Rex Murphy on Climategate - Corruption is No Joke At All

As a researcher, I was interested in this "take" on the role of science in society: "humble servants of the facts of the case". In this overview of "Climategate", Canada's Rex Murphy reminds us that the science on climate change is anything but "settled". A few quotes:

• Climate science and global warming advocacy have become so entwined, so meshed into a mutant creature, that separating alarmism from investigation, ideology from science, agenda from empirical study, is well nigh impossible.
  
• Climategate is evidence that the science has gone to bed with advocacy and both have had a very good time.
  
• That the neutrality, openness and absolute disinterest that is the hallmark of all honest scientific endeavour has been abandoned to an atmosphere and dynamic not superior to the partisan caterwauls of a sub-average question period.
• The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.
  

According to Murphy, climate science = climate politics, at least in part. Read the emails, Rex challenges the viewer, and you will never look at climate science the same way again.

UPDATE: There is a great article by Mark Steyn in the Dakota Beacon, entitled "Climate science and the peer-review consensus forgery"

A few favorite quotes:
- if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process.

- Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That's "peer review", climate-style.

- Andrew Revkin... served Mann's words up to impressionable readers of The New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of "saving the planet" from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn has written another good essay on climategate in Macleans, entitled "The Science of Global Warming: These leaked documents reveal the greatest scientific scandal of our times—and a tragedy"

Key Points:
1. The Settled Scientists have wholly corrupted the process of “peer review.”
2. The Settled Scientists have refused to comply with Freedom of Information requests by (illegally) deleting relevant documents.
3. The Settled Scientists have attempted to (in the words of one email) “hide the decline”—that’s to say, obscure the awkward fact that “global warming” stopped over a decade ago.
4. The Settled Scientists have tortured the data into compliance with political requirements.

"Science is never “settled,” and certainly not on the basis of predictive models. And any scientist who says it is is no longer a scientist. And the dismissal of “skeptics” throughout the Jones/Mann correspondence is most revealing: a real scientist is always a skeptic."

UPDATE: Editorial in Nature, "Climatologists Under Pressure", aside from the name calling, "denialists", which is unworthy of a scientific publication, one quote stuck out in particular: "global warming is real... human activities are almost certainly the cause". Almost certainly? Is that like "almost pregnant?" For shame. The editor focuses on slandering critics rather than bringing the science to the forefront. For shame in a peer-reviewed publication that toots its horn as the "world's most highly cited interdisciplinary science journal". "Nature" has betrayed its nature.