With all due respect, this is exactly the “conspiracy” that the AGW skeptics are talking about. Why should people trust the reporting on AGW, when the reporters are clearly approaching the issue with a bias? People are told to trust the scientists and peer review process, when the emails make pretty clear that these folks were doing everything in their power to manipulate the peer review process to totally exclude AGW skeptical evidence, not based on flaws in their science, but based solely on their unfavorable conclusion. People are told to trust that reporters are unbiased and delivering the news in straightforward and honest fashion, but you admit that you’re known for your own bias in favor of AGW. Nothing can change your mind, and you’re going to make every effort to debunk skeptical reports, regardless of their merit. Apparently, you’ve arrived at your conclusions, and won’t put up with any contrary evidence.

Guess what? You’re an advocate, not a journalist.

Which is fine. But to many of us, that’s kind of surprising. You should probably disclose in your columns that you’re biased toward AGW and will make every attempt to refute contrary evidence. If I’m supposed to believe that AGW skeptical reports are biased merely because they’re funded by (for example) an oil company, why should I believe your reports are valid if you admit you’re biased toward AGW?

If you don’t see any problem with being cited as a reporter with bias, then I’m not going to trust your conclusion that the rest of the emails are kosher, either.

Does all that spinning make you dizzy?

No matter, it’s not the most important point as far as I’m concerned. What is important that by his own admission, Mooney didn’t know his own namewas in the Climategate emails until it was brought to his attention. He obviously didn’t examine the Climategate emails and documents very carefully.

Yet Mooney was proclaiming in November that Climategate “ain’t nothing”. He even cited Michael Mann, who sent an email to a colleague telling him to keep “dirty laundry” about the tree ring residuals away from skeptics.

There’s also the

This collusion undermines Mooney’s claim about how there’s so much independently gathered evidence supporting the warmist view. Look at how Mooney makes his strawmen.

“Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that all of the worst and most damning interpretations of these exposed emails are accurate. I don’t think this is remotely true, but let’s assume it.

“2) The studies that have been called into questions based on the emails (e.g., that old chestnut the “hockey stick”) are somehow the foundations of our concern about global warming, and those concerns stand or fall based on those studies.”

Far from “every other climate scientist on the planet” needs to be involved, if the ones colluding are extremely influential, and have no scruples about promoting each others’ work or running down the work of those who disagree, even it means subverting the peer review process.

Mooney also makes this an either-or case — you either believe or you don’t. But there’s a third possibility, that legitimate evidence has been exaggerated for political reasons.

Plainly, Mooney just doesn’t want to look too closely into Climategate, and he doesn’t want the public to, either. A rather curious attitude for a journalist to take.

Science writers with political connections face a dilemma when the evidence clashes with their politics. One alternative is to be true to the science and risk political discomfort and ostracism from their allies. If Mooney were, for example, to call out Michael Mann for his unethical behavior that defrauds science, he’d lose a politically sympathetic source. Same with Phil Jones, Ben Santer and the rest of the bad actors.

The other choice for a science writer is to defend their politics by betraying the science. It’s pretty obvious which course Mooney has taken.

It’s a short, two-year old email that Chris didn’t know about until now—i.e., until the events of the last few weeks that we’re commenting on. It means “in the present” where “the present” doesn’t mean just this very moment, but “in the current period,” i.e., “much, much closer to this moment than that moment two years ago.”

That was then—the two whole years that he didn’t know—and this is now, the comparatively very short period when he does.

6 days is less than a hundredth of the time that the email has existed on a server somewhere. That counts as “now” in a common English sense that I would have thought everyone would immediately recognize. It is precise to within a percent, and accurate within that precision, and that’s plenty good for normal speech about such things.

Besides, you can’t assume somebody who’s busy—you know, going off to copenhagen, interviewing people, being interviewed—literally posts things as soon as he begins to write them. “Now” can mean “since I last posted about this subject.”

People say stuff like this very, very frequently in normal speech. It’s paranoid to think that a six-day lag in writing and posting stuff that’s two years old amounts to lying about what counts as “now”.

Hyeesh.

A few years ago, I was more worried about science distortion from the right, such as from Michael Fumento. I wrote this after his Monsanto payola was disclosed:

Science and traditional journalism have an important principle in common: the concept of objectivity. Whether performing an experiment or writing a news story, the scientist or journalist is supposed to make sure one’s personal beliefs don’t get in the way of the facts or present a misleading picture. And when there is personal involvement, disclosure is the best policy.

Since 2003, Fumento had written a column in which he frequently extolled the wonders of biotech. But Fumento had a hidden financial motive for writing his column: He took money from agricultural biotech giant Monsanto, and was looking for more biotech cash. . .

Admittedly, Mooney is far more intelligent than Fumento, a clownish character who wrote a book on biotech that described DNA as a protein molecule! I do a lot of biotech writing, so Fumento’s idiocy is particularly offensive to me.

Agreeing with other posters here, Chris’ appearance in the emails was mentioned quite a while ago, and this post, like others I’ve read, feels disingenuous. If I’m to believe that this is the first time Chris has been made aware of his admittedly tiny role in this whole affair, then I have to question the weight of his opinions on the matter as a whole. To put it smugly, you can’t teach the course if you haven’t read the coursework.

Sorry, teach, but you sound less like a journalist and more like an advocate as time goes on.

I find it pretty amazing how Hansen (and possibly Chris Mooney) can isolate an email. Look at the one email and it’s no big deal, it says nothing.

Look at other emails to get the story. It’s like reading one page of a book.

Even if he were not mentioned, Mooney has every motive to pretend Climategate isn’t a big deal — it contradicts the line he’s been feeding us about how these are just innocent apolitical scientists studying global warming, harassed by those meanie conservative denialists:

“…(A)nybody who knows anything about scientists knows that they tend to be really shy about venturing into the political arena. Bizarrely, Theroux wants to lock scientists back up in the lab where, frankly, many would be glad to stay in the first place–because they know well there are many ideological opponents out there, out gunning for them.”