Radley Balko interviewed in the Economist.
November 2009 Archives
AGW apologist George Marshall writing in the Guardian:
The recent hacking of the servers of the University of East Anglia can only be understood within this landscape of competing appeals to public trust. The denial industry (and hordes of climate nerds) has trawled through these emails and found sentences which, when removed from context, support their storyline that climate science is being deliberately distorted and exaggerated for a mixed bag of self-interested and politicised ends.
But you could find anything in here. I looked and found lots of references to lunch and fun, 94 to hate, 31 to love. Generally, though, the emails are extremely focused, technical, and, dare I say it, really dull. As noted on realclimate.org, the emails contain "no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords."
But this is hardly the point. This is an orchestrated smear campaign and does not require balance or context. The speed with which the emails have been cut apart and fed into existing storylines is remarkable. At the very least the UEA email campaign is an application of dirty political tactics to climate change campaigning.
So, nothing to see here then. Compare that to Charlie Martin's concise points (do read his piece to find links to the incriminating emails):
If we do accept them as authentic, though, they truly are incendiary. They appear to reveal not one, not two, but three real scandals, of increasing importance.
The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to "discipline" scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.
The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and "massaged" the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.
The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is "conspired") to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.
The title of an op-ed by Hannah Krening of Front Range Objectivism. I'll quote some bits:
That's it, there's no getting by those problems if government manages health care. Too bad this piece was published on-line only.If government owns and pays for my health care, they own my body just as a farmer owns his cow. If government is paying, it will decide what kind of care I get and when I will get it. Under "free health care for all," access will diminish as lines lengthen, and my care may not be there when I really need it.
Government will consider the needs of others (those with pull, for instance) against mine. I will be unable to make life and death decisions on my own; instead I will have to plead my case to a government functionary.
[...]The problem is that both sides share the premise that health care is a right. But rights are not claims to things, like a car, food or an appendectomy. Rights are the freedom to act to gain these things, while respecting the rights of others. Over the past several decades, the accepted definition of rights has become corrupted to mean claims to things.
Government health care proponents maintain that a benevolent government will somehow provide these claims to everybody. But this is impossible; there is no such thing as a free lunch. And government does not produce; it can only manage others who do. Someone will be forced to satisfy all claims.
