“It is possible that some areas of climate science have become sclerotic … too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with … primitive cultures.”
– Mike Hulme, CRU climate scientist. Quoted in Fred Pearce, The Climate Files (below)
Fred Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010) remains the definitive account of one of the greatest scientific scandals of our time. The book’s self-described summary states:
…One of the world’s leading writers on climate change tells the inside story of the events leading up to the much-publicized theft of climate-change related emails. He explores the personalities involved, the feuds and disagreements at the heart of climate science, and the implications the scandal has for the future. In November 2009 it emerged that thousands of documents and emails had been stolen from one of the top climate science centers in the world.
[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend 11 years ago that the Climategate’s unsettling oeuvre was first being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]
“The conflict between the two ideas about how science should be conducted–a closed system dominated by gatekeepers, or a more chaotic but less hierarchical open system–is the dominant story of the [Climategate] emails over more than a decade.” – Fred Pearce, The Climate Files (2010), p. 13.
“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.
Climategate lives in infamy. Then, and now, it is a case study of agendas driving science rather than science driving agendas.
A decade ago, climate alarmists and friends (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…
“… knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.” – Erich Zimmermann (1951).
Thanksgiving 2020 presents an opportunity to step back and appreciate the driver of progress in the free economy: the liberated, liberating entrepreneur. The change-makers of the market drive the creation and usage of resources, as well documented by the oil and gas extraction revolution of the last decade or more.
Increasing “depletable” resources is a paradigmatic example of what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource,” human ingenuity. Resourceship is a term that the followers of Erich Zimmermann, from Stephen McDonald to Pierre Desrochers, have popularized to understand mineral development.
Salient quotations from seven sources follow: institutional economist Zimmermann; fellow institutionalists Wesley Mitchell and Tom DeGregori; political scientist David Osterfeld; economists Terry Anderson and Donald Leal; economist M.…