“Climate change” climbdown begins

While most of us in this neck of the blogosphere have been focused on the aftermath of the Virginia GOP sweep, the rest of the world is becoming engulfed by ClimateGate, i.e., the exposure of leading scientific proponents of “global warming” and “climate change” as data-fudging and dissent-supressing charlatans.

Yours truly mentioned it on the RWL blog, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what my Canadian friend Kate McMillan has put together at Small Dead Animals.

American MSM has, as one would expect, been almost completely silent (the New York Times, deliberately and shamefully so), but in Britain, one of the leading alarmists – George Monbiot of The Guardian – has posted a mea culpa(via Watts Up With That, emphasis in WUWT):

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

. . .

I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.

I should note that the original Guardian link is down as of 11:45 AM (I’ll put the link up if it starts working properly.

Of course, British newspapers have neither the illusion of “objectivity” or the pompous arrogance of their American counterparts.  Thus, no one in the British press would believe they could supress a story just by refusing to report on it.  Sadly, most American MSM outlets are clinging to this myth . . . all the more reason for the blogosphere.