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Great Email Commentary: Who Are the Real Sceptics?

Frankly, it warms my heart to read about scientists critiquing their colleagues’ work ruthlessly. I like my scientists second-guessing themselves. I also like them doing what they can to stamp out any interference in their research by the militantly ignorant.

Matt Bush in a repost

Did you hear about this Climategate 2.0 bullshit? Why are journalists not getting fired for all this ridiculously irresponsible misreporting?

Over the last couple of days, we’ve been graced with the news that 5,000 personal emails exchanged by climate scientists have been leaked to the public. These aren’t recent emails, mind you, these emails cover the same time span as those released in the last ‘shattering’ leak. So hack journalists and parties with vested interests are forcing us to discuss yesterday’s news today.

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The mass media is once again doing the public a gross disservice through an unbridled flexing of staggering incompetence. Many reporters are defiantly refusing to even look beyond the now infamous text file (itself consisting almost entirely of shamelessly mined quotes) when writing their stories. What makes this myopia so damning is that in most cases, a fucking glance at the actual email the mined soundbite came from will lay the context bare — effectively refuting the entire article.

There are countless examples of such vacuous hype on Google News. No doubt you’ve already seen some. If you haven’t, you can start with this gem (shared courtesy of none other than Rupert Murdoch’s own glorified histrionic soap box). All we have here are the veritable peacocks of mindless dogmatism splaying dazzling shows of confirmation biases in defence of their stock holdings.

Even the better articles succumb to the deluded trap of giving ‘the opposition’ a voice on matters of science. If high school science was taught the same way, it would sound something like this: “That’s chemistry for today, class; now don’t be late for alchemy after the break!”

You have to stand in awe at the scandalous behaviour of these so-called ‘journalists’. I would love to see a dump of their leaked email exchanges. This is intellectual suicide at its most intrepid.

What can’t be disputed is that the the biggest sceptics of man-made global warming appear to be the scientists themselves, and that’s the way it should be. This is how science is done. We wouldn’t know that the planet is warming if no one tried to disprove it. Thankfully the scientists attack the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis at every angle, and they do so thoroughly; and to our collective despair, AGW has repeatedly proven itself bulletproof.

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Frankly, it warms my heart to read about scientists critiquing their colleagues’ work ruthlessly. I like my scientists second-guessing themselves. I also like them doing what they can to stamp out any interference in their research by the militantly ignorant.

Only a public horribly ignorant of the methods of science could possibly be taken in by such a travesty of lazy, biased reporting.

The timing of the leaks is obviously calculated to disrupt the upcoming UN climate change conference in Durban. Representatives of developing countries already affected by global warming are considering ‘occupying’ the talks to try to push for an international action plan. That this isn’t getting more coverage alongside the leaks is another media scandal.

With each new piece of data in the public sphere, I find myself even more dumbstruck by the sheer selfishness of the denier project. Irresponsible reporting makes journalists part of the problem. It’s no wonder that journalists are the least trusted group of professionals in Australia.

That a few people seem to think climate scientist Phil Jones is an incompetent dick is hardly newsworthy, and it says a lot less about the validity climate science as a whole. Phil Jones has already responded to the latest leaks.

Have the media already forgotten that massive independent study — funded by deniers — that was published last month and showed unequivocally that the planet is inarguably warming? Earlier this month, more data was released indicating that we only have another five years to drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions if we want to avert catastrophic global warming.

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The current fixation on what was happening in the world of climate science last decade is also plainly ridiculous. Science isn’t static. Anyone who thinks it is simply doesn’t know anything about science, and therefore isn’t qualified to make credible comments on the work of scientists.

It’s also interesting to note that the contents of the dump totalled at around 5,000 emails. Perhaps the most brazen demonstration of the stupidity of the leakers isn’t that they intentionally quote-mined emails they released alongside the original emails, but that they added this little nugget to their maliciously deficient little text file:

The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons.We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase.

Why the fuck not? I’m sceptical; I want to know these ‘various reasons’. They saw fit to include emails containing little more than holiday greetings and similar banalities. How do these disingenuous tools decide on which emails to withhold? 220,000 emails is an awful lot to withhold.

Even the worst of the so-called deceptions alleged to have been perpetrated by the scientists at the centre of the current propaganda campaign are nothing on those perpetrated by their denialist detractors. I covered some of these demonstrable crimes in my defence of the science behind anthropogenic global warming, which you can read here.

Urgh.

I invite you to look through the emails themselves here. There is a remarkable preponderance of no absolutely evidence of scientists trying to mislead the public. In fact, they appear to have been making every effort to not mislead the public. I know, right?

You can read some worthy coverage here and here.

Update: Check out the RealClimate team’s responses to this whole drama here.

Matt Bush is a journalism student at Swinburne University. He is also a raging godless progressive, a satirist and a science geek. He blogs at Entropy & Iteration.