Surprise - a British panel ruled that the scandal known as ClimateGate that supposedly revealed the manipulation of certain data strengthen the case of manmade global warming was much ado about nothing. But, The New York Times in a July 7 story called these findings of an inquiry led by Muir Russell, a retired British civil servant and educator, "a sweeping exoneration" of the ClimateGate scientists in question.
While there are still some serious and legitimate concerns to be raised about what ClimateGate reveal despite the findings, Bill Nye, the so-called "Science Guy" is celebrating and at the same time dismissing skeptics of Russell's findings. He explained why he thought this was important on CNN's July 7 broadcast of "Campbell Brown."
"Well, it's important to people like me," Nye said. "It's important to all the scientists. I think people who don't believe in climate change, who deny climate change, I don't think it's going to affect them very much at all because they're already committed to their - to their beliefs and this will be just one more brick in the great ziggurat of conspiracy for those people."
Nye has made some extraordinary statements in the past about global warming skeptics. Back during the winter of 2010, when many areas on the East Coast saw record amounts of snowfall, Nye declared global warming skeptics to be "unpatriotic." However, he made no qualms about expressing his elation over this British inquiry's findings, calling them "a great thing" and insisting that the entire ClimateGate scandal was based on nothing but out-of-context and twisted selective phrases.
"But for people who are in the business, for people who are, if you will, trying to change the world, it's a great thing," Nye said. "This was based on - on, really, selective taking of phrases and twisting them - taking them out of context. It's almost, as I said a few months ago, it's not just mean-spirited, it's irrational. So, I'm delighted this got done."
Despite Nye's view, ClimateDepot.com's Marc Morano has compiled a list of the various concerns about the Russell report that has supposedly exonerated these ClimateGate scientists. And Bjørn Lomborg, author of "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming," was also a guest on "Campbell Brown" explained that it wasn't necessary a win in that it strengthened the case for the global warming alarmist community, but instead was black mark on how scientist in this field behave.
"But the point here is, it's much more about scientist's behavior, the circling of wagons, if you will, the portrayal of climate change as this monolithic polished entity that everybody agrees," Lomborg explained. "And that was where you saw these scientists talking about deleting e-mails. We've seen that the largest primary data of the fundamental data that underlies most climate change research, namely, the temperature data of the last 150 years, has disappeared."
And Lomborg explained that Muir Russell's review didn't completely whitewash the entire ClimateGate scandal, but that it also lacked sufficient criticism of how those scientists handled certain data.
"Now, they actually criticized - the Muir review actually criticized them for doing so, although I don't think quite strongly enough," Lomborg said. "And the fundamental problem here is that's what makes people turn off on climate change discussions. When they get the feeling that they're not hearing the whole truth but they're only hearing our edited version, if you will."
The results of this inquiry weren't totally unexpected according to Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit.org. He explained the investigation leaned heavily to one side in a July 7 post, calling it "heavily weighted toward East Anglia "CRU apologia," the institution at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal.
"They adopted a unique inquiry process in which they interviewed only one side - CRU," McIntyre wrote. "As a result, the report is heavily weighted towards CRU apologia - a not unexpected result given that the writing team came from Geoffrey Boulton's Royal Society of Edinburgh."
