08 December 2009

Sarah Palin's Nonsense

UPDATE: This post has some commenters riled up. Please do be sure to read down to the part about science policy. For those wanting to debate whether the CRU emails call into question proposals being pushed in Copenhagen, I suggest visiting Ben Hale's blog, where he is taking on all comers on this sort of question as related to the emails. Anyone who wants to debate how policy gets made based on "sound science" and not "politics" is free to make that case in the comments here. Good luck;-)

You won't find two more wrong statements in an op-ed anywhere in 2009:
This [email] scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics.
The tragedy of the CRU hack is not that opportunistic politicians will seek to exploit it for political gain -- that is, after all, what politicians do. The tragedy is that a large part of the scientific community will respond to such political exploitation in kind, without dealing with the important issues raised by the emails, further exacerbating the pathological politicization of climate science. It is a downward spiral that Sarah Palin is happy to help along.