Climate Gate Response Goes Beyond Reasonable

Recently the environmental group, Greenpeace, posted a blog from one of its senior members in India that went beyond the pale in arguing that the demise of the Copenhagen climate change conference requires that environmental activists now resort to civil disobedience.  In fact, the closing paragraphs of the blog even threatened climate change skeptics with a Mafia-type threat - we know who you are; we know where you live!  The outrage about this blog forced Greenpeace to remove it from its web site and issue a mea culpa.  The official retracting the blog issued an apology and asked readers not to view the earlier blog as a deviation from the peaceful protest principles of Greenpeace.

The problem with this latest blog is that its author decried the nature of the Internet for enabling people to take a comment (supposedly out of context) and spread it around.  He decried the fact that this firestorm had obviously spread far and wide, yet in a gratutious statement he claimed this is what "climate skeptics" live to do. 

While Greenpeace wants its web readers to dismiss the ranting of its member, one has to question why they posted the blog in the first place if they were concerned about its ramifications.  It seems to me they embraced the views of the original blogger, but are now scared by the public reaction and the continuing erosion is support for global climate change legislation and actions.  That has to mean less support for Greenpeace, also. 

Lately, Japanese research has shown that the supposed melting of the Arctic ice was caused by swirling northern hemisphere winds and not rising temperatures.  Another report shows that Arctic ice is reforming rapidly, which would nullify some of the concern about the impact of global warming and the threats to the polar bears.  

The latest Gallup Poll results show that global warming is now only the sixth most important environemtal concern among Americans.  The results also show that the support has dropped to 28% of "highly concerned" Americans from 41% barely three years ago.  Even though the first investigation of the climate reseachers at the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit shows they didn't destroy or manipulate temperature data, it didn't totally absolve them of blame.  It faulted them for trying to keep the data secret and failing to comply with Freedom of Information requests, which we understand is a legal matter.  We'll see if the UK government presses charges.

As energy and climate legislation moves forward in the U.S. Congress, all of these environmental issues will be revisited.  In other words, stay tuned because we haven't seen the end of the global warming debate.