Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:
“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”
— Telegraph, December 6
Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.
No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.
The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.
“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”
In short, act first, think later.
Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..
At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.
Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me — whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12, were sent on October 12 to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then, realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.
“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”
The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.
But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.
So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.
The hackers have the last word on this:
“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”
Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.