[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend ten years ago that the Climategate unsettling oeuvre was being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]

“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)

“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.…

“California’s reliance on hydropower and proliferation of remote, centralized renewable energy plants; the mandated environmental mothballing of 19 coastal natural gas power plants located close to customers; redundant transmission lines for green power; and seasonal wind blasts, results in lethal blast-furnace-like wildfires that leave trees alone but incinerate houses.”

“California leaders and opinion-makers must first abandon their blame game and diagnose the problem more clearly than using clichés like ‘global warming,’ ‘Donald Trump,’ ‘greed’ or even ‘not enough clear cutting,’ if they are going to responsibly deal with the dangerous unintended consequences of de-modernizing its electric grid.”

A question arising out of California’s recent wave of wind-fanned wildfires, is why are public officials mainly attributing the cause to downed electric transmission lines that comprise less than ten percent of all the causes of such fires?…

“Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project… the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

– Judith Curry, City Journal, Winter 2019.

MasterResource has followed the science when it comes to climate change by profiling the work of Judith Curry, former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and currently a private researcher. Once in the alarmist camp, she checked her premises post-Climategate and realized that “the cause” was corrupted at the expense of sober science, not to mention public policy.

Previous MasterResource posts on Curry, emphasizing bottom-line quotations, have been:

• On the Falsity of Climate Consensus: Judith Curry’s March 29, 2017, Testimony (April 3, 2017)
• Mitigation Math: Is Climate Activism Futile? (Judith Curry thinks so) [March 27, 2017]
• Judith Curry’s Climategate ‘Open Letter’ Revisited (December 7, 2015)
• The Brave Judith Curry (Part II) [August 25, 2015]
• The Brave Judith Curry (one plus the truth equals a majority) [May 6, 2015]
• Judith Curry vs.

Li Fulong, director of development planning of the National Energy Administration … stopped short of saying China would halt ongoing or future plant constructions. “We have developed clean and efficient coal-fired generating units, that have large capacity, high energy efficiency and low pollution emissions,” he said.

Not only is China’s funding of coal power stations domestically a problem, but a 2019 report … found that Chinese companies were helping or promising to finance at least one in four newly-constructed polluting plants globally. [below]

The article is titled “China struggling to kick its coal habit despite Beijing’s big climate pledges.” Authors David Culver, Lily Lee, and Ben Westcott add to the mainstream confirmation that China is business-as-usual when it comes to coal.

Green-washing by China–they do not want to exit from the Paris climate accord but game it for competitive advantage–seems to be enough for CNN and other pro-regulation outlets to just state the facts and move on.…