Malone Today

Anthony Watts (WattsUp­With­That) and Andrew Bolt (Her­ald Sun) are out with new posts and arti­cles not­ing a so-​called “apol­ogy” from George Mon­biot, “one of the fiercest media pro­pa­gan­dists of the warm­ing faith.” (Watts). What apology?!

First, take a look at what George Mon­biot writes on his blog:

It’s no use pre­tend­ing that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the cli­matic research unit at the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now con­vinced that they are gen­uine, and I’m dis­mayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the mes­sages were obtained ille­gally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excru­ci­at­ing if made pub­lic. Yes, some of the com­ments have been taken out of con­text. But there are some mes­sages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evi­dence here of attempts to pre­vent sci­en­tific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy mate­r­ial that was sub­ject to a free­dom of infor­ma­tion request(4).

Worse still, some of the emails sug­gest efforts to pre­vent the pub­li­ca­tion of work by cli­mate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data dis­cussed in the emails should be re-​analysed.

But do these rev­e­la­tions jus­tify the scep­tics’ claims that this is “the final nail in the cof­fin” of global warm­ing theory?(8,9) Not at all. They dam­age the cred­i­bil­ity of three or four sci­en­tists. They raise ques­tions about the integrity of one or per­haps two out of sev­eral hun­dred lines of evi­dence. To bury man­made cli­mate change, a far wider con­spir­acy would have to be revealed. – (Click to open and read the entire post) [The num­bers refer to foot­notes in Monbiot’s blog post.]

Anthony Watts calls this an apol­ogy in a new post head­lined “Mon­biot issues an unprece­dented apol­ogy – calls for Jones res­ig­na­tion”. He writes:

From Andrew Bolt, my “mate” down under at the Her­ald Sun, comes this sur­prise. I’ll have to say, it is to George Monbiot’s credit to do this. I embrace his first state­ment, because it suc­cinctly sums up the situation:

“It’s no use pre­tend­ing that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the cli­matic research unit at the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now con­vinced that they are gen­uine, and I’m dis­mayed and deeply shaken by them.” — George Mon­biot on his per­sonal blog

George seems to real­ize that, “it’s worse than we thought”.

Andrew Bolt tries to write an apol­ogy for Mon­biot in “Even Mon­biot says the sci­ence now needs “reana­ly­is­ing””:

I apol­o­gise. I was too trust­ing of some of those who pro­vided the evi­dence I cham­pi­oned. I would have been a bet­ter jour­nal­ist if I had inves­ti­gated their claims more closely.

But these are only Bolt’s words and noth­ing in Monbiot’s state­ment sup­ports this conclusion.

Where’s the apol­ogy? I’ve reread his state­ment here and directly on Mon​biot​.com but I can­not find an apol­ogy. What I do find are sev­eral admis­sions, some dam­age con­trol, and then an attempt at humor to toss it all aside.

Monbiot’s effort is focused on admit­ting sev­eral points, offer­ing out a fall guy and “three or four sci­en­tists,” and a recheck of one or two record sets. He’s sim­ply attempt­ing CYA for him­self and the reli­gion of global warm­ing. I do not see this working.

First, I’ve seen sev­eral ref­er­ences in recent days to 42+ and even as many as 75 sci­en­tists inti­mately involved with Jones and the email released so far clearly offer up at least a dozen reg­u­larly shar­ing email and many oth­ers inter­mit­tently. Else­where I recall read­ing or hear­ing that there may be 500 lead­ing global warm­ing sci­en­tists around the world. The core group is likely much less with most being just fol­low­ers and wannabes. Any­way, my point is that a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent of the lead­ing global warm­ing sci­en­tists are likely involved in Jones’ and com­pany shenani­gans. As a whole, they should no longer have any credibility.

Sec­ond, Mon­biot admits to some data prob­lems and sug­gests (hopes) that only a cou­ple are sus­pect enough to require recheck­ing. I’m guess­ing the bad data is very wide­spread as data is reused and manip­u­la­tion appears from the email to be com­mon prac­tice. Who can be trusted to say with­out recheck­ing that data A is good and data B is bad?

Monbiot’s state­ment that this is not the final nail in the cof­fin of global warm­ing the­ory is about like Nixon say­ing he wasn’t a crook.

Note: This is an expan­sion of my com­ment writ­ten at Watts Up With That.

Updated with cor­rec­tion from yonasan. Thanks! Also, thank you Andrew. Yes, Monbiont’s apol­ogy was buried in a com­ment reply, which I noted in my own com­ments at Watts Up With That but ommited men­tion here.

I ear­lier saw the state­ment: “I apol­o­gise…” above and in Andrew Bolts blog but it was NOT in either Monbiont’s blog or in his arti­cle at the Guardian. After see­ing your reply ear­lier to my query about this I went back to both. It is still NOT in his blog but is a com­ment reply to his arti­cle at the Guardian. The full con­text of my reply com­ment is:

Sabraguy writes:
George, con­grat­u­la­tions for hav­ing the decency to write about this.

But now I sug­gest you review your file of cor­re­spon­dence and arti­cles, and fig­ure out who you need to apol­o­gize to.

You can start with your readers.

And to this Mon­biont writes:
Sabraguy:
But now I sug­gest you review your file of cor­re­spon­dence and arti­cles, and fig­ure out who you need to apol­o­gize to.

I apol­o­gise. I was too trust­ing of some of those who pro­vided the evi­dence I cham­pi­oned. I would have been a bet­ter jour­nal­ist if I had inves­ti­gated their claims more closely

Matthew writes:
Okay, but this still does not rec­on­cile with the sar­cas­tic arti­cle and blog he wrote. Will he now update both his blog and the arti­cle to state his apol­ogy or leave it buried in the com­ments? Over­all I do not yet sense much con­tri­tion on his part. Time will tell…

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