Update on the Hack In at Hadley Climate Centre Posted on November 20th, 2009
Well, this has certainly been an interesting day. When the story broke late last night, I was interested (of course, who wouldn’t be?), but knew that the main stream media would be a long time picking this up. The stage has been set, however, and it’s not likely that the main stream will stay off it much longer.
I can already see the tact they’ll take to discredit the information released. First, Michael Mann over at RealClimate.org emphasized how illegal it was to hack into the system and take the data. I won’t even bother linking to his tripe. A lame answer that addressed none of the questions. He made a half-assed attempt to explain “out of context” information.
So did the leader of this group, Phil Jones, who runs the HCC and whose talk about massaging the data (“Mike’s Nature trick of adding… to hide the decline”) was first interviewed by TGIF and that released this morning. His excuse is a combination of not remembering (I’ll give him that, this was a decade ago) and things being taken out of context.
That, of course, will be their chant here. “It was illegal to take those emails and now they’re being taken all out of context.”
Well, to put some context into it, let’s go to Climate Audit and see how Jean over there explains the email from Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes about changing the data so the hockey stick doesn’t point downwards.
Basically, the data can be presented truthfully, which is what the green line on the graph at right represents. Or it can be presented Al Gore style (meaning as a lie), as in the published graph denoted by the red line at right.
That’s pretty much what it all boils down to, folks.
You can search all over the place to get the original emails and files that were disseminated. They’ve gone viral. But reading through them (I’ve skimmed a few), you’ll find that it’s mostly more of the same.
You’ll notice two things going on:
- All of these people are colluding to make each other look good and to denounce, ridicule, and shut out those who disagree with them. Why would they do that?
- You’ll see that this group, their ringleader in particular, handled huge sums of money handed to him as research grants, funding, etc. We’re not talking about a weekend jaunt for the AIG executives kind of money, we’re talking about Al Gore doing a whistle stop tour at $500,000 a pop kind of money. First day of sales for Microsoft’s Windows 7 sort of money. Millions of dollars (measured in tens)!
You don’t get handed that kind of dough for saying “so-and-so’s data isn’t right.” You don’t get into the unsympathetic main stream news for that either. You get posted on blogs that don’t pay anything is all you get for your trouble.
What I’m saying here, folks, is that the cat is out of the bag. The gravy train (paid for by our tax dollars) for these pseudo-scientists and religion promoters is done.
The Telegraph picked up the story and I think it’s in the Wall Street Journal now too. Expect it to proliferate some this weekend, but expect several outlets to ignore it by Monday. Why? Because it will require actual investigative work (something the main stream media eschews) and it will require a lot of people to change their minds about something that has become fundamental to today’s politics and culture.
Plus, Al Gore might have to get a real job. Can’t have that!
Related posts:
- Hadley Hack Update – Authenticity Gets Some Confirmation
- Breaking: University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre Hacked
- Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data
