Climate Clowns Double Down

We imagine they figure with the continued network blackout they can just run out the clock on the the great ClimateGate hoax. When you have such friendly media coverage spewing the usual climate babble, that air of smug superiority is easy to come by.

A group of the nation's top scientists defended research on global climate change Friday against what they called a politically motivated smear campaign designed to foster public doubt about irrefutable scientific facts.

Irrefutable? Oh, you mean the science is settled? Is this a news story? Why, yes it is. But the reporter knows it's irrefutable.

The allegations came after skeptics seized upon a series of hacked e-mails at England's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit as evidence of a climate change hoax.

The scientists from two major research centers, a national think tank and NASA, claimed during a telephone news conference that the e-mail exchanges were taken out of context in an attempt to influence pending greenhouse gas emissions policies.

It is, they said, a cynical, blatantly dishonest effort to cloud the fact that the world is now confronting a huge, potentially disastrous climactic shift.

Blatantly dishonest? Like, say, dumping the data so nobody can check it? Like "hiding the decline" and pulling "tricks," that kind of blatantly dishonest behavior?

"There is so much information that tells us the planet has been warming," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "No independent study is going to come up with anything other than what we've already concluded."

In that case, Mr. Schmidt, you should welcome the independent studies since if the science is settle it would only reinforce your position, right?

If I had a theory and claimed it was so solid, I'd be more than eager to have others confirm it. But they do not want any independent review of their work because they know they'll be exposed as frauds.

The world's foremost scientists, some 2,500 in all, agree that an increase in global temperatures since 1900 is responsible for the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, acidification of the ocean, sea level rise and habitat destruction.

Despite this, the drumbeat of skepticism about global warming has never been louder. The Internet and conservative news programs have been flooded over the past week with breathless accounts of alleged scientific fraud.

Again, this is not an opinion piece; rather it's an actual news story. Not that you could tell the difference. Nowhere in this "news" story can a critic of this scam be found. Instead we get duplicitous propaganda like this:

Joseph Romm, a physicist and senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the evidence of warming is getting clearer while opponents are "redoubling their disinformation campaign."

"The last ten years are the warmest ten year period in the modern record," said Romm, who served in the U.S. Department of Energy in the 1990s. "These observations are unequivocal. The question is what will happen in our future, and that is still in our hands."

Of course that is an outright lie, but hey, why deal with facts when you have an agenda? And they accuse others of a disinformation" campaign?