The New Denialists

The reaction to the Climategate scandal from the die-hard AGW fanatics has been a thing to behold. They are in complete denial about the emails. The alleged news organisation, the New York Times, is focussing its coverage on the actions of the whistleblower, and running interference for those implicated in this scandal. Funnily enough they do not have the same attitude to other leaked information. In this, as in so many things, they are acting as partisan hacks rather than as journalists.

Worse than even the NYT is the BBC which had the new information for a month before the scandal broke, but did not publish it. They are just another discredited 'news' outlet.

Leftist intellectual George Monbiot is a strong supporter of the AGW thesis. The new information, while not causing him to change his mind on AGW, has given him pause for thought. He apologised to his readers, and acknowledged the seriousness of the now public CRU emails.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

This ability to engage and deal with new facts as they emerge is the difference between true intellectuals and mere ideologues.

UPDATE:

Andrew Revkin at NYT (who you can see being duchessed in the Climategate emails) is showing signs of critical thinking.