Tweet

Great Richard Grave piece on Huffington Post points out the parallel’s between the curret “gate” - Climategate - and the original paranoid right wing break-in that gate rise to the unimaginative, but in this case appropriate suffix.

As Graves points out, Watergate showed the worst side of a paranoid right-wing group clinging desperately to power. They committed a quite famous break-in, got nothing useful for their troubles and then crashed historically trying to cover their tracks.

This “gate” began the same way. We can only hope it ends with similar calamity for the perpetrators.

Tweet

“It does not change the position of Canada”

Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice told the National Post that the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia would not change the position that Canada is taking to the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen this week.

“The science overall is relatively clear on all of this and as a conservationist and as a responsible environmental steward Canada wants to see carbon emissions reduced,” Prentice said.

Prentice and the Canadian government have been winning criticism lately for being neither preservationist nor environmentally responsible in the position that it brings to the climate conference. Canada has abrogated its Kyoto commitment, nominated an inadequate target for emission reductions and made no public plan to meet even that disappointing goal.

The minister also seems to show his hand in saying that the science behind climate change is only “relatively” clear - leaving the door ajar for those who continue to argue the contrary case.

But it has to be an optimistic sign that he would not choose, at this juncture, to use the emails as an excuse for Canada’s intransigence. You might even hope it presages a new and more responsible international position.

Tweet

How dare the world’s media fall into the trap set by contrarian propagandists without reading the whole set?

Canadian Green party leader Elizabeth May has done, here what most journalists have not: she read ALL the leaked emails and comments on the basis of primary sources.

Her conclusion? We’ve been had.

Read her whole analysis below:

Tweet

Ben Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has written a long, but very worthy letter, blasting the thieves who hacked into the East Anglia Univesity’s Climatic Research Unit and defending its erstwhile director, Dr. Phil Jones.

Santer, who has made a global reputation by “mining” historical climate data to advance scientific understanding, says that in the wake of the email thefts, a different kind of mining is currently underway - a form that isn’t interested in advancing science in the least.

“This form of mining seeks to find dirt - to skew true meaning, to distort, to misrepresent, to take out of context. It seeks to destroy the reputations of exceptional scientists - scientists like Professor Phil Jones.”

The full letter is reproduced below: