The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.Given the state of the world economy, the climate for a radical reordering of world economies to show obeisance to Mother Gaia and line the pockets of the High Prophet Al Gore and the rest of the Climate-Industrial complex was already not good.
Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications.
"This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical."
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A partial review of the hacked material suggests there was an effort at East Anglia, which houses an important center of global climate research, to shut out dissenters and their points of view.
In the emails, which date to 1996, researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. repeatedly take issue with climate research at odds with their own findings. In some cases, they discuss ways to rebut what they call "disinformation" using new articles in scientific journals or popular Web sites.
The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with.
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In one email, Benjamin Santer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., wrote to the director of the climate-study center that he was "tempted to beat" up Mr. Michaels. Mr. Santer couldn't be reached for comment Sunday.
In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday.
The emails were published less than a month before the opening of a major climate-change summit in Copenhagen.
Now that we know that some of the leading "scientific" hacks are stifling dissent, well, I'm guessing people will be even less inclined to go back to living in caves to heal the earth.
Also, Bjorn Lomborg has the latest in his series of articles about practical solutions to environment-related problems in the world. This time he tackles the damage cyclones and hurricanes cause in the poor, coastal areas of the world.
