Climategate was a crime. Why? Because:
- someone hacked into computers and private emails;
- the hacked info was used to frame climate scientists by pulling and publishing quotes out of context and making the climate scientists look like they were saying something they weren’t and doing something wrong (over half a dozen independent investigations have found data were NOT manipulated and the science is as sound as ever).
Someone also committed a crime this year, as we found out this week on Valentine’s Day, by pretending to be a Heartland Institute board member in order to get board documents emailed to him or her and then sharing those with the public.
However, it’s pretty odd to see how the Heartland Institute framed the latter incident compared to how it framed the former (one which had much more severe consequences).
“Climategate”
Note that after at least 7 independent investigations, the conclusion is that about 15 years worth of emails show climate scientists have not fiddled with the data and been conducting junk science. Rather, after thorough and serious review, it’s clear that their work is as sound as ever, global warming and climate change are as big a threat as ever, and all the claims of manipulated data or bad science are completely false.
But long after these conclusions have been made, what is the Heartland Institute saying? Here’s a quote from its blog in November: “[climate scientists] who have now been exposed by Climategate of rigging data, hiding declines, and blacklisting peers who don’t toe the line of catastrophic orthodoxy.”
Um, what?! Exposed by who? No independent evaluation of the emails by scientific bodies have found or concluded any of this. Is the Heartland Institute so out of touch with reality?
Heartland Leak
Now, let’s see what the institute has to say about the recent leak:
“The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents.”
Hmm, the Heartland Institute did not wait in the case of “Climategate” and even once over half a dozen independent reviews were conducted, it continued (and continues) to misrepresent the emails of these climate scientists, misrepresent the science, and misrepresent the findings of independent evaluations by scientific institutions.
Going on:
“[H]onest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.”
Umm, are you kidding me? Three years of nonsense and praise for “Climategate” combined with the continual misrepresentation of what it actually was, and now the Heartland Institute wants to call in the referees and have us all sit peacefully in a thoughtful moment on how wrong it is to steal information and misrepresent people? You have to be kidding me!
Truthfully, the hypocrisy goes on and on, but I think I’ve had enough of it for today… on to something a little more enjoyable and uplifting!
Hypocrite image via shutterstock
