The Meaning of Climategate
By William Anderson
Published 12/08/00
Almost anyone who can read has heard about the "Climategate" scandal in which emails between the scientists that have been at the forefront of promoting the apocalyptic views of "climate change" were hacked and then made public. The snippets I have read confirm my worst fears, as we are seeing exactly what happens when the political process completely hijacks science.
As an Austrian economist, I don't worship at the feet of the "scientific community," in large part because the "scientific community" is able to engage in trickery but defend its actions in the name of "preserving science." However, because of my own experience in publishing papers in refereed journals and knowing the experiences of others, I can see what has been happening over the past decade in "climate science," and I can tell you that while it is not rigged, it is close to being so.
Modern science is all about receiving grants, and the biggest checkbooks are those wielded by governments, and governments expect certain results. For example, the government two decades ago funded research into the alleged "acid rain" problems and the researchers reached very different conclusions than what the U.S. Government, and especially Congress and the George H.W. Bush administration (and his William Reilly-led EPA) had wanted to see.
Acid rain, apparently, was not going to destroy U.S. forests, lakes, and rivers, and the government was ticked, really ticked. The EPA attempted to destroy the career of one scientist, Edward Krug, who had a paper in the prestigious Science in 1983 that demonstrated that lakes with high acidity were located in watersheds where the soil happened to be acidic. Furthermore, as Krug and other researchers noted, acid lakes existed in many places around the globe hundreds of years before "industrial society" became the norm.
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