Did Hadley hackers do a good deed if they did the deed at all?

Image of Planet Earth, courtesy of NASA.Commentary by Kay B. Day

The great front porch, the Internet, where the world congregates to debate or idle, has been abuzz for days over hackers who allegedly infiltrated Hadley University’s Climate Research Center in the United Kingdom.

Are the contraband emails posted on major media brand outlets and blog directories legit? Who can really say unless you’re one of the hackers or one of the expert perpetrators of propaganda distributed via colluding "scientific journals"?

Whatever the validity of hacking claims, if the alleged hacked emails and exchanges are genuine, they simply drive home what we’ve said about global warming alarmism at The US Report (our own portico in cyberspace) for quite some time.

We have repeatedly questioned alarmism over man-made global warming. One of the first indications we were correct came from the US government—an official shift from the use of the term ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change.’

Climate change is irrefutable. If I plant a new tree in my yard, I have changed the eco-system ever so slightly. If a starving Somali scalps trees in a forest fragment for charcoal, he has done the same. If a woman in Madagascar uses wood for fuel as most of her fellow citizens do, she has played a small role in climate change because the wood had to be cut from somewhere and there is no guarantee the trees have been or will be replaced. If China seeds clouds to make it rain, the country has changed the climate. None of these are permanent changes; they can be addressed with common sense approaches to land management. And so forth and so on.

Global warming alarmism actually began as global cooling alarmism—everyone knows that. And the alarmism, as it morphed into a very profitable religion for high profile leaders like former vice president Al Gore, began to dominate academia, scientific journals and major branded media. Politicians rolled over and played dead in the name of political correctness.

Developing nations began to see opportunity, fueled by biased reports from entities like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. After all, developing nations were already accustomed to an ever-flowing stream of revenue from developed nations. Developed nations have become the largest charities in global history.

Meanwhile, not much is being done to address the real implications of climate change. Developing nations still overgraze, deforest at alarming rates and tolerate internal warfare complete with rape, pillaging and burning. New Orleans still sits in a bowl and California will continue to provide fuel for wildfires. Gore will continue to live in a home that required sizable chunks of mountain be reshaped and he will continue to leave a heavy carbon footprint wherever his planes take him.

Religious organizations have even jumped aboard the bandwagon; after all, organized religion has become big business intent on growing coffers rather than addressing spiritual enlightenment. This is perhaps the most shameful illustration.

If the emails published are genuine, the result should be genuine shame on anyone who calls himself a scientist or statistician. Dr. Tim Ball said, via a phone conversation captured in a video by The Corbett Report and posted at Climate Realists, current alarmism represents the “hijacking of climate science by computer modelers and the IPCC.”

We must ask ourselves, if the Hadley hacking is bona fide, why must the world go to such incredible lengths to spur an international debate on global warming that, for ethical scientists, should have publicly aired voluntarily long ago? In the interest of real science as well as the interest of Main Street, Planet Earth.

Whether the hacking is real or imagined, the debate is real and it is a moral imperative.