A week after the explosion of the current Climategate scandal revealing that leading climate scientists engaged in ongoing email conversations about how to hide or obfuscate the real data on global warming (or lack thereof), the Washington Post on November 25 editorialized on the matter. Like other establishment media types, the Washington Post sought to make light of the shocking prospect of scientists acting wholly unethically. (Keep in mind that the panic over global warming and the Gore & friends call for massive energy taxes and rationing were based in large part on the work of these same scientists.)
To its credit, the Post did, today, print two letters to the editor critical of the editorial and the scandal. To its discredit, as Newsbuster Noel Sheppard aptly points out, the paper also published a letter from one of the scientists implicated in the scandal, a letter that directed readers to a "conversation" about the emails on...a leading global warming alarmist website. The paper could have published a letter written by leading global warming policy expert on the rational side of the debate (and submitted the same day the editoral ran), Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Globalwarming.org. That didn't happen. So, here is what Post readers would have learned about ClimateGate and how it was covered by the paper...but didn't.
----- Original Message -----
From: Myron Ebell
To: letters@washpost.com
Sent: Wed Nov 25 15:40:28 2009
Subject: Letter in response to editorial article, "Climate of denial," page A18, 25th November
25th November 2009
The Letters Editor
The Washington Post
Via e-mail
Sir or Madam,
Your editorial article "Climate of denial" is remarkably ill-informed and tendentious. The article begins by claiming that, "A hacker stole and released...." Do you have any evidence it was a computer hacker rather than a public-spirited whistleblower from within the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England who finally grew so disgusted by the ongoing scientific fraud that he made the documents public?
Second, after tsk-tsking at a few of the e-mails and rebuking the scientists involved in the scandal for not responding to the scandal effectively, the article then proceeds to claim that the vast scientific edifice supporting global warming alarmism is unshaken. This is outrageous. The scientists implicated are at the center of producing the U. N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Assessment Reports and are regularly referred to as some of the world's top climate scientists. Have you looked at some of the three thousand files or just a few of the juicier e-mails? Here is just one comment in one of the files from the scientist working on one of the temperature datasets:
"What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah - there is no )'supposed', I can make it up. So I have :-)...So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option - to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er, CLIMAT excepted). In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don't think people care enough to fix 'em, and it's the main reason the project is nearly a year late. " (From the "Harry Read Me" file, which may be found at http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME-30.txt.)
Dozens of similar comments have already been noted in the files. How does the Post know that similar corruption is not to be found in other major research supporting the so-called scientific consensus? After all, a number of the scientists implicated are at other institutions, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in NYC, and several U. S. universities.
There is certainly a climate of denial, and it includes the Post editorial page. Instead of joining the effort to stonewall this scandal, the Post should be leading the way and demanding that full civil and criminal investigations be undertaken of the scientists implicated. Or have you forgotten your role in Watergate?
Yours faithfully,
Myron Ebell.
