Michael Barone offers this analysis of the climagegate controversy.
“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” writes
Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations in The American
Interest. “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad
politics.”
Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so
many government, corporate and media elites were taken in by propaganda
that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence. And taken in to
the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause
that was based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling……The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a
religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual
(separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic
growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that
we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and
must persecute heretics (global warming
skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).
People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified
in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from
whatever flimsy source may be at hand.
