Rapidly Melting Credibility

Ben Lieberman / February 01, 2010

The Washington Post asks: “Recently, a U.N. scientific report was found to have included a false conclusion about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. That followed the release of stolen e-mails last year, which showed climate scientists commiserating over problems with their data. Is there a broader meaning in these two incidents, and should they cause the public to be more skeptical about the underlying science of climate change?”

You can’t call them isolated incidents now that they are coming in droves.

It is clear that global warming science has been hijacked by a subset of researchers who have crossed the line into advocacy and alarmism. The cache of climategate e-mails alone reveals a number of scandals – key researchers and institutions manipulating temperature data to gin up a bigger warming trend, refusing to allow independent researchers to see the raw data, and strategizing to keep skeptical views out of the scientific literature and official reports. Climategate is just beginning to unfold. (more…)