Global Warming E-mails Rock Scientific Community

Campaign to Suppress Dissent in Climate Change Issue Revealed

Controversy is swirling about the infamous global warming emails that were hacked from the computer at major global-warming advocacy center in the UK and then distributed on the Internet. Accusations of fraud have ensued.

The emails and other documents, which were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K., suggests that there is a systematic campaign ongoing to exclude from scientific journals opinions that maintain that human caused global warming does not exist.

"In the emails, which date to 1996, researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. repeatedly take issue with climate research at odds with their own findings. In some cases, they discuss ways to rebut what they call "disinformation" using new articles in scientific journals or popular Web sites.

"The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with."

There are also references to attempts to delete data that does not support human caused global warming.

This is not, needless to say, the behavior of scientists who are interested in free, unfettered inquiry and the pursuit of scientific truth no matter where it leads. This is more like the behavior of issue advocates, advancing one point of view and attacking opposing points of view, regardless of the facts.

The publication of the hacked emails has caused a scandal in the scientific community. The revelation of what amounts to scientific fraud has occurred against a backdrop of rising skepticism about human caused global warming, not only among scientists and policy makers, but among the public at large. The climate change conference in Copenhagen has all but collapsed due to concerns by some countries of the draconian costs of dealing with a climate change crisis that may or may not actually exist.