"Climategate"-gate: Part II

As with most conspiracy theories, the putative inference from "climategate" to the view that all climate science is seriously flawed has a giant gap in it: even if the hacked emails established that all of the research conducted at the East Anglia CRU was flawed (which they don't), they wouldn't establish that all the research conducted elsewhere -- which reaches the same conclusions vis-a-vis climate change -- is similarly flawed. And merely pointing out that "East Anglia is not some way station" doesn't help.

In addition to repeating the same tired lies (as well as the attempt at guilt-by-Mugabe-association), Rex cleverly sneaks in an attempt to fill this embarrassing gap. Amongst the other crimes he takes to be revealed by the stolen (and cherry picked) emails, he finds that East Anglia is acting as a climatology "gate-keeper":"They revealed a pattern of gate-keeping, of (quite non-scientific) hostility to contrary or dissenting opinions, attempts at controlling the much-touted peer-review process, and perhaps most disturbing of all a pronounced tendency to point the data toward the hypothesis rather than the hypothesis toward the data." But what could this gate-keeping consist in? If it is to explain the thousands of peer reviewed articles based on research not conducted at East Anglia, it must involve some kind of control over the editorial boards of the all the journals which published these articles. Or, more ominously, maybe they directly influenced the peer review process itself though their control of all the working climatologists who lent their expertise to it. Vast tendrils indeed. Sorry Rex, as with all conspiracy theories, the number of people that would have to be "in on it" strains credibility.