You may have read that a prestigious climate research organization (the CRU) out of the University of East Anglia in England was attacked by "hackers" and had a significant volume of emails between the scientists leaked to some climate change denial blogs.
The theft was discovered when the hackers attempted to sabotage realclimate.org to post the emails. This was thwarted, so the thieves evidently decided to send the emails to some friendly bloggers who eagerly posted them. RealClimate provides the definitive rebuttal to the farcical claims of the deniers:
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.
We're talking about leading climatologists talking behind the scenes in private emails, and somehow they never admit to any of the conspiratorial claims of the deniers all these years. Of course this means the deniers shout "see, this proves what they've been saying all along!"
Today, the story took a new twist as the attack shifted to New Zealand's government climate research group, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (or NIWA, and their response is found at that link) for "manipulating" some data which demonstrates the steady warming curve observed in New Zealand over the past 100 years. This attack is sourced to New Zealand's "Climate Science Coalition" (no link for them), which as Deltoid notes, "(Note: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition contains no actual climate scientists.)"
Obama blames Fox News, e-mail for likely loss in Kentucky
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, facing a likely defeat in next Tuesday's primary election, won't travel to Kentucky before the voting, but said he hopes to have much more time to win over Kentucky voters before the November general election.
He also blamed Fox News for disseminating "rumors" about him and said that that and e-mails filled with misinformation that have been "systematically" dispersed have hurt him in Kentucky.
Now I'm not really in a position to judge whether Obama is just offering politically expedient excuses, or whether he has polling showing that his popularity in Kentucky has been particularly hurt by the specific charges found in the most popular Obama smear-mails. Having been studying this issue since I wrote about it last week, I tend to believe him. I can't speak to particular impacts in Kentucky, but I've been able to put some figures down to give some scope to this problem. I think by more accurately describing the problem will put us closer to discussing a solution. If not that, at least, what a solution would look like, and what it would be able to do.
The impression that Barack Obama is Muslim crosses party lines with 10% of registered voters overall, including 14% of Republicans, 10% of Democrats and 8% of independents, telling [a] recent Pew poll that they think the Illinois senator is Muslim, compared with 53% who correctly identify him as Christian and about a third who say they don't know what his religious beliefs are. Fully 79% of the public say they have rumors that the Democratic presidential candidate is Muslim.
(Note: I am the poster formerly known as "Scientician")
The thread below is kind of long so maybe let's start another. Since I've been working on media reform issues, this kind of thing dovetails into my interests (usually I don't feel any unique insight into Primary matters to write posts on them).
Aside from legitimizing Fox News (already much discussed and I don't have anything to add), what bothers me about the Obama Fox appearance is the ritual humiliation.
Wallace taunted and cajoled Obama to come on, and he did. Right wingers love that.
