The more worrying part of the debate is the tendency for warmists to obfuscate, shrilly denounce opposing views, and outright misrepresent and distort evidence. The latest trove of leaked emails reinforces these worries. The emails show some of the leading climate scientists scheming revenge against critics and deliberately hiding data from public view. James Delingpole has been on top of things and sums it up:
If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones's infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to "hide the decline," deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists' preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?
This is the real significance of the climategate emails. They show that major scientists who inform the IPCC can't be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism. This, in turn, has very worrying implications for the major international policy decisions adopted on the basis of their research.
