The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News of the Tautological
“Elementary Students and Parents Enjoy Fun Activities”–headline, Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot, Feb. 3
Global Warming Outsourcing
Another job has been sent to India–but this is a job that is held by an Indian, London’s Daily Telegraph reports:
The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.
The move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.
The IPCC won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Meanwhile, London’s Guardian reports on the continuing investigation over the University of East Anglia climate scientists’ emails:
A scientist at the University of East Anglia has been questioned by detectives investigating how controversial emails were leaked from the campus’s climate research unit.
Norfolk police have interviewed and taken a formal statement from Paul Dennis, 54, another climate researcher who heads an adjacent laboratory.
The leaked emails from the head of the unit, Professor Phil Jones, surfaced just before the Copenhagen conference in December and caused a furore because they suggested that data which did not support theories of global warming was being deliberately withheld. Dennis denies leaking the material. But it is understood that his links with climate change sceptic bloggers in North America drew him to the attention of the investigating team, and have exposed rifts within the university’s environmental science faculty.
Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because “science isn’t done by consensus.”
Dennis, it seems, has come under criminal suspicion because he did not support his colleagues’ dishonest practices. There appears to be no evidence that it was he who distributed the emails, but at this point it seems to us there’s a good case for dropping the investigation on the ground that whoever did distribute them did a public service.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
