The search for the leaker of thousands of private emails, used to harass and impugn the reputation of the world’s top climatolohiusts, is narrowing down. Dare we dream a suspsct soon emerges to Ollie North fanfare levels? They seem to want to be caught, even leaving a taunting note in the database:

(SideneyHerald) — The stunt was enough to jump-start a police investigation that had long seemed dormant. In December, citing a request from British law enforcement, the US Justice Department asked that Automattic, the parent company of the blog host WordPress.com, preserve three days of digital logs for three blogs where the links to the latest emails first appeared.In a raid in Leeds, Britain, the police also confiscated laptops from the home of one blogger; he says the police have told him he is not a suspect.

Personally, I think all emails everywhere should be public. Total transparency, 100%, for everyone, serves both science and democracy best. I don’t write anything via email I’m the least bit worried about and just assume it’s all being read, at least by a machine looking for keywords anyway, if not an actual nosy person at the NSA or God knows where.

Note: BTW folks, I hope to get back to a more regular blogging schedule about the middle of this week. I work in tech support/customer service, it’s been brutal the last coule of weeks.

Police investigating serial hackers stealing and posting emails between climate researchers raided the home and confisctaed the computer of at least climate denier’s home this week: [Read more…]

Antarctica beckons, and on the other end of the earth, the island or continent or whatever we’re calling Greenland these days is rising, literally, thanks to global warming and a process called isostasy: [Read more…]

Chasing the know-nothing vote is apparently more important to Jon Huntsman than the integrity he once claimed to prize. Whereas before the former Utah Governor accepted the scientific consensus on climate change (And evolution), now he’s paying homage to the deniers by way of the long debunked CRU email hack:

(TPM) — “[T]here is — there are questions about the validity of the science, evidenced by one university over in Scotland recently,” Huntsman said, referring to the East Anglia University conspiracy that continues to fuel climate change skepticism. “I think the onus is on the scientific community to provide more in the way of information, to help clarify the situation.”

That’ll do pig, that’ll do.

Climate change is affecting the Arctic more than any place on earth and scientists now say that change may be irreversible, thanks to polar amplification, at least on human time-scales: [Read more…]

 

Great article, in Forbes of all places, about the latest hatchet job underway to portray climate scientists as evil cackling conspirators and the fossil fuel industry as feeble victims pilloried by infinitely powerful conspirators. I especially liked this part regarding FOI requests:

(Forbes) — First, FOI laws generally apply to official communication between government officials – not to private mails, and not to early drafts of research papers. That’s especially important to researchers, whose deepest fears involve publishing something that has a fundamental error in it – a fear that Wingnuts and, unfortunately, most journalists, seem immune to. They avoid this by first incubating ideas in private or in brainstorming sessions, then showing them to a few peers, testing them, refining them, and only then exposing them to the formal process of peer review. This is a grueling enough process without them having to justify their every utterance to some crackpot in the backwoods of Alabama who wants to talk about sunspots and the Apocalypse.

There are two climate change articles on Google news that caught my eye this morning, not just because of the titles, but because they’re juxtaposed in such a way that they inadvertantly illustrate the nature of the manufactured controversy better than a single article could. The first is called Climate change denial still runs strong in US and reviews the gulf between climate scientists and data, as illsutrated in the chart above, and public sentiment swayed by decades of misinformation spread in large part by the fossil fuel and energy indsutries. The second is a piece in the Daily Mail, naturally, trying to create a controversy over BBC executuves consulting with climate scientists about how to present the science and what the consequences of increasing global temperatures might be to culture in general. [Read more…]

Another batch of emails stolen from CRU has been released, but so far wingnut miners dredging for propaganda gold have been disappointed. Interest is already ebbing given the worst anyone can come up with so far are two out of context quotes below, neither of which are quite the smoking gun our usual suspects pine for: [Read more…]