12.02.2009

James Inhofe's inbox

Leaving aside the obviously intentional mis-interpretation of the hacked CRU e-mails known collectively as "Climategate"...
“For instance,” Inhofe wrote, “one scientist wrote of a ‘trick he employed to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperature trends, as well as discussed attempts to ‘redefine what the peer-review literature is’ to prevent papers raising questions about anthropogenic global warming from appearing in IPCC reports.

“Another scientist stated, ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming and it is a travesty that we can’t.’ Still another wrote, “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same,’” Inhofe added.
Wow. It's amazing how this man can consistently dumb things down so radically and get away with it.

The bigger question that arises here is how can a Senate hearing possibly be based upon illegally obtained private e-mails? Will Inhofe need to invoke the PATRIOT Act? I do believe that the University of East Anglia probably needs to do an internal investigation to at least answer to the world the question of what was actually meant by the word "trick" and that the "decline" noted in the 1999 e-mail referred to the divergence problem and not to the idea that temperatures were actually declining.

And if we're going to get into these e-mails, might we also have a peek at correspondences between, say, climate skeptics and various think tanks to look into how they decide to best present the data to the public? I, for one, would love to know.