Manufacturing conensus: why Climategate hurts the warming faith

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
Thursday, Nov 26th, 2009

Ilya Somin, associate professor at George Mason University School of Law, explains why the Climategate emails undermine the faith non-experts have about man-made warming:

I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm.

The New Atlantis agrees:

The evidence of scientific dishonesty supplied by these communications is so copious it’s hard to know where to begin an attempt to describe them. Many of the e-mails brazenly discuss the manipulation of scientific data either to provide the appearance of greater support for global warming science or to undermine the claims of skeptics.

Deutsche Welle:

German climatologist Hans von Storch of the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, remarked that the “unfortunate writing” done by Jones and others has “likely damaged the credibility of climate science.” …But the fallout may not be entirely negative, he writes; in fact he sees a silver lining for climate science: “I would assume that … a useful debate about the degree of politicization of climate science will emerge.”

Debate? In The Age? ABC Melbourne radio?  AM? PM? 7.30 Report?

Full article here

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