Climategate burned by reality

Climatologists exonerated, by all except the conservative media, that is

By Gene Lyons
Salon.com

'You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right.... But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, only in the mind of the Party.... Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.' -- George Orwell, 1984

What with the Northeast sweating out a triple-digit heat wave, naive observers might expect a spate of global-warming stories in the media. You know, retreating Arctic sea ice, vanishing glaciers, etc. After all, last winter's record Washington, D.C., snowstorms triggered a veritable avalanche (sorry) of pundits and TV talking heads prating about the "elitist" idea that rising world temperatures constitute a grave threat to humanity and the natural world as we know it. No less an authority than Fox News' Sean Hannity announced that "climate change is a hoax."

Supposedly, see, there's this global cabal of scientists conspiring to bring about socialist one-world government. But what really got the ball rolling wasn't the weather, but a manufactured, media-driven scandal. The orchestrated release of more than 1,000 e-mails hacked from computers at the U.K.'s University of East Anglia's climate research center quickly became a cause célèbre.

Cherry-picked and quoted out of context, almost 20 years of informal, occasionally bitchy communications among scientists were cited as evidence of fraud. Nor were Hannity and Fox News the only ones pushing the alleged wrongdoing. CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC News, everybody joined the party. "NBC Nightly News" host Brian Williams was typical:

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