A Sampling of Writing on the Climate Change Scandal

I spent part of the holiday weekend working on a column on what some folks are calling Climategate, the release of thousands of emails and other documents revealing a pattern of bad behavior at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England. (Having taken a vow to resist the "gate" suffix for political mischief and misdeeds, I'll just call it the climate change scandal.) As the holiday weekend wore on, the commentary and analysis piled up, along with great links to the leaked information.

The coverage in local papers has been limited, so I thought I'd put some of the best of what I'd read up here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel writes that the scandal has sunk any remaining prospects for Senate passage of a cap-and-trade bill.

One of the best headlines appears over a good WSJ editorial: Rigging a 'Climate' Consensus

Megan McCardle's Atlantic article points up the real problem with the climate science emails. She cites a perceptive assessment by CBS news reporter Declan McCullagh, widely viewed as having done the best MSM reporting on the scandal. This is from McCardle's post:

The emails seem to describe a model which frequently breaks, and being constantly "tweaked" with manual interventions of dubious quality in order to make them fit the historical data.  These stories suggest that the model, and the past manual interventions, are so poorly documented that CRU cannot now replicate its own past findings.

That is a big problem.  The IPCC report, which is the most widely relied upon in policy circles, uses this model to estimate the costs of global warming.  If those costs are unreliable, then any cost-benefit analysis is totally worthless.

The IPCC report she refers to is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. As McCullagh writes:

That report, in turn, is what the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged it "relies on most heavily" when concluding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.

Then we discover that the raw data has been dumped, making replication impossible.

What's it all mean? IChristopher Brooker, in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, calls it "the greatest scientific scandal of our age," with science taking a back seat to ideology.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

Michael Barone frames the question appropriately.

The more interesting question going forward is whether European and American governmental, academic and corporate elites, having embraced global warming alarmism with religious fervor, will be shaken by the scandalous CRU e-mails. They should be.

My column is scheduled to run Wednesday.