Midwest Voices

E. Thomas McClanahan

None

The AP story on an independent review panel’s report on the Climategate e-mails said the panel’s report “largely vindicated” the scientists involved: They acted honestly and their research was reliable.

Well, obviously this won’t do. The criticques of this shallow exercise were not long in arriving. At Watt’s Up With That, Fred Singer pointed out that the review panel barely delved into the science, which is the whole point, right?

Singer: “In fact, none of the investigations so far have had a serious look at the crucial science issues.” Was the post-1980s temperature data manipulated or not? Any thorough “review” of this scandal must wade into such issues.

My first thought when the “largely vindicated” stories came out last week was to recall what I call the Big Three admissions of Phil Jones, who headed the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. Earlier this year he admitted that he was a lousy organizer and crucial data may be lost, that the Medieval Warm Period may have been hotter than today’s supposedly man-caused temperatures, and that there had been no stastically significant warming in the Earth’s climate for 15 years.

That sort of thing, as well as the refusal of the Climategate e-mailers to share their data (which the review panel did criticize), not to mention their attempts to punish journals that published dissenting views, caused a sudden crash in the credibility of anthropocentric global warming theory, or AGW.

But it was left to Walter Russell Mead to point out that “the Big Green Lie is falling apart.” The attempt to put an end to Climategate with pat exonerations like “largely vindicated” simply won’t work.

As Mead wrote, “A suspicious and skeptical public will not be convinced without a significantly more transparent process; the story isn’t over yet. Not until comissions that include prominent climate skeptics and genuinely independent figures ask all the relevant questions will this story die down. … The greens were found innocent of inventing the science, but guilty of systematically hyping their case.”

Mead doesn’t necessarily doubt the science. Global warming could be happening. He favors a straightforward carbon tax with the revenue used to reduce payroll taxes, thus encouraging hiring. I’d go for that as well, although I’m a climate-change skeptic. To me, the case is unproven.

Whatever, Mead’s Big Lie isn’t the science, it’s the notion that the greens have good ideas about what to do about supposed climate change, and the public will accept those policies. That’s pretty far-fetched, when you consider the movement’s off-putting self-righteousness.

Mead compares the greens to the Prohibitionists, who may have been right about the evils of drink but pressed a remedy that led to worse ills such as organized crime. He offers other examples of movements whose main point had validity but whose preferred remedies, once implemented, caused worse problems. As they say, read the whole thing. The spate of “largely vindicated” stories is only one chapter in a story that has much longer to run.

MORE: Clive Crook of the Atlantic, a climate-change believer, disagrees with Mead on the nature of “the big lie,” but also blasts the “investigations” for failing to wade into the science:

“I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.”

Comments

Sign in with Facebook to comment.