Climategate: the official cover-up continues

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: February 12th, 2010

If there’s one thing that stinks even more than Climategate, it’s the attempts we’re seeing everywhere from the IPCC and Penn State University to the BBC to pretend that nothing seriously bad has happened, that “the science” is still “settled”, and that it’s perfectly OK for the authorities go on throwing loads more of our money at a problem that doesn’t exist.
The latest example of this noisome phenomenon is Sir Muir Russell’s official whitewash – sorry “independent inquiry”  into the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) scandal.
The inquiry has not even begun and already it has told its first blatant lie – seen here on its official website.

Do any of the Review team members have a predetermined view on climate change and climate science?
No.  Members of the research team come from a variety of scientific backgrounds. They were selected on the basis they have no prejudicial interest in climate change and climate science and for the contribution they can make to the issues the Review is looking at.

By what bizarre logic, then, did Sir Muir think it a good idea to appoint to his panel the editor of Nature, Dr Philip Campbell? Dr Campbell is hardly neutral: his magazine has for years been arguing aggressively in favour of the AGW, and which published this editorial in the wake of Climategate:

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ’smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

Dr Campbell has since resigned his post – and rightly so, as the Global Warming Policy Foundation makes clear. But are we to feel any more confident about the alleged neutrality of another of Sir Muir’s appointments, Professor Geoffrey Boulton?
Bishop Hill certainly doesn’t think so. He notes that Professor Boulton….

• spent 18 years at the school of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia
• works in an office almost next door to a member of the Hockey Team
• says the argument over climate change is over
• tours the country lecturing on the dangers of climate change
• believes the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2050
• signed up to a statement supporting the consensus in the wake of Climategate, which spoke of scientists adhering to the highest standards of integrity
• could fairly be described as a global warming doommonger
• is quite happy to discuss “denial” in the context of the climate debate.

You wonder, if Sir Muir really is that determined to keep his inquiry totally unbiased, independent, above-board and scrupulously neutral why he just doesn’t go the whole hog and appoint Al Gore, James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri. I doubt the conclusions they’d reach would be any different.

Tags: Climategate, Geoffrey Boulton, Muir Russell, whitewash.

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