Climategate: Which part of 'over' don't these people understand?

By James Delingpole
The Telegraph
Dec. 03, 2009

Some people still don’t get Climategate.

The main lesson – according to today’s Guardian – is that ‘climate scientists’ have done nothing actually wrong but that in future they should improve their cover-up skills just in case:

But like politicians before them, climate scientists are learning the hard way that sticking to the rules is not enough – they must also to be seen to be sticking to them.

And the other lesson, apparently, is that ‘deniers’ who write stories about such things are just stupid, ignorant scuzzballs:

For one thing, as well as the proper scepticism of the inquisitive mind, which all scientists face, they must tackle the talk-show brand of bastardised scepticism that is borne [sic] of wilful ignorance.

Meanwhile, today’s Times – the paper which boasts it has more environmental correspondents than any other publication: gotta use them somehow, I suppose – prints a special, glossy, Copenhagen-themed supplement about global ecodoom. On the cover there’s a picture of a pretty clownfish nestling amid an anemone. The coverline shouts:

“Losing Nemo: Is it too late to save the ocean?”

Inside “11 Climate Change experts” are asked to name reasons to be cheerful about the “post-Copenhagen world”.

Ed Miliband, British Secretary of State For Energy and Climate Change:

“I think it’s a question of political will, of mobilising the public.”

John Sauven, Executive director of Greenpeace:

“I find it very empowering that you can now have solar panels on your roof and generate hot water from the sun..”

Franny Armstrong (director of the most embarrassingly bad eco-doom movie in the history of cinema The Age Of Stupid):

“Personally I’m relieved that it turns out our generation has something extremely important to do.”

Elsewhere in the supplement, another writer wonders why on earth it can be we’re so reluctant to stop taking flights, turn down our heating and generally try to make our lives more primitive and miserable. Her conclusion? Because of our sense of powerlessness. The threat of climate change is so great, apparently, that rather than deal it we retreat into denial mode.

“When we can’t actually remove the source of our fear, we tend to adapt psychologically by adopting a range of defence mechanisms,” explains Tom Crompton, “change strategist” for the WWF.

In other words not believing in ManBearPig is psychopathology rather than rationalism.

Meanwhile at Telegraph blogs, the site that popularised the word Climategate – 25 million Google hits so far – there are those who just can’t see what the fuss is about. Hey, Climategate is just some wacko distraction talked up some guy who didn’t even read Zoology like George Monbiot.

(Don’t forget I’m debating Monbiot tonight 6.30 in London. Please come and give your support. I’ll be so much better if I’m playing to a friendly crowd – here are the details)

So here, very, very simply, is a quick idiot’s guide to why Climategate does matter.

1. A bunch of climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have been caught out cheating. They distorted evidence, hid or lost inconvenient raw data, manipulated the science towards a particular end, and set out to silence hard-working, decent, honest scientists who disagreed with them.

2. Those climate scientists aren’t just any old bunch of scientists. They work at the very heart of the IPCC process. They – and their friends: for this is a small and tight cabal, comprising around 43 scientists – are the ‘lead authors’ on the IPCC’s reports. They also supply the most important of the four data records used by the IPCC. They are the people telling our political leaders that the world is suffering from catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming – caused largely by the growth in CO2 emissions – and that urgent action needs to be taken to prevent it.

3. According to one estimate – by the International Energy Agency – the global cost of dealing with AGW will be $45 trillion (that’s 2/3 of the world’s current entire economic). This will mean our energy bills will rise by perhaps a factor of ten; that we will be subject to more and more pettifogging rules on what kind of lightbulbs we use and how we dispose of our trash – perhaps even how often we’re allowed to fly; it will mean governance by unelected “experts” and technocrats from the UN; it will cripple industry; it will mean higher taxes; it will take money from the middle classes in the Western world and hand them over in the form of “compensation” to kleptocrat dictators in the Third World; it will almost certainly send the global economy diving into a double dip depression. We are, in other words, about to be presented with the biggest bill in the history of mankind.

4. Given what we now know about the reliability of 2 and the basis of 1, are we really sure that with 3 we’re getting our money’s worth?