Climate Gate today

The story has gotten worse since the global-cooling cover-up was exposed through a treasure trove of leaked e-mails a week ago. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia has been incredibly influential in the global-warming debate. The CRU claims the world's largest temperature data set, and its research and mathematical models form the basis of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2007 report.

Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU and contributing author to the United Nation's IPCC report chapter titled "Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes," says he "accidentally" deleted some raw temperature data used to construct the aggregate temperature data CRU distributed. If you believe that, you're probably watching too many Al Gore videos.

Mr. Jones is the same professor who warned that global-warming skeptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone."

Other revelations hit at the very core of the global-warming debate. The leaked e-mails indicate that the people at the CRU can't even figure out how their aggregate data was put together. CRU activists claimed that they took individual temperature readings at individual stations and averaged the information out to produce temperature readings over larger areas. One of the leaked documents states that their aggregation procedure "renders the station counts totally meaningless." The benefit: "So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Academics around the world who have spent years working on papers using this data must be in full panic mode. By the admission of the global-warming theocracy's own self-appointed experts, the data they have been using is simply "garbage." . . .

Climate Gate story

Breaking news: The embattled head of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, the institution at the center of a data breachinvolving the release of more than 1000 e-mails among prominent climate scientists, has resigned pending the ongoing investigation.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a set of guidelines for how providers of custom-made DNA sequences should do business. The proposal is the first comprehensive guidance issued by the government to tackle bioterrorism concerns stemming from the rapidly developing synthetic genomics industry, which some security experts believe could allow terrorist groups or lone evildoers to develop bioweapons simply with materials purchased over the Internet.

An Irish politician with no experience in science is slated to become Europe's new research policy chief. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso announced yesterday that he will nominate Máire Geoghegan-Quinn as the European Union's new commissioner for research and innovation. Meanwhile, former Danish Climate and Energy Minister Connie Hedegaard will fill a newly created post as commissioner for climate action--a move indicating Europe's interest in playing a key role on the global warming issue.