Good summary piece on "Climategate"

Probably you Random Jottings people are already up to speed on this, but here's a clear summary to pass on to those still in the dark.

Iain Murray, Pajamas Media — Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate:

...They're calling it "Climategate." The scandal that the suffix —gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade or so revealed by a thousand or so emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists released following a leak from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

This may seem obscure, but the science involved is being used to justify the diversion of literally trillions of dollars of the world's wealth in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. The CRU is the Pentagon of global warming science, and these documents are its Pentagon Papers.

Here are three things everyone should know about the Climategate Papers. Links are provided so that the full context of every quote can be seen by anyone interested....

One of the interesting things about this is that it's not the kind of conspiracy where a cabal manipulates things in darkness. Megan McArdle wrote today: "I have so far seen no evidence of the kind of grand conspiracy that some critics have charged." She misses the essence of the thing. It's like high school, where everybody knows who's "in" and who's "out." And most kids would KILL to be in the "in crowd." No one has to be "recruited" into that rat-race. It's a conspiracy with no conspirators. For instance, there is one e-mail in the pile that says something like: "those people will know what to say without being prompted."

It's similar to how no one among the press and the liberal public needed to be prompted to start referring to teachers as some sort of precious national treasures (a silly idea; a good teacher IS a treasure, but most of them are mediocrities.) And sending them up in space shuttles, etc. The corrupt teacher's unions own the Democrat Party, so once conservatives started talking about privatizing schools, the faithful rallied round. They probably weren't even lying; they believe what the crowd believes...

Most people today have the morals of high schoolers. I bet Phil Jones and the other Climate-gaters could give speeches to young people explaining how science works because of skeptics, and peer-review, and open-ness........ without feeling any cognitive dissonance whatsoever! Just like teenagers might lie and cheat to get into the "in crowd," and not even connect that with "being dishonest."