“There’s only one problem with this rash, hyperbolic onslaught on fossil fuels: everything about it is wrong. Far from destroying life on Earth, our discovery and exploitation of these fuels improved it enormously.”
“The hostility to fossil fuels seems increasingly to be driven by misanthropy rather than reason; by an elitist feeling of revulsion for the gains of modernity rather than by a rational assessment of the undoubted problems humankind still faces.” (Brendan O’Neill, SPIKED, November 12, 2021)
Alex Epstein, president and founder of Center for Industrial Progress, has not been alone in his quest to reframe the climate/energy debate in humanist terms. Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer of SPIKED, whose recent “Keep Burning Those Fossil Fuels” came to my attention, has been beating the fossil fuel/human betterment drum for some time.…
Politicized ends-justify-the-means “science” includes cutting corners, hiding data, splicing-and-dicing–and cancelling those with different theories and findings. All came to light in the Climategate saga.
Yesterday’s post examined the fire behind the smoke that many had noticed for years. Today’s post resurrects Fred Pearce’s “‘Climategate’ was PR disaster that could bring healthy reform of peer review,” which was published in The Guardian (UK) in February 2010.
From The Guardian
In a unique experiment, The Guardian published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.
As well as including new information about the emails, we allowed web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.…
“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.
It has been 11 years since the intellectual scandal erupted called Climategate. Each anniversary inspires recollections and regurgitation of salient quotations. These quotations speak for themselves; attempts of climate alarmists to parse the words and meaning distracts from what was said in real-time private conversations.
And the scandal got worse after the fact when, according to Paul Stephens, “virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.”
Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010) was a mainstream look at the scandal. Michael Mann is the bad actor, despite his I-am-the-victim take in his account, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012).…