The day before yesterday I posted a big piece about ClimateGate at Samizdata, or whatever we’re calling it all today, my second Samizdata effort on this topic, hence my relative inactivity here during the last week or so.  All about why I think this story is huge (so far so obvious), and how I think it will stick around for quite a while because of the peculiar nature of the climate argument (that being the vaguely original bit), and because of the sheer number of individual, guilty persons who are now ready for and in need of skewering, because they fell for this fraud and decided to bugger up the world in accordance with it.

The first draft of this even made the claim that we are now be living through is the second great History Date of the twenty first century, the first being Sept 11th 2001.  Sadly, I don’t think that’s necessarily true, however much I might wish it to be.  To be an authentic History Date an event has to be agreed by everybody in all parts of the political solar system to be a Big Thing, even as everyone simultaneously slags each other off about what it all means and what to do about it.  The trouble with ClimateGate - and, as I’ve already hinted above, one of the problems is that we aren’t even agreeing what to call it - is that a huge slab of dupes and frauds would like nothing better than for the whole ghastly business to be totally forgotten.  For ClimateGate, or whatever, to win out and find its place next to Hastings, Magna Carta, the Great Fire of London, the Glorious Revolution, Trafalgar, Waterloo and the rest of them, then my team in this ruckus would have to win the battle of the history books.  Which we yet might, but this is not certain, to put it mildly.

This piece (one of the many on this topic linked to by the ever-invaluable Instapundit – never forget what a difference he has made and still makes to the world) confirms everything I said in my Samizdata pieces, about how the internet has totally changed the rules for arguments like this.  Love the 2001 A Space Odyssey pastiche.  Apparently, in the USA, whenever and wherever a big, pompous, biased, dead-tree organ now ventures onto the www with a piece about Global Warming, Copenhagen, etc., but without mentioning the shenanigans at UEA, CRUgate, ClimateGate, GlobalWarmingGate, ... commenters are piling in in their derisive dozens and even hundreds to remind them.

Fox News is all over it, in the person of Glenn Beck.  (I loved his mispronunciation of “East Anglia” - something like “Angleela"- the other day, on an earlier video, I think, than that one.) My friend Adriana Lukas recently told me that she told a good mate of hers at Fox News about this story when it first broke, and it was the first he’d heard of it.  Kudos Adriana.  Although they would have heard about it from someone soon enough.  It’s a different world, like my piece says.

And what do you know, only seconds, literally, after I had put up my big bit, Johnathan Pearce posted another bit on the same topic, just as foreseen/feared here.  I hope JP and others commenting on that earlier piece are right that this kind of duplication doesn’t matter, helps even.  Certainly this story is big enough to merit constant multiple Samizdata postings, every day.

A commenter on that Johnathan Pearce Samizdata piece said this:

At least now we can all agree, on both sides of the Climate Change debate, that Global Warming was caused by Mann.

Hah!  Wonder why I never thought of stroke came across that gag before.

And this may just be my favourite SQotD ever.

I recently emailed Bishop Hill (one of ClimateGate’s global blogstars) asking if he’d be willing to do an interview with me, along the lines of this one, in connection with his wit and wisdom generally, but in particular in connection with his forthcoming book.  And guess what, he has just emailed back saying yes.  But he is mind-bogglingly busy just now, so don’t hold your breath.  That won’t be happening any day soon, but in a few weeks, probably.  I’m looking forward to that a lot.

Michael Jennings has now just put up another excellent ClimateGate piece, also at Samizdata.

Regular readers of this blog will know that many a day of torpor here has been rescued by an incoming Michael J email, often (as there) with follow up comment from him of far greater sophistication, interest and intelligence than all but my very best postings here.

Michael Jennings is one of those people who likes - needs even - to know that people are interested in what he has to say before he says it, as is not quite the case with everyone, is it?  Hence some of his best bits of writing often take the form of comments, in answer to direct questions to which he happens to have a very good answer which someone has just asked and clearly would really like to know about.  But with this ClimateGate thing, I imagine he feels confident that people all over the place will be extremely interested in anything even semi-coherent that he has to say about that, and of course what he does say is far better than that.

Next, a couple of quotes from others about how this is all rather Bolshevik.

An incoming email to Instapundit recently went thus:

I now have a sense of what it was like living under Communism in Eastern Europe. The state-owned (in our case, establishment) press won’t report on reality so people had to turn to Samizdat to learn what’s actually happening in their world. It’s rather amazing. Also, having an Army of Davids go through these emails will pay dividends for years.

Indeed, and another Army of Davids asking those who swallowed this nonsense whole what they were thinking of, and what they are still doing, and why, and meanwhile what their expenses claims are looking like, should also now be assembling.  Count me, in.  (And see below.)

And see also this, from one of the comments on Michael J’s piece:

I had a sudden thought last night with regards to the “mainstream” response, particularly the self-serving response from UEA itself.  It is rather like claiming that Lysenko was just a rogue element within Soviet biology, and in any case his findings are supported by the overwhelming majority of Soviet biologists working in many places around the Soviet union and its satellite states, so the Lamarckian consensus within Soviet science remains intact.

I am now working on a piece provisionally called something like: Now is the time to subject the government of the world to Guidoisation - i.e., basically, to start blogging about it in a big (i.e.much bigger and more mainstream A-list blogger way), and to make it personal.  Who are the people doing it, where (Copenhagen will be a good place to accelerate the rolling of this ball), when, how, at what cost both in terms of public policy and in terms of the hotel and salary bills for their fatcat selves, what did these people do in the past (i.e.what mere countries have they already screwed with), and what have they said in the past (before they’d even got to the screwing their own country stage), what crackpot bolshevik groups were they in when even younger, who are they now arrived to, and why won’t the regular damn media report on all this (because they are part of the damn problem is why – let me tell you about what the owner of the Daily Deadtree was doing with whom last weekend), blah blah, blah blah.  I believe I may have some rather original and fruitful insights to offer about this.

Who the hell, exactly, and just for starters, is this Michael Mann creature?  (I’ve not read that Wikipedia entry and would not trust it as far as I could spit it.  When the left fascists have an axe to grind about anyone or anything, then Wikipedia is just leftist agitprop, with all critical but true additions edited out pronto.  And did I recently hear something about Wikipedia collapsing, or did I merely imagine it?) Last night at a book signing I attended, somebody told me that Michael Mann is a total bastard, far worse than any kind of regular scientist gone wrong, more like a cross between Lysenko and Beria.  So, as Arthur Seldon of the IEA used to ask of anyone interesting in a bad way: who he?  What he making from all this?  Who he married to?  Where he based?  Who he conned?  How many years he deserve in jail?

But, I promise nothing.

I wonder, might “Cruleak” be a good name for all this?  Just a thought, and probably not a very good one.  But I do agree with another of the commenters on Michael J’s piece that all these thingy-gates are becoming very tedious.