Climategate: They Threw Away The Raw Data? Where Is The American Media? And Why Are Liberals Silent?–UPDATED

The authors of the anthropogenic global warming theory threw away the original data upon which the theory was based. No one can reproduce non-existent data. No one can verify it. As horrendous as manipulating data or lying about the implications of the data might be, throwing out the original data is mortal scientific sin. [Background here.]

From the Times:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

What in the world were these people thinking? Either they were malicious or lazy and neither bodes well for top level scientists. [More details from Climate Science Blog.]

People are smugly driving in smart cars because of this data and it can’t be verified? The government wants to control the thermostat in your home and the data can’t be verified. Nancy Pelosi stands to make millions on wind mills and this data can’t be verified. World leaders are about to sign economy killing agreements based on data that can’t be verified.

In short, the whole world has been turned inside out on a fear that may well be utterly baseless. And we’ll never know because the original data was destroyed?

And here’s my second concern: If you’re watching the news, do you know anything about this? If you read the newspaper, are you reading stories that reflect this knowledge? How much collusion is involved and at what point do major media become irrelevant–if they won’t report news such as this? Roger Simon says:

It was that UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as most of us recall, that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore. And they are the ones with the “structural tendency to politicize climate change”. From a scientist to his colleagues, that’s a powerful indictment. So it should be no surprise that Hulme also has some rather cynical things to say about the coming Copenhagen climate conference:

This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

Indeed they will. And indeed it isn’t. No matter what our climate czar may insist, climate science and Copenhagen are now under a giant cloud. In fact, as Hume implies, the situation is far more serious than that, because what has been revealed is what strange bedfellows science and politics are in this era. The relationship between politicians and scientists today is not entirely unlike the relationship between scientists and the clergy during the days of Galileo. And the politicians of today know about as much about the science as the bishops of Galileo’s time did, although our politicians are perfectly willing to exploit the science of which they are ignorant and the scientists too often perfectly willing to be complicit in their own exploitation.

And just like in Galileo’s time, the government seems to control the media. Just look at any news aggregator. Are any American news sources breaking stories on Glimategate? No. Why? Because to them, Global Warming is their religion, too.

What’s interesting to me is that the elites are once again (hello Barack Obama) the true believers while the average folks are the ones still skeptical. Who keeps making emotion based political decisions?

UPDATES:

Via Memeorandum Climate Change “Denier” will represent EU at Copenhagen Summit.

Jim Treacher has a conversation
with the Global Warming Zealot in his head.

From Scott Graves on Twitter, “I did a Google search for news about “climate emails”… the American MSM should be ashamed of itself!”

More from Stacy McCain [MUST READ the whole thing] who discusses the religion of global warming and how reason and faith intermingle:

Right, Pete. While we await your Ph.D. dissertation on the physics of transubstantiation — zing! — let’s agree that there have always been religious overtones to environmentalism. One reason that abortion is such a sacred right to some Baby Boomers is that they were deceived by the “Population Bomb” hoax of the 1960s and ’70s, when neo-Malthusians warned that the alternative to draconian population control was a Soylent Green-style dystopia.

He continues:

These landmark Supreme Court decisions stigmatized religion as unconstitutionally subversive of the educational process, ensuring that future generations of American youth would be inculcated with a sort of neo-Manichean worldview, wherein traditional religious belief had nothing relevant to say about science, history, psychology or any other realm of human inquiry.

Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver famously observed, and this legally-certified declaration that there was no overlap between Faith and Reason has not merely marginalized Faith, it has also undermined Reason. When we behold the religious fanaticism of the Temple Cult in regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), we must understand this irrational fruit as a natural product of the poisoned tree of Scientism.

So, McCain asserts that the unreasonable fealty to science becomes religion because of the absence of the same. That makes sense to me. People will fill the holes in knowledge with something and if the plug in the hole of knowledge isn’t God, it’s often some theory that ends up either sounding conspiratorial, or, in this case, an actual conspiracy.

Further, the god becomes not truth but the nebulous “progress” which McCain fairly scorns:

This temptation to think that we are morally superior to our ancestors, you see, is the road to hell that Scientism paves. You need not be a Bible-thumping fundamentalist (like me) to notice how the adherents of Darwin tend to smuggle into their arguments a predisposition toward Whig history, wherein humankind is relentlessly struggling upward on the road of Progress. Here it is best to recall the brilliant aphorism of G.K. Chesterton:

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”

Exactly. If everything is Progress and Progress is everything, then decline becomes an ontological impossibility and — by logical extension — today’s Congress is morally superior to the Founders who gathered at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787.

How humorous, then, that global warming is, in fact, global cooling. That is, the last ten years refute the assertions of some very zealous and self-protective scientists. Literally, the progress of heating has been inverted to cooling. If heating was progressive, is cooling conservative?

This is all nonsense. The temperature is the temperature. What it all means is another question entirely and one the Global Warming alarmists believe is “settled”. It is by no means settled at all.

Maybe Global Warming theory will be brought back into the realm of science and reason rather than faith and religion. Maybe. People invest a lot of emotion in religion and the global warming zealots are no different.

UPDATED AGAIN:

AJ Strata has a look a the data and concludes this [His whole post is crunching numbers and well worth examination and comment, please check it out.]:

I have been working on this post for about a week now, testing a hypothesis I have regarding the raw temp data vs the overly processed CRU, GISS, NCDC, IPCC results (the processed data shows dramatic global warming in the last century). I have been of the opinion the raw temp data tells a different, cooler story than the processed data. My theory is alarmists’ results do not track well with the raw data, and require the merging of unproven and extremely inaccurate proxy data to open the error bars and move the trend lines to produce the desired result. We have a clear isolated example from New Zealand where cherry picked data and time windows have resulted in a ridiculous ‘data merging’ that completely obliterates the raw data.

To pull this deception off on a global scale, as I have mentioned before, requires the alarmists to deal with two inconvenient truths:

1. The warm periods in the 1930’s and 1940’s which were about the same as today
2. The current decline in temperature, just when the alarmists require a dramatic increase to match the rising CO2 levels.

What is needed out the back end of this alarmist process is a graph like we have from NCDC, where the 1930’s-1940’s warm periods are pushed colder and the current temps are pushed higher.

So, if I understand AJ correctly, the CRU scientists used raw data mixed in with rigged data and the rigged data helped confirm the theory of global warming, but when taking away the rigged data, the temperatures are the same as usual.

Well. Whatever data is there to be examined, needs to be examined and thoroughly. AJ is doing the scientific thing and testing the data. Now, for the major media to get to work and for the skeptics to start producing their findings, too.

Tigerhawk has a Climategate video that goes through the cast of villains.

Posted in Bias • Economy • Environmentalism • Liberals