The London Times reports that “the scientist at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide:”
Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”. He acknowledged similarities to Dr David Kelly, the scientist who committed suicide after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that alleged the government had “sexed up” evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq.
In emails that were hacked into and seized upon by global-warming sceptics before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, Jones appeared to call upon his colleagues to destroy scientific data rather than release it to people intent on discrediting their work monitoring climate change.
Jones, 57, said he was unprepared for the scandal: “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”
But he and the gang behind Climategate had few qualms about causing them. As Mark Steyn wrote back in late 2009:
Yet perhaps the most important revelation is not the collusion, the bullying, the politicization and the evidence-planting, but the fact that, even if you wanted to do honest “climate research” at the Climatic Research Unit, the data and the models are now so diseased by the above that they’re all but useless. Let Ian “Harry” Harris, who works in “climate scenario development and data manipulation” at the CRU, sum it up. Mr. Harris was attempting to duplicate previous results—i.e., to duplicate all that science that’s supposedly settled, and the questioning of which consigns you to the Climate Branch of the Flat Earth Society. How hard should it be to confirm settled science? After much cyber-gnashing of teeth, Harry throws in the towel:
“ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently—I have no memory of this at all—we’re not doing observed rain days! It’s all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I’m going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
“OH F–K THIS. It’s Sunday evening, I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”
Thus spake the Settled Scientist: “OH F–K THIS.” And on the basis of “OH F–K THIS” the world’s enlightened progressives will assemble at Copenhagen for the single greatest advance in punitive liberalism ever perpetrated on the developed world.
And it also seems more than a little disingenuous for Jones to say he has no training in PR, given that the folks at the core of the Climategate scandal have been basically using the legacy media as a de facto press release distribution mechanism.
Though he’s been caught manipulating the truth, I’m glad that Jones didn’t commit an inconvenient felo-de-se. Of course, there are environmentalists even more radical than Jones who wish the rest of us would touch the face of Gaia — sooner, rather than later.
Would it be terribly inappropriate to borrow from Scrooge and say: “If he would rather die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
I mean, after all, overpopulation is another darling of the left, right?
To protect himself from the inclemencies of changing political weather, this pathetic scientific fraud seeks that most treasured of liberal attire: the cloak of victimhood.
Calculated protestations aside, like a cockroach, he will survive even nuclear blasts, and will spend the rest of his life defending the fraud that was his career–much like soviet spy alger hiss.
I read this over the weekend elsewhere, and have been following the whole climategate fiasco at wattsupwiththat.com.
point: the emails were leaked by someone inside, NOT hacked. That is based upon the way the packets were organized.
question: why does the times want people to feel sympathy for the AFW fraudster? Is it because they support AGW, and as Dr. J goes, so goes CRU, Hadley, the MET office, and the entire UK AGW movement?
ugh! I “meant”, AGW fraudster.
I really have no sympathy for the guy falling off his Ivory Tower. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving fellow.
Climate Change gravy train. Are you angry about this obvious RICO Act fraud and the national media’s complicity in the cover-up, misinformation, reframing and misdirection of the issue and the related “carbon derivatives” market Obama’s Administration is spinning up? Why pay for propaganda? Take responsibility and take action. STOP all donations to the political party(s) responsible for this fraud. STOP donations to all environmental groups which funded this Global Warming propaganda campaign with our money, especially The World Wildlife Fund. DEMAND they take you off their donors’ mailing list. They have violated the public trust. KEEP donations local, close to home. MAKE donations to Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe, the only politician to stand firmly against this obvious government/media coordinated information operation (propaganda) targeted at its own people. Senator Inhofe, the only politician to refuse the GREEN KOOL AID. Senator Inhofe, the only senator to stand between us and the collective insanity of the ruling class of elitist hucksters led by Al Gore. WRITE your state and federal representatives demanding wall to wall investigations of government sponsored propaganda campaigns and demand indictments of those responsible. WRITE your state and federal Attorneys General demanding Al Gore and others conducting Global Warming/Climate Change racketeering and mail fraud operations be brought to justice, indicted, tried, convicted and jailed. Carbon is the stuff of life. He (Obama) who controls carbon, especially CO2, controls the world. Think of the consequences if you do nothing! For one, the UK is becoming the poster child for George Orwell’s “1984”. The mendacity of UK’s John Beddington, Robert Watson and Ed Miliband prove the point. The US government’s sponsorship of this worldwide Global Warming propaganda campaign puts it in a class with the failed Soviet Union’s relentless violation of the basic human right to truthful government generated information. Given ClimateGate’s burgeoning revelations of outrageous government misconduct and massive covert misinformation, what are the chances that this Administration’s National Health Care sales campaign is anywhere near the truth?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bdneX1djD
http://www.kusi.com/weather/colemanscorner/81559212.html