Why should "Climategate" come as a surprise?

[Monkeyleg]

The mainstream media is now covering the Climategate story, although they're doing their best to cover for the charlatans who cooked the numbers. It only took weeks of stories on the internet and on conservative programming to get the MSM editors to pull their blankets off the story.

I'm a bit surprised that there's a controversy over scientists with a liberal agenda fudging numbers. We've seen it before, especially those of us who've been following gun politics. We had Kellerman use selective samples to arrive at the "43 times more likely" figure for shootings, not to mention an endless stream of massaged numbers coming from the Violence Policy Center.

Anyone who took but a few minutes to look at VPC numbers could see the fraud, yet the media reported them as fact.

Everybody knows by now that there are 47 million people in this country without health care. That is gospel. Anyone who's been paying attention knows the number is a fabrication. Even the Obama administration had to revise the number down when the issue of illegal aliens became part of the health care debate.

When the media hasn't been reporting junk science as fact, it's been making its own. Take, for example, the NBC Dateline story in which the gas tank of a pickup truck was rigged to explode for the cameras to demonstrate the dangers of the vehicle.

What sort of science was used to convince the government to mandate that we burn food (corn) in our vehicles, when doing so costs the consumer more, does nothing to reduce pollution, and reduces the amount of food available for export to countries where people are starving?

Which number-crunchers-for-hire did we pay with our tax dollars to get us to accept a ban on any light bulbs except those containing mercury (for our own good, of course)?

When did the acceptance of junk science on behalf of liberal causes start? Was it with Ralph Nader, who parlayed a book blasting the Chevrolet Corvair into a lucrative career as an expert on...what?

It seems to me that we've been fed years of junk science in the name of the public good, all the while hurting us physically or financially, but making many people wealthy, with Al Gore being the most recent conspicuous example.

[Jamisjockey]

Green is the new red.  Once they can force us into very specific and predictable consuming habits the left controls the economy.  With the economy, the country.  "Transformation", as BHO called it.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

nader is a nut but lucrative?  maybe  take a look
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/061800-01.htm

[grampster]

2010

[Standing Wolf]

I'm a bit surprised that there's a controversy over scientists with a liberal agenda fudging numbers. We've seen it before, especially those of us who've been following gun politics. We had Kellerman use selective samples to arrive at the "43 times more likely" figure for shootings, not to mention an endless stream of massaged numbers coming from the Violence Policy Center.

I discovered a weird phenomenon as a lowly advertising copywriter in the early 1980s: numbers tend to be more persuasive than words. I did A-B split tests with direct mail pieces, whose results are relatively easy to measure. I found noticeably better response to pieces with charts, graphs, and numeric assertions than otherwise identical pieces without those. The appearance of scientific-looking "proof" packs a wallop.

In case you're curious, A-B split tests between copywriting styles consistently showed people responded better to traditional writing, usage, grammar, and punctuation than loose. I was amazed.

Within my lifetime, (I'm now one and sixty,) I've seen science transformed from a serious enterprise with unquestionable ethical standards into yet one more tool in the hucksters' tool box. I know a physicist and a chemist who still do serious science and mathematics, so I'm not sure science as a whole has been devalued like the Weimar Reichsmark, but am very sure much of what's passed off as "science" is plain old-fashioned fraud—unless I mean "plain new-fashioned fraud."

Try this on for size: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html

[Ben]

Within my lifetime, (I'm now one and sixty,) I've seen science transformed from a serious enterprise with unquestionable ethical standards into yet one more tool in the hucksters' tool box. I know a physicist and a chemist who still do serious science and mathematics, so I'm not sure science as a whole has been devalued like the Weimar Reichsmark, but am very sure much of what's passed off as "science" is plain old-fashioned fraud—unless I mean "plain new-fashioned fraud."

You might be surprised that even though the deputy undersecretary of a federal scientific agency publicly states that, "the science is settled", that a good number of the scientists working for that agency disagree.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

and a whole bunch of retired scientists are incredulous

[RocketMan]

The following clips of a BBC Newsnight interview are interesting and entertaining.  Of course they show the expected positive bias the BBC has for AGW in the setup to the interview.
One of the two interviewed, Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia, does a masterful but completely expected job of spinning the Climategate story as much ado about nothing.  His attempts to explain away the cooking of the numbers is very entertaining.
His final comment at the end of part two directed at the other person interviewed, Marc Morano, a former communications director of the U.S. Senate Environment Committee, accurately shows the mindset, in my opinion, of the AGW religionists toward those that don't believe as they do.

Interview Part 1 7:15 long.

Interview Part 2 3:36 long.

[HankB]

The following clips of a BBC Newsnight interview are interesting and entertaining. 

I watched both clips - the BBC moderator clearly gave Watson more of a forum than his opponent.

I noticed that Watson's argument took a form that I've come to expect from those on the left - accuse your opponents of the behavior YOUR side is engaging in.

[coppertales]

Any program along these lines that is pushed hard by a politician is suspect.  Follow the money and the truth will prevail......chris3

[stevelyn]

Why should "Climategate" come as a surprise?

I didn't find it surprising at all. As a matter of fact, I suspected it all along and the release of the e-mails and contrived data merely confirm my original suspicions.

All anyone had to do was look at the list of the usual leftist suspects trying to sell us the bill of goods of global warming and it would have become apparent that they were perptrating a fraud.

[brimic]

To the left, the ends always justifies the means, whether it means destroying societies or making millions of 'non-believers' disappear.

[Scout26]

You dare question the work of the State Science Institute and Dr. Robert Stadler ??