The Hugh Hewitt Show: Mark Steyn on ClimateGate

HH: What’s the significance of the hackers’ foray?

MS: Well, it’s very significant. My colleague, Iain Murray, put it this way. He says that the CRU is basically the Pentagon of the climate change business, and these are the Pentagon papers. And that’s basically true. It’s the clearing house for a climate change orthodoxy. So everything from Kyoto, Copenhagen, the IPCC, as you mentioned, the cap and trade monstrosity in Congress, all depends on figures that have been run through the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia. And as we now see, not so much from the e-mails, but from the actual code, the code, the computer code they’re using, it’s garbage. I quote at random. For example, this is one example of the computer code there. “Specified period over which to compute the regressions. Stop in 1960 to avoid the decline that affects tree ring density records.” So in other words, the computer code that they’re producing these numbers with is rigged and distorted, and what they want to do at Copenhagen is tax you up to the hilt to pay for this racket.
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MS: Yes, and I think this is a real crisis for, particularly for American newspapering, because they’re a more advanced case in decline than other parts of the world. But if you look at, say, this guy Andrew Revkin, who is the eco-guy at the New York Times, and is fawned on and flattered by the fellows in these e-mails who all call him Andy, and also happen to be the guy who shut down Phelim McAleer, the Irish anti-global warming guy whom you had on your show the other day, Andrew Revkin was the one who shut him down when he tried to ask Al Gore about that British court decision. This guy, this guy basically is on the side of the climate change advocates. Well, that’s for all well and good, but he should have a column on the op-ed page. We shouldn’t be pretending that this is any kind of neutral coverage of the issue.

The Heart of ClimateGate (Wizbang)

It appears that Michael Mann and his acolytes were indeed "true believers" in what they were doing, and probably answered to no one outside their circle of colleagues. Perhaps in their minds this reinforced the notion that their work had never been corrupted. Still, when science becomes a propaganda campaign that is forced to rely on Gestapo tactics in order to perpetuate its version of the truth, it isn't science any more. The only way that the East Anglia group can redeem itself in the eyes of the world at large, which curiously seems to understand the objective nature of peer review much better than they do, is to publicly release all of their raw data and computational methods so that they can be studied by unbiased atmospheric scientists and computer programmers. Until that occurs, we should consider their entire body of work to be highly suspect at best.