Moonbat media plays down CRU leak

Moonbat media

Of course we could rely on the lefty media, in thrall to the global warming bandwagon, to trivialise the significance of the leaked emails and documents.

The Guardian (UK) huffs and puffs and wheels out the “poor ikkle alarmists” routine:

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by ‘sceptics’. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about ‘sceptics’ who accuse them of fraud.

It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire. (source)

And in the same paper Michael Mann gets very hot under the collar:

Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: “I’m not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I’m hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows.” (source)

Good luck with that, Michael – you’ll be chasing about a billion people, then.

The BBC does a similar trick, with Roger Harrabin gushing sympathy for the poor wronged alarmists:

My contacts at the CRU tell me the e-mails are being taken out of context and insist they are part of the normal hurly-burly of conversations between scientists working on some of the most complicated questions of our times.

They ask how many of us would feel completely comfortable if our own inboxes were emptied out for the world to see. How much of what we had said to close colleagues in industry jargon would be liable to misinterpretation?

…

Some of the e-mails reveal the frustration and annoyance among mainstream climate researchers about the probings they face from critics who relentlessly question their methodology. (source)

Isn’t that what science is all about? Or are they so arrogant as to think they can’t ever be questioned?

Some of the warmist science blogs are trying their best to play it down too:

What’s interesting is how rapidly the climate denial blogosphere has latched onto this as proof that the entire climatology community are in on a scheme to defraud the world [and your point is? – Ed]. And why whoever the hackers are would think that this material was actually all that interesting in the first place. The hacking of the data is a worthwhile story, insofar as IT security goes, but the content is just plain banal. All we learn is that scientists are humans after all. (source)

Unfortunately the comments don’t quite swallow that:

Wow James. You skimmed 4000 documents in a couple hours and instantaneously declared there is no scandal. We’re all real surprised at your conclusion. Nice try.

Time for me to sing and you to admit full loss of credibility and find some other fake bulls#!t line of work.

FAIL!

Kevin Grandia over at the Huffington Post is a bit more subdued than normal, but still manages to defend the warmists:

I have been going through all the files today and I hate to disappoint but it just ain’t the scandal everyone wants it to be.

These emails are blissfully being spun by the climate contrarians as proof of some type of worldwide conspiracy by scientists to fake the climate change crisis. [and your point is? – Ed]

…

What people like [Michelle] Malkin and others don’t understand is that the evidence for climate change is based on decades of research that builds and builds into a solid foundation from which conclusions can be drawn.

It is not the house of cards they want us to think it is. And while these emails don’t look great, they are in no way “proof” that climate change is not happening and the grand conspiracy they think it is. (source)

All we can say is, we shall see.

And of course, there is, at the time of writing, nothing in the mainstream Australian media about this – what a surprise.