There is a lot to read about Climategate, but none of it is in the Mainstream Media, with the exception of the Obama-Administration described “not real news” organization. That would be Fox News, which is covering the story.
The New York Times, in a stunning bit of hypocrisy, says they won’t report on Climategate because they didn’t like the way the information was discovered. To the NY TImes, the real story, if they ever deign to cover it, will be about the method in which the story was found, and the ends not justifying means.
There is a valid nit to pick over hacking and how it threatens not just programs but governments and individuals. But when an entire global movement, with accompanying financial interests and public bullying has been founded on “science” that is -at the very least- now confirmed to be “unsettled,” that information, regardless of how it was brought to light, needs to be reported on and investigated.
The NY Times’ primy distaste for the means of disclosure on this issue rather reminds me of a few years back, when someone leaded a memo from the Senate Intelligence Committee, whereby Sen. Jay Rockefeller suggested strategies to undermine “Bush’s war,” and the mainstream media ignored the content of the memo, while waxing indignant over the leak.
The standard media, it seems, only like leaks when they serve their own agendas, or take down their perceived enemies, foreign and domestic.
So, they don’t like this Climategate Story, not at all. Troubling links and trouble, trouble for the narrative.
Let me tell you why the press is blacking out the Climategate story:
In a nutshell, Climategate is a destroyer of world-views. As someone who has always maintained that the AGW hype was a matter of politicians and grifters seizing an opportunity to use unsettled science as a means of getting filthy rich while imposing harsh measures against human freedom, I am very familiar with the world-view of the alarmists. Whenever I wrote about the “hoo-hah” of AGW (and particularly of Al Gore’s stupendous, international fake-out and hypocrisy), my email would load up with people telling me I was “a stupid hick,” unschooled in scientific method (just like Al Gore) and therefore unentitled to opine on anything, so I should just “shut up” and “go away” and of course, I was a “nazi.” These emails occasionally ended with a diatribe against George W. Bush for good measure, and suggested he and I were both “criminals” against humanity. One person even accused me of being Barbara Bush, in disguise.
All of that was standard-issue hate, but nowhere as amusing as the occasional “Sinner, fry in hell” emails I will get from a Jack Chicker, so I stopped reading them long ago.
But I also had a journalist I admired, and who I still consider a friend, privately and gently suggest that if I doubted the truth about AGW then I was as deluded (and perhaps as evil) as a “holocaust denier.”
Yes. The left went that far. The press went that far. They embraced this unsettled science, this unproven theory, with a fervor of moral righteousness; to dispute AGW was to be a bad and stupid person, even if were a dissenting scientist.
To question the point of “environmentally sound” lightbulbs that give bad light and create a dangerous and toxic risk when they break was to “not get the point,” which was that the planet was “dying” thanks to Hanukkah candles and incandescent lightbulbs.
To suggest that large-numbers of privileged people flying scores of private planes to exotic locals, gorging themselves on fine fare while deciding how the common folk ought to live, in order to “save” the planet from AGW was bizarre, wasteful and hypocritical in an era of video-conferencing, was to be sniffed at as “insipid.” Didn’t one understand the power of the Gore Indulgence carbon-offset? Just pay some money to the man with the absolute moral authority on all things green, and your sins are covered. Somewhere, a tree is planted.
The scam of AGW was permitted to gain the foothold it did, because of George W. Bush.
It’s Bush’s fault: if Bush had not fought back when CBS News called Florida for Al Gore before polls in the panhandle had closed, if Bush had not taken Gore’s selective re-count to the Supreme Court, if Bush had just taken those hanging chads like a man and allowed Al Gore to ascend to the presidency (as he’d been groomed to do before he sighed and fumed his way through debates, put his common sense into a lockbox and stumbled into the Buddhist convent, discovering that there were “no controlling legal authority,”) whether the Vice-President actually won or not (the NY Times eventually admitted “not”) then Al Gore would not have had to seek redemption and his fortune in climate hucksterism, and the left would not have had to over-indulge him in it, overcompensating in order to “kick Bush in the leg.”
That’s basically it. The AGW/Climate Change question became a rigorous boondoggle that got out of control not because the scientist who first suggested a connection between human carbon emission and a change in climate were bad people, or that the question was not worth asking, but because bad people then took the uncertain hypothesis, put it on media-fueled steroids, demonized anyone who disagreed with them, made it political -so much so that even the scientists got caught up in the good/bad, smart/stupid, Gore/Bush, Left/Right identifiers- and found real power there; they allowed the AGW movement to become the dubious centering pole upholding the giant circus tent of their worldviews.
As such, it is not permitted to be shaken. Shake the centering pole, and everything could come tumbling down: Oh. My. Gawd! If the Gore-doubters were right about this, what else might they be right about? And if they’re all stupid, and I’m smart, but they’re right and I’m wrong . . .
Implosion.
If the true-believers of AGW got this wrong, and they’d attached it to all of their politics, all of their hate, all of their superiority, then everything is in a free-fall.
And this is why the mainstream media cannot possibly report on Climategate until they have an acceptable counter-narrative that they can haul out in order to either debunk the story or soften its edges, even as they break the news.
The press, who spent a huge portion of their credibility convincing America that President Bush was a “liar” and a “power-abuser” and an “arrogant chump who made the world (read Chirac and Schroeder) hate us” and then spent the balance of their capital carrying into office a man whose every utterance comes with an expiration date, who seems to have very quickly abused his power and has treated our traditional allies (who were partnering well with the United States from 2004-on) with contempt or disinterest. The press really cannot afford to admit that almost nothing they have said in the past 9 years has escaped ideological or political framing to suit their agenda. Implode, they will.
So the story must not be told, until it can be told from their self-protective angle which is undoubtedly under development as you read this.
This reminds me of Jon Stewart, on the Daily Show, back when Iraq had its first successful election -when even the press could not snarl too much at the pictures of women in hijab pointing their purple fingers in the air as they grinned. “What if Bush was right,” Stewart mused, with a horrified expression.
“What if Bush – the president, ours – has been right about [Iraq] all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may – and, again, I don’t know if I can physically do this – implode.”
There is an anvil-heavy irony to all of this. Part of the smart/stupid, left/right narrative was built on the fantastic strawman that the AGW-doubters on the right were “enemies of science,” that first they were not allowing science to use human embryos for experimentation, and now they were daring to doubt the most imperative scientific advice in the history of mankind.
But if the excesses of the weather-sciences are about be discredited to the degree that -as some worry- may “bring all science into dispute”, then that harm comes not from the right, who simply dared to question, but solely from the left, who refused to permit questions, openness, transparency.
Well, let’s get to the bottom of all of this, and then let us try -if it is possible, any longer- to become a saner world, say I.
Let Al Gore keep his ill-gotten booty and his stupid Academy Award and his worthless Nobel Peace Prize, and let him go away, somewhere, to an abode that is at least as “green” as President Bush’s despised ranch in Texas.
Let people once more get on a commercial air flight without being pestered about how they are guilty of earth-murder.
Let’s name the grifters, disassemble the dubious global policies that have been hovering for landing in Copenhagen, admit that the greatest threat to the world and its people is predicated on bombs and hate rather than some feckless, unprovable idea, and then let’s prepare for the cold, cold winter with some good old-fashioned oil-drilling while we finally begin to debate a nuclear future.
In truth, I just want my incandescent lightbulbs back, please.
Related:
PJM -Martin: Climategate violates social contract of science
PJM- Murray: 3 Things You Must Know about Climategate
Monbiot: AGW Rigged?
RCP: The Fix is In
CBS: looking into the leak, natch
Melanie Phillips: Green Totalitarianism
Andrew Bolt: The Global Conspiracy
James Delingpole: The Great British Climate Fraud
Obama’s Science Czar: Involved in Climategate?
True Believer: “Shaken” by Climategate
Because problems, real, or as in this case, imagined, provide a backdrop for a liberal/socialist “cure” which provides them eternal power because the problem in never cured. It can’t be: no “problem”, no need for the liberal “blight in shining government armor” to fix it.
When one looks at the lousy schools and continued poverty, particularly for minorities, in deep blue states like Massachusetts and Connecticut, one must certainly ask where the liberal “utopia” is, i.e., how come liberals can’t ever seem to fix the problem?
The Story of Cap and Trade is Told on December 1st (Coming to a School Near You)
E-Mails Of Climate Researchers Buttress Case Of Warming Fraud
Global Warming With the Lid Off [WSJ on Climategate]