Climategate 2.0

“If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.” - Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate in physics, on scientific integrity

More emails hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit have been released. Already it's being called "Climategate 2.0" in the media.

You're probably scratching your head about that one.

Back in late 2009 a bunch of emails were somehow obtained, by person or persons still unknown, and released to the media. The emails appeared to show a pervasive pattern of fraud in reporting and interpreting scientific evidence vis-a-vis what used to be called "global warming," and is now called "climate change" after a lot of really cold winters.

"Climate change" is a safe term. Climate is always changing and always has. Climate/weather systems are chaotic by nature.

The new emails are in many respects even more damning, but the response this time around seems to be a big yawn and it's hard to see why. By any measure you care to name: number of people involved in perpetuating the fraud, number of people taken in by it, the economic consequences, etc, this has to be the biggest fraud in the history of science.

It could be that enthusiasm for that particular catastrophe seems to be waning. Disaster scenarios go in and out of fashion, I'm old enough to remember when the disaster de jour was the next Ice Age and massive worldwide famine with deaths in the millions, the latter set to arrive without fail no later than 1980.

The University has admitted that the sample they have examined "appear to be genuine, but says that several independent panels have exonerated the Climate Change Unit from charges of wrongdoing.

Yeah, right. Getting members of a small, tightly-knit profession to police their own, how does that work? One might ask, when was the last time you heard a panel of doctors announce they'd found a practicing physician was an utter incompetent whose patients died at an alarming rate? It happens, but how often?

All you really need to know about Climategate is this: the scientists at the Climate Change Unit destroyed the raw data. That does-not-happen in legitimate science. Not ever. Period. Full stop.