Energy Probe

That isn’t my headline. It comes from The Atlantic, where Clive Crook its senior editor, yesterday took apart the recent spate of verdicts exonerating the Climategate scientists. For those who don’t know Clive Crook, he’s one of the world’s prominent journalists having been, among other things, a 20-year veteran at The Economist, 11 of them as its deputy editor. Oh, and Crook is also a long-standing believer in the view that climate change represents a threat to humanity.

Abstract: This paper introduces criticism elimination, a type of information removal leading to a framing effect that impairs Wikipedia‟s delivery of a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and ultimately facilitates a new form of gatekeeping with political science and information technology implications. This paper demonstrates a systematic use of criticism elimination and categorizes the editors responsible into four types. We show some types use criticism elimination to dominated and manipulated articles to advocate political and ideological agendas. We suggest mitigation approaches to criticism elimination. The research is interdisciplinary and based on empirical analysis of the public edit histories.

A panel criticizes the Climategate scientists for being defensive and unhelpful, for withholding data, for providing misleading information, for having been “blinded … to the possibility of merit” in the claims of their critics.

Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

Over at the National Post, last week was "Junk Science Week," during which Post writers like Peter Foster and Lawrence Solomon identify and denounce widely publicized "science" that is, in reality, shoddy nonsense. The editors also give a sardonic award -- the "Rubber Ducky" -- "to recognize the scientists, NGOs, activists, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who each year advance the principles of junk science."

Stanford University’s Jon A Krosnick, a communications guru and advisor to the global warming camp, scored a coup in a New York Times oped last week that discredits polls by firms such as Gallup and Pew Research Center. The highly cited oped, entitled “The Climate Majority,” claims that these pollsters and others have it backwards and that “huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.”

But the pollsters say otherwise. 

To manage a crisis well, you need good public relations. Enter the PR gurus and their revelation "Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming." The authors of "Climate Cover-Up" and the associated website DeSmogBlog.com do some crusading of their own for the cause of the faith.

Climate scientists play a good game of whack-a-mole.

That's why I think "climategate" was such a happy event for the global warming deniers.

The term for the hacked emails from some of the world's top climate change scientists, it supposedly showed that these UN researchers were politically driven, worried about how their research would play out on the public stage. They were not dispassionate scientists, their critics said. They were simply advocates.

The concept of manmade global warming - the idea that global temperature is increasing as a result of the green house effect from pollutants like CO2 that come from the industrialization of society - has become widely known. But the basis for such conclusions is yet to be proven and the claim of a scientific consensus by those like Al Gore and Prime Minster Gordon Brown, is unequivocally wrong. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe and Lawrence Solomon of the National Post say the opinion is hardly unanimous, noting thousands of scientists that dissent from such a consensus.