"Global Warming" Propagandists Unmasked

I've been following on the web for the last few days a fascinating story wherein someone hacked a British "global warming" database (for lack of a better descriptor) whose emails revealed an ongoing, Stalinist-style attempt to purge "dissenters" from peer-reviewed journals.

Surprisingly, the left-leaning Washington Post actually picked up the story today (bet it hasn't appeared in the New York Times). In an article titled "In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes," reporter Juliet Eilperin provides a condensed, blow-by-blow account of this conspiracy. Money quote, referencing academic papers that poke holes in the "global warming" conspiracy theory:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," [Phil] Jones writes. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

More:

Jones and [Michael E.] Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," Mann writes.

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor," Jones replies.

The literary-historical allusion to Thomas a Beckett in the last sentence is telling, as Ann Althouse observes in her brief commentary.

A certain amount of this ongoing snit is but one example of the casual, reprehensible kind of skulduggery that's an everyday fact of life in academia where tenured-for-life professors go through adulthood acting like spoiled brats. Nonetheless, adding this scoop to other evidence such as the now-discredited "hockey stick chart" that kicked the "global warming" hoax into high gear is helping concerned citizens get a better grasp on this immense scam whose aim is, as always, to allow greater and greater state intrusions into our lives.

The unmasking of this ongoing attempt to smear and silence critics is important, and it's one of the main reasons why I took pains to provide our readers with my (currently) 6-part synopsis yesterday detailing how the hard left tag teams its opposition via smears and manipulated verbiage to shut off all discussion that's inconvenient to the Party line.

Many of Althouse's commentators pick this right up and run with it rather astutely. Here's one example:

"In other words, use muscle and not mind if you don’t like the results. Get rid of the editor and put an agreeable apparatchik in his place."

Yup. Here's another:

I had not realized that the hockey stick thing was already discredited. Funny, I have friends still citing that.

I will tell you that when the CRU [Climate Research Institute] said they'd deleted all their primary data my 14 year old son said: wonder what they are hiding.

From the mouths of babes. Althouse commentator "lucid" also gets the political implications:

This is a very good example of the left's opposition to free speech, of which they are so often an enemy. They are so sure they are right and that other people are wrong that to them it is morally correct to suprress the speech, communication, and opinions of others. It is anti-democratic and an instance of the left's ties to a Marxist perspective. For Marx, free speech simply meant letting the wrong people control public opion and this is how many leftists feel about free speech also. It is one of the odd links that often appears between liberalism, Marxism, and fascism.

Gee, wish I'd written that. Let's wrap this with a final Althouse commentator's comment, a bit more of a downer but realistic:

I doubt if anything will come of these revelations. Man-caused global warming is such a convenient stick with which to beat modern civilization and in particular the US that I don't think it really matters to our "betters" in the international community and the media whether it has any basis in fact or objective observation.

I hate to think this observation might prove true. But the way things have been going in Obamanation, it sure might. Now that we have a real window open on this longstanding statist hoax, however, we need to keep the pressure on until the full extent of the associated academic, scientific, and political fraud and collusion is fully exposed.