The Hoax Hoax


There are few issues on which Rush Limbaugh spreads as much manure- uh, er, misinformation- as on climate change.      Admittedly, there is a lot of competition as Limbaugh distorts, manipulates, and lies at a dizzying rate.    But Monday's program featured a classic Limbaugh effort to toss out as many inaccuracies as possible when a caller challenged Rush's views on global warming, asking him "what are your credentials as, you know, to prove" his assertion" man-made global warming is a fraud.... a hoax."     Limbaugh replied

Well, my ability to read faked e-mails from the University of East Anglia, e-mails written by participants in the hoax who described how to cover up the hoax and how they lied about various measurements and how they were covering it up and trying not to get caught.  

Joe Romm reminds us

Climategate was a scandal of corrupt, deceitful, and shoddy reporting. In 2009, as all of the world’s leaders prepared to meet in Copenhagen to tackle global warming, thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit webmail server — a top climate research center in the United Kingdom — were hacked and dumped on a Russian web server.Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth.

Fortunately, the only hoax here was the trumped-up scandal.      The Union of Concerned Scientists cites six academic studies which determined there was no "hoax."    It notes

A three-part Penn State University cleared scientist Michael Mann of wrongdoing.

Two reviews commissioned by the University of East Anglia "supported the honesty and integrity of scientists in the Climatic Research Unit."

A UK Parliament report concluded that the emails have no bearing on our understanding of climate science and that claims against UEA scientists are misleading.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Inspector Generals' office concluded there was no evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of their employees.

The National Science Foundation's Inspector General's office concluded "Lacking any direct evidence of  research misconduct...we are closing this investigation with no further action."

But those are mere reports, carefully compiled, of reasonably objective, highly-trained individuals.      On the other side is Rush Limbaugh.      There must be a liberal cover-up.





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