Climategate and Newsgate

Conrad Black: A teeming rain forest of irrelevant climate claims:

"As Lord Lawson wrote in his book, those worried about imminent environmental catastrophe, as compared, for examples, to nuclear terrorism or even large meteoric collisions, “need not worry about saving this planet. They are already living on another one … We appear to have entered a new age of unreason … It is from this, above all, that we really need to save the planet.”"

Small Dead Animals says

"Well, it finally happened. Much of Canadian media broke radio silence on Climategate today...

For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them.

It's a spin doctor's worst nightmare...

I don't think my friends in traditional news gathering truly appreciate what it is they've done. I don't believe they fully comprehend how gravely they have injured themselves, and how they're driving home the razor into an industry already struggling for survival with abbreviated, dismissive, misleading reports and "denier" and "conspiracy nut" slurs.

The bloggers tried to warn them. The opinion columnists tried to warn them, the talk hosts tried to warn them. Their readers, viewers and listeners tried to warn them."

Even the MSM can't blame the internet's superior speed for 10 days of delay. If it was a sports game they could have covered it overnight.

Found in the comment section of the SDA post. The Miss Marprelate Tracts is making no guarantee about the authenticity of said email, but it looks pretty good.

Thank you for your e-mail of November 28 addressed to Vince Carlin, CBC Ombudsman. Since CBC News falls in my remit, perhaps I can reply.

You wrote, in substance, to ask why CBC News had not carried a story concerning the thousands of e-mails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit that had recently ended up on the Internet.

I suppose the short answer is CBC News did carry the story. On CBC News.ca, it was posted on November 26 under the headline, “Hackers skewed climate-change emails: scientists”. I expect we will be carrying more stories about the stolen documents and the fallout from their publication in the days before the opening of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on December 7.

With the clearer vision afforded by hindsight, we should have noticed the story and picked it up sooner than we did, but its absence is certainly not evidence of partisanship or CBC “suppression” of the story.

To be fair, the story’s significance seemed only gradually to emerge. As I understand it hackers tried to post the stolen e-mails on a scientific website on November 17. By the weekend, climate change skeptics were analyzing and re-posting them, arguing that they demonstrated collusion among climate change researchers in an effort to overstate the case for global warming, a conclusion vigorously disputed by the scientists involved. The growing debate sparked wider attention the following week (I see The New York Times carried the story on November 21, the National Post on November 24, the Toronto Star on November 28 and The Globe and Mail on December 1).

As you might expect, CBC News editors are faced daily with choosing - from among the thousands available in Canada and around the world - the few dozen stories that they feel are the most significant and will be of the greatest interest to Canadians. It is a decision made all the more difficult by the limited resources and time available in our news programs and our Internet pages. Of course, we cannot include all, or even many, of the stories taking place around the country and the world, but thank you for drawing this one to our attention. We will continue to follow it.

Thank you again for your e-mail.

Finally, it is my responsibility to inform you that if you are not satisfied with this response, you may wish to submit the matter for review by the CBC Ombudsman. The Office of the Ombudsman, an independent and impartial body reporting directly to the President, is responsible for evaluating program compliance with the CBC's journalistic policies. The Ombudsman may be reached by mail at the address shown below, or by fax at (416) 205-2825, or by e-mail at ombudsman@cbc.ca

Sincerely,

Esther Enkin
Executive Editor
CBC News
Box 500, Station “A”,
Toronto, Ontario
M5W 1E6

Bolds are obviously mine.

Excusing themselves for not adequately covering the story because the competition did has got to be a MSM first.

Link to the non-partisan, "Hackers skewed climate-change emails: scientists"

Updates:

You just can't make some people happy. We got everyone writing to our offices, nagging us to death about "Why aren't you covering this?" and "What kind of biased propaganda organ is the CBC anyway?", so we cover the story. Now we've got all this mail about it was the wrong sort of coverage! Like this here letter from, what's his name? The Doggerel Party. Complaining that we were telling the public a pack of nonsense and ignoring the real issues at stake. What did he expect? Don't they realize that some of our CEOs have good money down at the bookie on the Liberals regaining power with the Greens as opposition? What were we supposed to do? Let the Cons (funny how Conservatives admit to being cons isn't it) win?

Elizabeth May, not only can she not get a seat, she cannot even manage to keep the allegiance of people interested enough in global warming to attend a debate. When the debate started 61% of the audience favoured her side. When it ended, only 53% did. And they barely even mentioned climategate. Terrence Corcoran aids in the demolition by skewering the pro-global warming arguments and wanting to know why there couldn't have been a fact checker to pop up and object every time they used a false proof. Just for the record, they also had to shut off May's mike at one point to get her to stop an attack.

Lorne Gunter thinks the story is very important. He also deals with why it is not being properly reported on by our Lords and Masters in MSM.

What is keeping this story from being reported is a mindset rather than a conspiracy. It is socially and intellectually easier to take the word of the pleasant, safe crowd claiming to be interested in saving the Earth. Standing with the skeptics is harder work, not to mention riskier.

To continue on my little National Post run here. An article about a French scientist who has come up with a somewhat different temperature graph from the prevailing model, and his difficulties in getting data. So much for well we must be right because everyone else agrees with us. How does that work when no one else can get their hands on the data?

Meanwhile:

Prof Jones said: ''What is most important is that CRU continues its world-leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible.

''After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the director's role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support.''

"My dog ate the data". Watts Up is pointing out an interesting connection between two things.
One, a sudden realization on the part of our climategate friends in September that the raw data had been deleted decades ago. After years of dreaming up excuses why no one could see it, as soon as excuses ran out the data turned out to have been missing all along.
Two, the fact that in the climategate emails they professed themselves willing to destroy the data rather than make it public.
His third point, or rather question, is to ask why no one is connecting the first two.

Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail has some invigoration prose. Climategate is "a scandal that has swept the world of climate science like a mighty hurricane". The hacked emails are "pretty damning" and " gives a pile of ammunition to those who believe global warming is a giant boondoggle." The article concludes:

"“What has been noticeably absent so far in the Climategate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigours of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking,” American climate scientist Judith Curry wrote. She figures the damage inflicted by this affair on the credibility of climate research “is likely to be significant.”

Academic spats, name-calling, data-massaging and cozy peer review by friends are not exactly rare in the world of science. You'll find them anywhere that careers, reputations and resources are on the line. The difference is we are not usually asked to wager billions on the findings. Given the stakes, it's hard not to conclude that climate science is too important to be left to scientists."

Gerald Warner of the Telegraph also heats it up.

Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been *******.

The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is “game-changer”. For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars.

Good Hunting my blog friends!