“[Climate change is] a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know…. they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the [Climategate] scientists…. Terrible. Where they got caught, you know, so you see that and you say, what’s this all about. I absolutely have an open mind.”

– President-elect Donald Trump, “Donald Trump’s New York Times Interview: Full Transcript,” November 23, 2016. Quoted in Joe Romm, “Trump Fools the New York Times on Climate Change, ThinkProgress, November 23, 2016.

It has been seven years this month since the intellectual scandal erupted called Climategate. With President-elect Trump’s recent reference to the scandal, it is timely to recall some of the more salient quotations.…

“The Spanish Inquisition and the McCarthy Era are two examples of dark periods in history when silencing freedom of thought and association were punished. History is replete with periods of repression of personal freedoms. Society has never been advanced by these efforts to control the populace’s thoughts and actions.”

Recently, 19 Democratic Senators have “called out” conservative organizations that have produced research and policy papers questioning the orthodoxy of climate change–using their privilege of making claims from the floor of the Senate where a politician cannot be legally attacked for his speech (Article I, Section 6, Clause 1, United States Constitution).

These legislators wasted taxpayer money (the Senate had to be in session, so that meant staffers had to be paid) in attacking the free-speech rights of those companies, individuals, and organizations questioning the “settled” science of climate change.…

“What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values: the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking. Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.”

This item at Judith Curry’s website caught my eye. She recounts the “crazy days of Thanksgiving 2009 when I spent all weekend writing my ‘Open Letter'” in the wake of Climategate.

Six years later, in the middle of COP 21, it is time to give voice to Curry’s contribution, which was reproduced by Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth at the time under the title, “A Climate Scientist Who Engages Skeptics” (November 27, 2009).…

[Editor Note: In light of the 5th anniversary of Climategate on November 19th, MasterResource proudly reposts Steve Gorham’s summary from last year, Revisiting Climategate as Climatism Falters. Good analysis becomes more valuable with the passage of time. This post, and Gorham’s book, The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, pass this test.]

” … the real scandal was not so much that two or three climate scientists behaved badly, but that virtually the entire climate science community tried to pretend that nothing was wrong.”

– Paul Stephens, “Climategate Anniversary,” The IPCC Report, November 17, 2014.

Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, is on the wane. Once riding high, the ideology of man-made climate change is losing its influence in governments across the world.…