Not waving but drowning

The climate change zealots continue their free fall into utter ridicule. Yesterday, the government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, told the Independent that the highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency.

Ah! Reds under the sea-bed! But by today King had retreated. The Guardian reported:

Sir David King admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a ‘side-issue’, he said. But it emerged that he had been misinformed about key facts. One of his grounds for believing a high-powered team of professionals were behind the leak, he said, was that there had been a wide spread of emails going back decades ‘between very different people’. He told the Independent: ‘The emails date back to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years.’ In fact, as UEA confirmed today, all the files and emails were archived on a single backup server on the Norwich campus. Once access was gained, it would have been simple to copy all the material.

Sir David King FRS is a former professor of physical chemistry and one of this country's most distinguished scientists. Yet he has shown himself here to be sloppy with facts and prone to wild conspiracy theorising. Is it any wonder therefore that he is a climate change zealot? This frighteningly closed-minded individual was a key force in shaping Britain’s science policy from 2000 to 2007. Read more.