The Dead Zone

I refer by the title to the zone of silence regarding "Climategate" at a local lib blog I read (Why don't I ever link to them, or quote them directly? Because whenever I refer to them here, I am saying something negative, sometimes fairly caustically.). I keep waiting, you see, for some sign from them that they've even heard of it, that they have engaged it, that they realize that it means that a frequent object of their derision, Senator James Inhofe, has been more correct in his assessment of the subject than they have been.

I'll probably wait forever, just like I've been waiting forever for them to acknowledge the existence and now-clearly-demonstrated nefarious actions and nature of favored Democratic operatives and allies ACORN, just like I've been waiting forever for them to acknowledge that just possibly, the Democratic party is just as full of crooks and liars as the Republican Party (Of course I believe the Republican Party is full of crooks and liars. Politics is unfortunately all about power, money, and influence, and where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather...), just like I've been waiting forever for them to acknowledge that the Obama administration consistently appoints communist sympathizers and other varieties of socialists to positions of power.

It's not that I expect them to spend any significant time talking about the left's shortcomings. They are libs, after all. I just can't help but wonder if there will ever be an exception to the general rule that the only thing that beats through their brains is Republicans bad! Democrats good! Probably not. The main reason I continue to read them is the amusement value their incredibly simplistic approach to national politics affords.

But I'm wandering. Here, for those who are interested in exactly why Climategate matters, is a bit from the Washington Times, via John Lott:

The story has gotten worse since the global-cooling cover-up was exposed through a treasure trove of leaked e-mails a week ago. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia has been incredibly influential in the global-warming debate. The CRU claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 report.

Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU and contributing author to the United Nation's IPCC report chapter titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes," says he "accidentally" deleted some raw temperature data used to construct the aggregate temperature data CRU distributed. If you believe that, you're probably watching too many Al Gore videos.

Mr. Jones is the same professor who warned that global-warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

Other revelations hit at the very core of the global-warming debate. The leaked e-mails indicate that the people at the CRU can't even figure out how their aggregate data was put together. CRU activists claimed that they took individual temperature readings at individual stations and averaged the information out to produce temperature readings over larger areas. One of the leaked documents states that their aggregation procedure "renders the station counts totally meaningless." The benefit: "So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Academics around the world who have spent years working on papers using this data must be in full panic mode. By the admission of the global-warming theocracy's own self-appointed experts, the data they have been using is simply "garbage." . . .

I have watched with not inconsiderable amusement as the high priesthood of the religion of anthropogenic global warming has attempted to make it out as though the CRU hasn't done anything all that bad, that this is all a tempest in a teapot, that it only looks bad because the public doesn't understand the culture and slang involved.

The public--those who've looked at this material, that is--don't have any trouble understanding the main, glaring fact: the folks involved have clearly cooked and/or misrepresented the data to support their preferred conclusion.

James Inhofe was right; that little local lib blog was wrong. But I'll wait until the nether regions freeze over before they ever acknowledge that.

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UPDATE: Several days later, sure enough, whilst the authors of the blog haven't bothered to notice that anything's amiss in their solipsist little world, they have jumped all over Inhofe for jumping all over generals--according to them, because they disagreed with him on climate change. And commenters, predictably, have jumped into the gap, explaining, or linking to explanations of, why hacked e-mails that basically, as Rush said today, can be paraphrased as, "If this gets out, we're screwed!" and contain all manner of admissions to having cooked and massaged the data on which the global warming model is based, nevertheless don't mean what they appear to mean.

****. I knew they'd do it, or at least that someone'd do it, but it's still stunning.

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