So the timing is either suspect or very carefully planned, but either way the morass that is Climategate was given a new lease of media fame this week with the release of a second round of emails further damaging the reputations of the climatocacy, the Universities of East Anglia and Penn State in particular and those in the media who were so obsequious for so long to the cadre of climate conspirators.
This is not a story that will blow over quickly nor easily. AGW hysteria is already on the wane. Politically, climate is no longer a sexy topic for upwardly mobile politicos. For the public, energy, and especially rising energy costs, has supplanted the nebulous possibility of climate change with an immediate policy concern that has tangible cost and lifestyle implications: windmills are done, dusted and stigmatized; solar has been Solyndra-ized and exposed as a fraudulent waste of taxpayers money, and; the opportunities afforded by shale gas will burn the last bridges of the limits crowd. Globally, poverty and political freedom, not weather, remain the main challenges facing humanity.
Climategate 2.0 will finally elevate the whole sorry debacle out of the confines of the climate wars and into a broader consideration of:
- the role of the academy in policy formulation
- peer to peer review as a logical alternative to the nepotism and expert politics inherent in the exclusivity of refereed journal peer review
- the changes needed for science to regain public trust as an honest broker
- the future of environmentalism
- creative empowerment in the implementation of sustainability as change
as might be expected, the plethora of indictment within Climategate2 has eviscerated the remaining shreds of credibility of many climate activists and revealed the personal doubts several had about the public mantra of alarmism and certainty.
Stupidly, some political activists insist on asserting what is now a very disgraced narrative. For this, they are being called into account. This example from Delingpole was too good to bypass:
- Have you noticed that whenever our beloved Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne speaks his lips never move, only his butt cheeks? It was the same again on BBC Question Time last night. "But Huhne, this is just arrant nonsense," you kept wanting to scream at the TV. "And either you know it's nonsense in which case you're a liar. Or you don't know it's nonsense, in which case you're more incredibly stupid, more badly informed and more ill-advised than any Minister of the Crown has any decency to be."
- Delingpole then goes on to present the much more polite but even more dismissive letter to Huhne from Lords Lawson and Turnbull.
