Malone Today

George Mon­biont – never heard of him until this past week – is out with another ‘we got a prob­lem’ arti­cle in the Guardian today as he frets over the dam­age being done to the reli­gion of global warm­ing [and his career] by the actions and incom­pe­tence of the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. Inter­est­ing that other than his buried apol­ogy in a com­ment attached to his sar­cas­tic arti­cle yes­ter­day, he – George Mon­biont – accepts no blame for the fraud that has been per­pe­trated. This rat bailed and is now adding the sci­en­tists to his list of “scum­bag” cli­mate skeptics.

A few choice quotes from Monbiont’s drivel:

• I have sel­dom felt so alone. Con­fronted with cri­sis, most of the envi­ron­men­tal­ists I know have gone into denial.
• …[Y]ou could argue that tech­ni­cally he [Phil Jones] has done noth­ing wrong. But a fat lot of good that will do.
• I feel des­per­ately sorry for him [Jones]
• Some peo­ple say that I am roman­ti­cis­ing sci­ence, that it is never as open and hon­est as the Pop­per­ian ideal. Perhaps.
• By com­par­i­son to his oppo­nents, Phil Jones is pure as the dri­ven snow.

Maybe Mon­biont sees his only cred­i­bil­ity and career on the line? While he still pro­motes the reli­gion of global warm­ing in every other sen­tence, he has offered an abbre­vi­ated indict­ment of the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity for let­ting him down:

• …the emails are very damaging.
• Pre­tend­ing that this isn’t a real cri­sis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to jus­tify the emails with technicalities.
• One of the most dam­ag­ing emails was sent by the head of the cli­matic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out some­how — even if we have to rede­fine what the peer-​review lit­er­a­ture is!” …his mes­sage looks awful. It gives the impres­sion of con­firm­ing a potent meme cir­cu­lated by those who cam­paign against tak­ing action on cli­mate change: that the IPCC process is biased.…[and] Jones’s state­ment.… is stark and easy to grasp.
• When it comes to his han­dling of Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion requests, Pro­fes­sor Jones might strug­gle even to use a tech­ni­cal defence. If you take the word­ing lit­er­ally, in one case he appears to be sug­gest­ing that emails sub­ject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advo­cat­ing poten­tially crim­i­nal activ­ity. Even if no other mes­sage had been hacked, this would be suf­fi­cient to ensure his res­ig­na­tion as head of the unit.
• …there is no help­ing it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an hon­ourable exit. Oth­er­wise, .…he will linger on until his remain­ing cred­i­bil­ity van­ishes, inflict­ing con­tin­u­ing dam­age to cli­mate science.
• …opaque­ness and secrecy are the ene­mies of sci­ence. There is a word for the appar­ent repeated attempts to pre­vent dis­clo­sure revealed in these emails: unscientific.
• The cri­sis has been exac­er­bated by the university’s han­dling of it, which has been a total train­wreck: a text­book exam­ple of how not to respond. .…the uni­ver­sity knew what was com­ing three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rab­bit in the head­lights, wait­ing for dis­as­ter to strike.
• When the emails hit the news on Fri­day morn­ing, the uni­ver­sity appeared com­pletely unpre­pared. … When a jour­nal­ist I know finally man­aged to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no com­ment” and put down the phone. This response is gen­er­ally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”.
• No one has been as badly let down by the rev­e­la­tions in these emails as those of us who have cham­pi­oned the sci­ence. We should be the first to demand that it is unim­peach­able, not the last.

Mon­biont focuses his venom on Phil Jones, ignor­ing that the email impli­cate the entire sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. By some accounts, and as evi­denced in the email, the global warm­ing clique involves 40 to 75 or more “lead­ing” sci­en­tists. Maybe Mon­biont thinks mak­ing Jones the fall guy will pro­tect the rest from scrutiny.

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