(Some) Leftist Reaction to the Explosive Climate Research Scandal

I've started the headline above with "some" in parentheses since the CRU scandal is too devastating for even the most hardline eco-extremists. We do have a few enviro-Stalinists, hoping to chain the world community to the gulag of global warming totalitarianism. But things aren't working out too well for the commissars of late.

This cartoon, up at Climate Progress, demonstrates the left's fearmongering (it's the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with the fourth dude in denial). These captions appear with the cartoon:

* Embarrassing climate e-mails will have limited impact
* Scientists behaving badly won’t change evidence ...

And the left's total non-seriousness is captured in the comments, with the suggestion that the real scandal is the hacked e-mails:

HackerGate.

With Watergate, the questions were:

Who broke into the hotel room?
What were they trying to do?
And for the cover-up, What did they know and when did they know it?

Those should be the questions about HackerGate. Who hacked the emails, for whom were they stolen, who knew about the crime, and when did they know it?

But even George Monbiot, a huge AGW backer - or propagandist - sees a devastating impact from the CRU e-mails. See, "Global Warming Rigged? Here's the Email I'd Need to See":

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

Again, that's from a guy who's a huge AGW propagandist. theory. But check Viscount Monckton, at Pajamas Media, "Viscount Monckton on Climategate: 'They Are Criminals'":

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

Some may recall that Viscount Monckton gave a recent lecture that went hyper-viral on YouTube, and Al Gore has refused to meet Monckton for debate:

But it turns out the Scott Eric Kaufman, who's a now a co-blogger at the neo-communist LGM, is looking to scrap; notice how he oddly finishes his genuinely hare-brained post with an (unearned) arrogant dismissal, "I don't envy climate scientists the tsunami of stupid they're about to suffer."

And that's not far removed from Comrade Repsac3's theory, where he suggests those taking seriously the CRU bombshell are the new "truthers." See, "Climate Conspiracy Trutherism":

... the idea that a whole bunch of scientists are getting together and conspiring to fake data and lie to the public in the name of propagating a particular theory as to whether & why the climate throughout the world changes--and that the proof of this is to be found in e-mail "confessions"--strikes me as being right up there with the folks who cannot accept that the Towers fell because of damage sustained by the planes, Oswald acted alone, Obama was born in Hawaii, and Lennon/McCartney really did write all those hit songs themselves.

Unreal, I know. But when huge elements of the global campaign of neo-communism hinge on the global warming scam, it's not hard to see why these idiots have blinded themselves to genuine significance of the CRU case.

In any case, more at Memeorandum.