence everyone else. Get them fired if they cause any trouble.

I got an early Christmas this year.

"You lie!"  Rep. Joe Wilson R-(SC)

Like other rational, thinking posters have said...

 This hardly going to get the alarmist to admit the truth.  In fact, this is going to get them to attack the "skeptics" even harder and with more vigor.  There's way too much money and power involved (just look at Al Baby).

We (the raitional thinkers) need to keep pushing back, if not harder.  Truth is our only guiding light here...

When the Conservatives get back into power

and they will (the Libs are all but ensuring it) I would like to see the ole "turn-about-is-fair-play" and have Gore hauled into court and tried for fraud/treason/(fill in the blank) then thrown in with Madoff. Hell, Bernie is a piker compared to the damage that Gore has brought to the country and the world.

Maybe the Brits would like a crack at the moron, too.

"You should always tell the truth, because if you tell the truth you make it the other person's problem." Sean Connery

Indict these scumbags now.

Apparently, some of these global hucksters destroyed incriminating information that was being sought in a FOI request.  That's an offense worthy of a federal indictment.

 They should be prosecuted now.

"The problem with political jokes is they get elected." -Henry Cate VII (?)

Bitter Irony

Of course the Washington Post got it exactly backwards. The article is written by Juliet Eilperin who has a history of alarmist garbage. Her husband just happens to work for the Center for American Progress (Enter George Soros, John Podesta etc, etc.) and is some kind of "ethics" expert.

You beat me in

calling out Elperin (yet again on NB).  No conflict there by the WaPo....nah.

I find some solace in recalling that the WaPo also championed failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds for months on end.  AGW's kiss of death by the WaPo?

Can you imagine the two-step

Can you imagine the two-step tango all these man-made-global-warming reporters, editors, left wing commentators, and university quakademics are dancing now? They were all either participants or useless eaters of the biggest science scam since the Middle Ages.

That's the thing about truth: it may take a while to come out, but it will eventually come out. Let the trials begin!

No citizen's right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, or property is safe as long as Obama is President of the United States.

Please Understand Something

It does not matter if we ould or can prove that the entire AWG movemnt is a scam the beat goes on. The stage is set for massive amounts of Government Intervention and for the One World Govt. Types AWG is the gift that keeps on giving. Instead of slowing down the meeting in Coppenhagen in which nothing was seen to be coming out of it will I predict instead lead to new and more restrictive treaties which will be quickly ratified by the Senate. They will not let this opportunity to meddle in everyones lives go away.

The same way that Healthcare will pass regardless of what all the pundits say Govt. always wants more Govt. Always.

rich... I think you may

rich...

I think you may be right...I hope you aren't but it is heading that way, big time.

I hear the non-stop commercial ads on radio using the little kiddies with Copenhagen changed to Hopenhagen...in fact as I am posting this, it came on again, it's been this way forever now.

Talk about infuriating!

'Doubling down on stupid is not a particularly good idea'~Breitbart

Skeptics include liberal intellectuals

Skeptics include liberal intellectuals.

Meet an skeptic - a denier of eminent proportions; physicist Freeman Dyson, professor Emeritus of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. Dyson has been awarded 21 honorary degrees from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford.

And did I say that he's progressive? Can you hear the stampede of the little feet of the liberal media running to schedule an interview? He is a staunch advocate for distribution of wealth - not just here in the US, where he believes capitalism, is simply bad, but in global redistribution of wealth. My goodness how will be be able to comply with all the media demands?

Oh 

He also has a keen interest in this debate on global warming. Yes Virginia, there is a debate.

One would think that the MSM would be fawning all over him; inviting him to offer up his two cents on the issues here. Why not? On the topic of Global Warming alarmism, Dr. Freeman stands with the science of science, rather than the hypothetical politics of science:

"The fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated," Dyson wrote in his 2007 book "Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe." Dyson focuses on debunking climate models predictions of climate doom: "They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models." 

From an interview with Charlie Rose in 1999:

Rose: You're not surprised that communism failed, are you?

Freeman: Yes! I am surprised. I did not expect that. I think that few of us did. ... but still people did take care of each other..

The MSM is not lined up to listen to this intellectual talk about global warming and the rush to pass cap and trade? The MSM will not allow an intelligent informed conversation to take place if and when the intelligent person is a "skeptic." Well.. these just captured e-mails and conversations amongst the alarmists community may show that they may not actually believe their own models - ya think?

The NYTimes Magazine, in yet another rare look at a skeptic, previewed Dr. Dyson earlier this year in a piece called, "The Civil Heretic." A few excerpts:

Among those he considers true believers; Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.

“Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”

"The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse.."

Any wonder why the MSM doesn't have this "idiot" up in the discussion of what we should not be doing right now?

(;~/ gary

You're not surprised are

You're not surprised are you? Demonization, ridicule, ostracization, censorship, etc. are the tactics of oppressors and tyrants (i.e. liberals).

It's never been about climate and environment, it's about political power and money. The same is true for the healthcare issue and many others.

Illegal document Release.

<p>So the Washington Post characterizes publication of unreleased documents as an "attack"  That must means that each one of WaPo’s publications in the 60's and the 70's must have been acts of war by WaPo against the American people.  </p><br /><p>This release by a hacker is far more justified than any of those WaPo publications were back then.  This documents an ongoing fraud, a crime in progress.</p><.p>Back then, WaPo and Jack Anderson, publishing got three million people killed and the Pentagon Papers were not first hand source documents but the musings of some pencil neck geeks who should not have been hired to start with or paid given the poor quality of their work   </p>

 

Avitar... Let's not just

Avitar...

Let's not just recently with Dana Preist releasing info regarding other countries helping us house terrorists etc...heck she got a Pulitzer.

Plus look at the msm and ACORN accusing the couple that exposed them for their filth...on tape.

It's never ending.

'Doubling down on stupid is not a particularly good idea'~Breitbart

make stuff up, claim fictional consensus, hide your data...

and THEN bitch and moan you are being attacked.

This is a classic criminal kabuki. Scream and holler but don't disprove the other guy. Scream and holler but don't provide your alibi (the actual data sets and algorithms). Point the finger at just about any passer-bye. Etc., etc., etc.

The reason this stuff was jacked is that they have been stonewalling FOIA requests for years now. The reason was readily figured out when no one else could reproduce their outputs. It's much like the cherry picked tree ring data that used one tree out of hundreds of trees sampled in order to get data that supported the stupid AGW hoax.

Now we find out they are trashing the emails, etc. which is strictly against the law. I guess that only applies to us.

Thoroughly distasteful environmental video

If you haven't seen this video, be sure to check it out- it illustrates the sickness of the AGW crowd. NOT IN FRONT OF THE KIDS THOUGH.

This is apparently from the bowels of the environmentalist movement. Absolutely disgusting. I wonder though, how come you don't see this kind of thing from the "skeptics who dare to question"?

H/T Giovanni's World

21 years of debate is all they had. There never was truth.

  Science is about looking at the world and saying I think X may be happening here and then setting up a system whereby X can be proven. Then going before your fellow sceintists and saying that yes X is indeed true. And presenting them with the reproducable sequence of events that can prove X is true.

  Climate change was always about plugging a bunch of numbers into a really big computer.

Numbers that cannot be completely known as true. (Temperatures prior to accurate termperature taking) (Weather stations that are too close to manmade structures such as asphalt parking lots)

Numbers that cannot ever be known as true (output from the sun)

Numbers that cannot possibly be forseen (volcano output)

Numbers that were not forseen but should have (melting ice would open up new areas of the ocean to act as carbon sink)

Numbers that can still only be guessed at (There is still an unknown carbon sink on the planet. Something is sucking up CO2 and we have no idea)

Crappy formulas that turned everything input into a hockey stick.

Sincerely,

a Veteran of a 1000 psychic wars.

Viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.