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.…

“First wind and solar–and now batteries. How can a business editorialist not talk about cost and opportunity cost? Does $65 billion and counting ring a bell? I guess when you are a climate alarmist, economics does not matter.”

“‘Demand response’ is more government intervention to rescue prior. ‘Virtual power plants’ are the ultimate government takeover of the grid. Wound the supply side, load it up with costs, and force demand down.”

In “Natural Gas, Coal and Nuclear Power are Failing the Texas Grid, New Tech is the Future,” Houston Chronicle business editorialist Chris Tomlinson carries the water for Green New Deal/Net Zero interests, including his wife’s business of wind/solar origination. His 750-word piece is a tissue of half-truths and misdirection that only church-going climate alarmists can like.

CHRIS TOMLINSON COMMENTARY

The Texas electric grid’s biggest failures so far this summer are coming from the supposedly most reliable generators: fossil fuels.…

“Are humans like frogs in a simmering pot, unaware that temperatures have reached the boiling point? Or has global warming been spun into an ‘alarmist gale,’ as Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at M.I.T. wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed article?” (Revkin 2006, below)

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Seventeen years ago, and eighteen years after James Hansen yelled Fire in his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee (tomorrow’s post), New York Times climate columnist Andrew C. Revkin published “Yelling ‘Fire’ on a Hot Planet.” The media propaganda machine was out in force, and the alarmist side was debating what to do to ‘wake up’ the public. One idea was to emphasize adaptation instead of mitigation, a controversial strategy as Revkin reports below.

The article questions whether polar bear drownings were due to climate change.…

Ed Note: This week is the 35th anniversary of the exaggerated climate alarm, which began with James Hansen’s June 1988 testimony before the Senate. Meanwhile, far-too-many scientists remain quiet about the climate model problem and psuedo-scientific attribution studies, while the campaigners link all extreme weather events to mankind’s consumption and energy habits.

“In a paper being published in the March-April [2009] edition of the journal Environment, Matthew C. Nisbet … said Mr. Gore’s approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight … ‘as global-warming alarmism….’” – Andrew Revkin, NYT (2009).

“There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language. In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.”