on-climate.com

From firedoglake

It should be bizarre, but is in fact grimly typical, how the whole phony “climate-gate-scandal” has played out so far. Hundreds of emails between climate scientists were hacked — stolen — from servers at East Anglia University. The stolen materials were then misrepresented, distorted, and lied about, and the scientists involved abused, insulted, and accused of everything from deliberate fraud to acting as the willing dupes of the shadowy liberal-fascist “global warming industry.”

The bizarre part is that the only people being asked to Seriously Question Their Motives and Practices, or who are facing scrutiny for what they did, are the climate scientists who just got robbed, even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they have actually done anything clearly unethical. (The worst bit is the suggestion as to deleting emails, something that everyone concedes is pretty bad and nobody is defending, though there’s no proof anything was ever deleted.) More important, nothing in all this nonsense even approaches a challenge to the science that shows the reality of global climate change, at least to a reasonable person.

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From Zachary Roth, TPM.

So, what to make of those emails, stolen from a top climate research center in Britain, that conservatives are excitedly touting to argue that the science of climate change is fatally flawed?

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger calls the episode “an epochal event” that shows “science is dying.” But underneath the bombast, the key question is whether the emails — hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), and indexed here — actually undermine the case, now settled, that man-made warming is happening. And despite the claims of the New York Post, among others, they don’t come close to doing so.

Exhibit A for conservatives has been the revelation in the emails that, back in the 1980s, CRU discarded a set of data on raw surface temperature. The Post argues that that means “it’s now impossible to check the CRU research,” and adds “So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science.”

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From Mark Hertsgaard, Vanity Fair.

You wouldn’t know it from the coverage in the mainstream media, but last week may go down as a turning point in the history of the climate crisis. After months of putting health care first, President Obama finally stepped up the plate and, amazingly, secured what has long been the Holy Grail of climate diplomacy: a U.S.-China climate deal. Speaking in Beijing on November 17 alongside Chinese president Hu Jintao, Obama said he hoped the U.S.-China accord would “rally the world” toward solutions at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen, December 7 to 18. After months of Obama’s aides lowering expectations for Copenhagen, and even suggesting that he would not attend the summit, the president signaled that climate change is a top priority and that he is prepared to spend real political capital to achieve a breakthrough, both in Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill.

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