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.)"
See the dirty secret here is that Canada has historically been notably less wealthy than the US (Nationmaster lists the US at $6K higher in GDP per capita for 2006) and there was always an element of apples to oranges in comparing our systems. We have fewer MRIs? Well, duh. Of course America should have had the better system, and at the upper end of the income spectrum, they probably do. The fact that we're ahead at all is itself an indication of how broken the US model is.
So let's transmogrify those oranges into apples, and get some idea what it would mean to implement US level health spending within other systems. US health care reform opponents have recently moved from bashing Canada to the UK's NHS, but the same sort of disparity applies. In 2006, the UK spent about US$192B (8.2% of GDP) on health care, based on an economy that generated $39K per capita. America spent $2 trillion (15.3%) based on an economy that generated $44K per capita. The Brits too, spent less of their national income on health care, but that income is proportionally smaller too. Let's adjust both dials and see what we get.
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