ClimateGate/Copenhagen roundup Dec. 7

With the Copenhagen (anagram of Hopenchange) circus now on, ClimateGate discussion shows no signs of abating. Some picks:

• MUST-READ: Bruce Bawer : The warming faithful gather in Copenhagen. I can’t do this piece justice by selective quoting. Go read it all.
• “The most influential tree in the world“.
• The Daily Mail claims the ClimateGate hack was perpetrated by Russian secret agents. I personally subscribe to the “whistleblower” theory instead…
• Wretchard (Richard Fernandez) plays the cui bono (“whom does it benefit”) game with his usual incisiveness, and reflects on the humorless fanatic, the “grim and determined man”, one finds so often in extremist movements (especially in hard environmentalism). The comment sections on both articles have some incisive stuff too.
• Jonah Goldberg: “all hot air“
• Physicists petition the American Physical Society (APS) to rescind its statement on global warming as being “based on cheating and corrupted work”
• Can Google be trusted to do no evil?

• and don’t miss Pi Guy’s “Skeptic layman’s guide“.
• More updates to follow as the day progresses
• UPDATE: “Manufacturing consensus“, part 12,345 (H/t: Insty)
• UPDATE 2: Roger Simon: “Why did 0bama change his Copenhagen itinerary?” Good stuff in the comments too.
• UPDATE 3: Lorrie Goldstein in the Toronto Sun: “Climate Change: ‘Life and Death’ or ‘Cash Grab’?” (H/t: Paladin Phil)
• UPDATE 4: reposted from Dec. 4 summary: Daniel Henninger, “Is science as we know it dying?”  Some choice quotes:

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously “unprovable” theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and “messy” as, say, gender studies.

The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State’s Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom.

[...]If the new ethos is that “close-enough” science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

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