Saturday, November 28, 2009

The New Downing Street Memos

In 1 May 2005, official British governments documents were leaked to the press, heretofore known as The Downing Street Memos (or, as they were known in England, the Downing Street Minutes). Nothing more than writings on a piece of paper, notes taken at a meting, they stated clearly that the US (under the Bush administration) was intent on invading Iraq and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed [by the U.S.] around the policy" of removing Saddam Hussein. For many people in the anti-war(or pro-peace, if you like)movement, it was the smoking gun that proved that the war in Iraq was not a necessity, rather an undertaking of choice, by an administration eager to enrich political donors and cabinet members enough to deliberately falsify documents. It was roundly ignored by the right as well as the corporate media as everyone was making a buck from the Iraq war.
Now, years later, an equally damning leak has made it's way into the press. Called ClimateGate, it shows through emails and documents leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit that scientists were conspiring to falsify data to support an already arrived at conclusion, global warming climate change.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think we should be dumping more pollutants into the atmosphere, but this seems less about protecting the environment and more about a select few becoming billionaires in the cap and trade carbon market (which shifts cost from polluters on to the consumer, and doesn't do much to end pollution)who seem to have a double standard about reducing one's carbon footprint. It's like selling low energy fluorescent bulbs on the premise of saving a few dollars to people too stupid to care about disposing of them properly.
The leaked emails, touted by the right as evidence that global warming climate change is all hype, will not even be published by the "liberal" New York Times, the same "liberal" paper that committed treason and aided Judith Miller in leaking the name of a CIA operative handed to them by a Bush administration official bent on punishing said operative's husband for declaring forged documents used to justify an attack against Iraq to be forgeries.
So I don't expect these leaked emails to be reported on by the corporate media anymore than they applied to Downing Street Memos. The agenda has been set, and not having fully drank from the global warming climate change Kool-Aid, I can see how they've been slowly selling people 'green' in much the same manner as they sold us the war in Iraq. Hopefully, the end result will not be the same.

4 comments:

Tom Harper said...

I haven't followed the "climategate" story much, but I thought those leaked e-mails didn't have much credibility. Mostly just people ranting back and forth to each other; not much about science.

But like I said, I haven't followed the story that closely.

Al Gore definitely preaches a lot more than he practices.

Lew Scannon said...

Tom,
Your point about Mr. Gore is one of the reasons I'm a bit skeptical about climate change: if this is as dire as he claims then why doesn't he practice what he preaches?

libhom said...

The climate change emails are not as significant as the right claims they are. It should surprise no one that people who would break into email systems would have no qualms with taking isolated paragraphs out of context in order to distort what actually is going on. This is part of the same Big Oil/Big Coal scam that has even involved trying to bribe scientists into writing review articles distorting the facts about climate change.

Global Warming is going on now. Russia, Canada, the US and other countries are trying to stake claims for oil which is currently under Arctic ice sheets that keep getting thinner and thinner. The predicted increase in brushfires in Mediterranean climates is already a fact of life.

Climate change doesn't seem as mysterious to me as it does to some people because I followed Astronomy when I was young. One of the things I remember is that the difference in the temperature on Venus to that on Earth cannot be explained by its closer proximity to the Sun. Higher levels of CO2 in that planet's atmosphere trap heat.

I learned about this in the 70s, before most people thought about Global Warming. One haunting thing I remember at the time was one of the reasons why it was so important to study other planets: it provides us information on what could happen to earth.

Gerald C said...

Grreat blog post