Media Missing the Plot on ‘Climate Gate’: It’s the Fraud, Stupid!

by Christopher C. Horner

To the credit of the New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post — reliable outlets for promoting global warming alarmism, protecting those who craft it and marginalizing those who point out its weaknesses and excesses — they all ran stories in the past 48 hours addressing the documents somehow obtained from the computers of a UK university serving as the warming movement and industry’s Mother Ship. My great surprise is even greater because these outlets have demonstrated a pattern of only giving ink to embarrassing controversies after a week or so, once it appears that damage control is needed and the alarmists have gotten their story straight.

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I documented this pattern in a book published one year ago this month, subtly titled “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.” The title says it all, including all that surely seems to have been affirmed by the documents posted, by “anonymous” on a Russian server and otherwise covering his tracks.

Since this affirms, not “reveals”, the scandal that so many have been explaining is the global warming industry, it also raises the issue of how can each of these media outlets still miss the plot? Well, they are doing so in a fashion so uniform, and in the face of such outrageous exposition of the scandal that is unfolding, that I conclude it is nonetheless yet another exercise in damage-control.

The emails, let alone the data still being combed over by the pointy-heads, plainly affirm everything I wrote, in detail, about the scams being run by the booming industry of Big Academia and Big Science suckling at the teat of the “global warming” panic they are also fostering.

I was by no means without company, but I did name and go into detail about all of the stars of this alleged correspondence, and how they are engaging in everything these documents appear to confirm. None of them lawyered up to challenge what I wrote. I suspect, however, that each and every one has retained counsel in the past few days, and not because they plan on suing anyone. They — rightly in my opinion — fear legal consequence as a result of what has been revealed. And not for writing nasty emails about people who disagree with them.

Yet the media have defined the story down, focusing on sideshow issues such as conspiring or hateful commentary about those who cause problems for the authors. Think of the wisdom of that approach: whose emails do not somewhere include such things? Surely this will also be proved with more emails stolen from skeptics’ computers, dispatching the story with an “everybody does it” narrative that entirely elides the meaning of the far more important admissions. Heck, Greenpeace used to peddle emails taken from my trash to the press, and got the Guardian and others to excerpt sections, out of context, with phony context padded around them and without calling me before running their “story”. That’s how they roll. They’ve no room for outrage. Still, that poses no resemblance to what’s going on now.

How it is possible that these media outlets’ regular “issue” reporters do not recognize the import of the fraud admitted to in the emails which, broadly, have been acknowledged as genuine?

Incidentally, also note how all of these outlets emphasize as fact, up front, that these documents, codes, data and emails are the product of “hackers” (this has grown from “a hacker” when the story first ran, though no outlet has offered any explanation for that change let alone evidence of the hacking). They simply accept that the University of East Anglia’s computers were hacked, on the word of people who are shown by what was hacked to be liars and charlatans and who have an interest in making the story be something other than the substance of the material.

I do not know if the computers were hacked. I do know that there is just as much reason to suspect that the documents were posted by someone on the inside who still possesses a conscience, a “whistleblower”. Remember that this incident occurred after the most recent and audacious twist in the university’s Climatic Research Unit refusal of access to basic raw data and other material necessary to validate their claims serving as the basis for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol (and Kyoto II), “cap-and-trade”, and so on. This was a four-year campaign to hide material — a campaign whose tactics were also admitted to in the alleged emails now made public.

After running out of excuses, in September CRU’s Phil Jones simply claimed that he had lost the data so, sorry, no, no one can check it. Implausible beyond comprehension. And if the emails are real and any indication of the way this group operates, deeply dishonest.

Soon thereafter someone went and downloaded material that, again if real, says enough, you are scandalizing and perverting “science”. This shall stop. Someone took it upon themselves to enforce a UK freedom of information act that its targets allegedly and apparently admit to subverting.

No matter how many stories seek to distract you with the shiny objects of prurient dialogue between sniveling, petulant and nasty global warming alarmists, that isn’t the story. The story is the exposition . Not the revelation, in fact, but merely the revelation of their affirmation of it.

I’m told by a cable news producer that, across the board, the green pressure groups, the supposedly “Concerned Scientists” (the even have a Union!), all of them are refusing to come out and speak to the issue. That could be because they understand that what is out is described by the material’s anonymous source as “a random sample.” There could be many more shoes to drop. Why hitch your organization further to the anchor threatening to sink a $7 billion per year (that’s just federal taxpayer-funding) industry? Live to fight another day. There will always be a new Man-as-agent-of-doom theory attracting college kids, Statists and wealthy elites.

This cannot simply be a three-day story about titillating emails. The edge seems to have been turned up on information proving everything we have been saying, often in great detail if to no media interest, for years. Kyoto II, “cap-and-trade” and EPA must all be stayed, at least so far as the U.S. is concerned, until the truth is outed and admitted to.


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Posted Nov 23rd 2009 at 8:38 am in Environment, Media Criticism, News | 210 Comments