Google joins ClimateGate (dis)information fray? [krakatoa]

Kate at Small Dead Animals notices a peculiar thing when searching Google for things like "climategate", "climate hack", or "climate emails".

It used to be, up until yesterday, when beginning to type those queries the drop-down helper would show the list of most searched items. Yahoo has a similar feature. Go ahead and try both in Yahoo and Google, and you'll see the difference.

UPDATE: Google now shows "climategate" in response to typing "clim". 10.6 million responses, and for some reason Google's algorithms lost it.

It's not censorship, per se. This isn't quite Google China again. It does demonstrate though the occasional petty and intolerant actions of those who claim to trade in the free flow of information.

If the AGW activists truly believed "the science was settled" (the mere utterance of which, one would think, precludes the statement from the Scientific realm forever), one strains to find a credible reason for massaging data, deleting or otherwise losing key measurements, or manipulating the peer-review process to exclude dissenting Scientific studies from gaining broad readership.

Andy Revkin notes the growing cracks in the IPCC's armor. (Apologies in advance for the NYT link.) At the moment, the goal of the MSM and the AGW proponents is to try to minimalize the damage by framing the issue as a tempest in a teapot; a quibble over esoterica in code or data that has no impact on the larger findings. At worst, they hope to limit this to a few inconsequential lapses by a few bad apples.

We know, based on the works of the likes of Steve McIntyre & Anthony Watts that it is in those esoteric details that large trends can be bent to the results the "Scientist" wishes to achieve.

We suspect that these "bad apples" represent the poisoned fruit from which many of the supporting studies by non-IPCC affiliated Climate Scientists derived data for their own purposes.

I expect those independent scientists whose work was based on the now highly questionable datasets provided by the IPCC "scientists" are feeling more than a little discomfort about their own results.

posted by xgenghisx at 12:34 PM

| Access Comments