Slowly but surely the mainstream media is being forced to cover the leaked emails from the Hadley CRU and the ramifications therein.
Some good examples from the National Post are here, here and here.
Its way too soon to see if the story has legs but the viral nature of its extensive coverage on the Internet suggests that it might. Why does it matter? It matters because the story has yet to emerge from underneath the allegations and smears that warmists have thrown up as an initial knee-jerk response. Steadily, however, the tide of comments is turning. The realists are not the loony posters any more. Rather they now represent the voice of quite reason and the shrillness is entirely within the die-hard alarmists going the seven stages of AGW death: shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression and acceptance.
Somewhere around the guilt and anger phase, some of the key players will either resign or be encouraged to take early retirement -- right now shock and denial are common, with the last chance hope that the bargaining at Copenhagen will somehow yet pull a rabbit from out of the climate change looking glass.
The news that many world leaders will still attend the Copenhagen talks is seen a life raft for those wanting to jump from the AGW ship. Conversely, the Copenhagen talks can be viewed as the meeting where world leaders collude, sorry -- reach "consensus" -- on the new language to frame their social engineering efforts now that AGW has morphed into climate change and added the moniker "discredited".
Look back at the sixties Rachel Carson inspired framing for environmentalism: pollution became limits, became sustainability, became precautionary principle, became global warming, became climate change. With the events of the past few days, it is expedient to morph from climate change and re-frame the dominant environmental ideology as "stewardship". Same stuff, new packaging: recycle, re-use and reduce. Don't think of anything new, just re-use the existing ideas, recycle the existing constructs and reduce everything to a false moral dichotomy of good (conformity to the dogma) versus evil (non-conformists, individuals, realists, skeptics, deniers...people we don't like, won't let play with our ball).
Alarmism is the basic currency. Chicken Little is employed as chief media consultant and the framing of the problem is adjusted decade by decade but the underlying concepts and defining constructs are not measurably altered, extended nor deepened in sophistication. The ideology is enforced by dogma that the data do not substantiate and each phase of the indoctrination is revealed by the iconoclast who dares question the hegemony of axiomatic assertion: first Julian Simon, then Bjorn Lomborg and now, Steve McIntyre.
But then it only takes one person to identify the truth. Its up to the rest of us to wake up and recognize it and then be empowered to overcome the oppressive forces of authoritarianism in politics, in science and within civil society.
The real shock for many greens, is to discover that far from being the agents of change, they are the forces of oppression. Human beings are not a cancer on the planet. But authoritarianism, in whatever guise it takes, is a cancer on society.
