Fire him, the warmists say
My recent column in The Daily Maverick on the scandal at the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unit, which calls anthropogenic global warming into question, elicited this published response. While I hope the final demand, that I be dismissed, was meant tongue-in-cheek, it is a particularly silly joke to make when one of the charges against the CRU scientists is that they got a critical editor at a peer-review journal fired. My reply appears below the letter, which attacks my column for “distortion and innuendo”.
I read about the hack a while before you wrote your article about it. It has definitely served to make me doubt what I’d been led to believe before regarding global warming.
I think a full, transparent and public investigation should be made and a public explanation be given.
If global warming is a myth, then many scientists must not only be fired, but jailed for colluding to deceive the public.
Also, in future, it should not be necessary to rely on hackers to bring us the truth. All research done with public money, must be publicly available. I can’t imagine the lack of procedures that allow public research to be kept under wraps. That makes no sense at all.
That’s the penalty for writing a weekly column published on a fixed day, I guess. The advantage is that I had a few days between the leak on Thursday and my deadline on Monday to digest a lot of the leaked information.
I agree on both counts. This calls for criminal prosecution, and the code and data must be open-sourced, as Eric S Raymond suggests here.
Here’s another look at the comments on the code, which suggests it is a complete mess. It’s not worth the “peer reviewed” paper it is written on, let alone cause to enact a massively expensive global treaty.