So it appears that the global warming skeptics are circulating rumors about some environmental data that was dumped at one of the world’s leading climate change research universities. If you Google “environmental data thrown out,” you get 1.15 million hits - the first of which is an article from The Times (that’s the Times in London); and if you Google “university of east anglia environment data,” you get 404,000 hits - the second of which is the same article from The Times (same one). Click here for said article.
Okay, fine. Healthy debate is a-okay. However, the right does not debate in a healthy fashion. They use fear-mongering in place of facts, and of, you know, having a valid point. The article in The Times, talking about this environmental data that was allegedly dumped, says, “The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director.” What they do not mention - and you can use a simple browser Find command to check this, since you’re not going to believe me - is that the word “hack” does not appear in the article at all. This is convenient for the skeptics, as it instills the fear and doubt without - surprise! - making any use at all of context. The e-mails in question were hacked, not leaked; and they were posted on the magic Interwebs as though they existed in some kind of vacuum.
If you dig into the thing even just a little bit, you can find an article here from the BBC and a statement from the university that was the victim of the criminal mischief that The Times so disingenuously refers to as “leaking.” And if you keep digging, you’ll find that The Times is actually owned by News Corporation, which is run by Rupert Murdoch, who is not known for his objectivity.
Oh, and that data that was allegedly dumped? Yeah, that happened back in the 1980s. Boy, it's a really good thing we have those skeptics on the right to feed us good information, right? Heck, yes! As you probably heard, all the scientific research into global warming stopped back in the 80s, not long after this data was "dumped." Technology stopped advancing, access to information stopped improving, and the argument pretty much came to an end. Also, this university, Britain's University of East Anglia, was the only institution in the whole world that ever did any research into global warming. No one did it before they did, and no one has done any research on the subject since. So when they "dumped" their data, all the evidence for global warming - every bit of it that was ever collected in the entire history of human civilization - was lost forever and ever.
Now, can I get an amen?
Sigh. What else can you do but sigh? There are legitimate points to be made on both sides of this global warming thing; but just repeating - over and over again at the top of one’s lungs - that “they threw out the data” is not debate. It’s barely even fact, and it ain’t even close to being even kissing cousins to the most cursory idea of context - not that the right is ever really all that concerned about context. But go ahead, ya dim bulbs, and bloviate all you want; maybe one day I’ll rename this thing The Debunker - although, honestly, continually having to debunk all of this nonsense isn’t really all that much fun.
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