“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.” (- Michael Mann, below)

The futile, wasteful anti-CO2 crusade is in its 37th year, dating from the hot, dry summer of 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm before U.S. lawmakers, led by Al Gore.

Last week, the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) ended with acrimony over an unenforceable agreement pledging to transfer wealth to developing (Statist) countries for “clean” energy development.

CO2 emissions cuts? With almost all major emitters well beyond the targets set in the 2015 Paris Accord, the (also) unenforceable agreement is losing more and more every day as self-interest swamps aspirations. The recipient welfare states described COP29 as “chaotic,” “complete failure,” “optical illusion,” “stage managed,” and “paltry.”…

“Gaygate 2023 and Climategate 2009 reinforce each other. So when will basic honesty and academic standards return to academia? To climate science?”

It’s a whitewash–again. The plagiarism (and data falsification?) of Harvard president Claudine Gay brings to mind the similar exposé of the Climategate emails, whose words, sentences, and paragraphs had to be swept under the rug back in 2009/2010 by an embarrassed establishment protecting its own. [1]

Wiki’s whitewash, for example, brought attention to the source (“denialists”) and then misrepresented the importance of the exposé.

The story was first broken by climate-change denialists, who argued that the emails showed that global warming was a scientific conspiracy and that scientists manipulated climate data and attempted to suppress critics. The CRU [Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia] rejected this, saying that the emails had been taken out of context.

Editor Note: It was during Thanksgiving weekend 2009 that the unsettling oeuvre that became known as Climategate was disseminated. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.

“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)

“They were shown: contriving to destroy inconvenient data in order to evade FOI inquiries; attempting to shut down scientific journals which published studies unhelpful to their cause; viciously bullying dissenters; even trying to rewrite history, for example, to erase the widely recognised Medieval Warming Period.” (James Delingpole, “My Finest Hour,” November 9, 2019)

Climategate lives in infamy. It remains a historic case study of agendas driving “science” rather than science informing agendas. Fourteen years ago, climate alarmists and friends of the involved scientists (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…

“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.

It has been 13 years since the intellectual scandal erupted called Climategate. Each anniversary inspires recollections and regurgitation of salient quotations. These quotations speak for themselves; attempts of climate alarmists to parse the words and meaning distracts from what was said in real-time private conversations.

And the scandal got worse after the fact when, according to Paul Stephens, “virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.” Whitewash exonerations by the educational institutions involved and scientific organizations– was a blow to scholarship and standards as well. The standard of fair, objective, transparent research was sacrificed to a politically correct narrative about the qualitative connection between CO2 forcing and temperature (see Wiki).…