Democrats: "ClimateGate" Leak A Non-Scandal
(CBS/EARLY SHOW)
But Democrats put a brave face on it on Wednesday, with Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey saying that the leaked files and allegations of scientific misconduct should not stand in the way of the U.S. Congress swiftly enacting cap and trade legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. (See earlier CBSNews.com coverage ofClimateGate and the costs of cap and trade.)
Markey, the head of a House global warming committee, said during a hearing that his Republican colleagues "sit over here using a couple of e-mails to (tell us) how to deal with a catastrophic threat to our planet." And: "There is no alternative theory that the minority is proposing, other than that we know has been funded by the oil, by the coal industries that want to continue business as usual."
That's a bit of an overstatement. The leak includes over 1,000 e-mail messages, and another 2,500 or so computer files, many of which are still being analyzed. And the burden of proof should properly be on anyone -- even a House committee chairman -- proposing new taxes and extensive regulations, especially when climate science isanything but settled.
It is true that, if other independent data sets confirm what the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit claimed, ClimateGate's effect on the view of climate trends may be minimal. Then again, as Reason's Ron Baileynotes, University of Colorado climatologist Roger Pielke Sr. says the CRU data is not independent of NASA and other temperature data sets. Pielke had previously written that the CRU and its political allies have been trying to "manipulate the science, so that their viewpoints are the only ones that reach the policymakers." FULL ARTICLE
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