"Oops, They Forgot To Include Siberia"

Hide the snow line! At Commentary, John Steele Gordon writes:

First it was the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia playing fast and loose with scientific data, manipulating it to produce desired results while discarding much of the raw data. Now, according to a report in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, the Hadley Center for Climate Change, part of the government’s British Meteorological Office, did some data-cooking as well, leaving out temperature records for about 40 percent of the Russian landmass in calculating recent temperature trends.

Since Russia constitutes 12.5 percent of the world’s landmass, much of that a byword for brutal winters, that is no small omission. And the data from weather stations that were omitted do not show substantial global warming in recent decades.

Climategate is beginning to seem more and more like its namesake, Watergate. Those around in those days remember how, day after day after day, new revelations came out and ever more desperate attempts to minimize their significance or to explain them away were made. (One of my all-time favorite Herblock cartoons, from June 1973, as Watergate was just beginning to expand, shows a press conference in the East Room. In the background is a very large, very dead whale labeled “Nixon Scandals,” inadequately hidden beneath a small rug. The spokesman holding the press conference says, “I am authorized to say, ‘What whale?’ “)

The constant water drip of revelations and Nixon’s attempts to explain them and prevent further ones from leaking slowly but surely destroyed the Nixon presidency. The chronology of Watergate as it evolved over a year and a half is a fascinating window into the greatest scandal in American history as it slowly reached critical mass.

Climategate bids fair to be equally interesting, and it seems that we are getting nearer and nearer to that critical mass. I suspect that Al Gore, flying around in his private jet telling everyone else to walk, is not too happy right now.