It reads like something from Shouts and Murmurs in The New Yorker:
If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.
If only all Nature editorials were this amusing. It ends with the same pompous reference to “science” as Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of Superfreakonomics:
The pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.
Thanks to Bruce Charlton.
More Here’s what James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard and President-elect of AAAS, has to say: “The content of a few personal emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.” He is ignoring the fact that the data has been revealed to be a huge mess.
There is a VERY easy way to avoid the “endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts,” don’t take government money that triggers the laws.
As a government employee of a large organization that looks a lot like the Army Corps of Engineers, who is used to being sued under the National Environmental Policy Act, and has had to produce emails for litigation, I have zero sympathy for this argument. It’s a fact, the People, through their Congressional representatives have spoken, deal with it.
Try your hand at suggesting economists have a pet project in all this too: Carbon Credit trading. I can’t seem to get any prominent economist blog to let my comments through. They get “moderated”.
This isn’t an “either or” question.
I strongly suspect that there is both climate trouble AND juicy embezzlement prospects (Carbon taxes and trade) from govts and traders.
We get the “best of both worlds”, isn’t that wonderful?