This is a letter I sent in reply to a most authoritarian opinion piece written by David Suzuki on among other things "Climategate": where he says what we "must" do. I say we should stop this silly replacing science with insult, else we revert to a more primative way of looking at the world.

.........

In his opinion piece in the Era Banner David Suzuki starts by alluding to emails recently released at East Anglia. He dismisses this event with insult, and tellingly no discussion of content. People are just "wetting their pants". If this is an event of interest only to babies then why has the head of perhaps the key climate research centre in the world (Phil Jones) stepped down while the (apparently) fraudulent conduct of his organization is investigated by the relevant government authorities? Why has that organization already determined that their dataset must be completely redone? This will be a three year process since the researchers took the raw data and threw it in the garbage "to save space during a move".

To put the importance of this dataset (the basis of which was thrown in the garbage) in context the HADCRUT3 dataset is the core temperature data that the mid-term temperature studies (back to 1850) use to study climate change. It was this dataset one of his researchers (Michael Mann) used to create the famous hockey stick graph that Al Gore so famously used in "The Inconvenient Truth" and was used as the centre piece of the last IPCC policy report. Among the leaked emails was one advocating the use of similar "tricks" to make it appear as if there is warming (even when the data in that period did not support it) with newer work. They did keep the modified version of the dataset of course, but given the clear violation of scientific method exposed in the leaked emails any trust that the alterations between raw data and the final dataset were done based on science will have to be verified. Among the leaked documents was a sheet indicating the modifications that seem to have been used, 6 out of 7 increased the raw temperature data prior to publishing. Maybe this is required, I don't know, but I would want impartial and peer review accepting scientists to figure that out and not the school kids cooking the results that were exposed here.

This is not isolated, the leaked emails and documentation include incriminating activity written by 12 out of the 26 authors of the Copenhagen Diagnosis. That document is being used as a basis by most global political leaders to decide how to spend trillions (not billions, trillions) of dollars this week. By dismissing this as just some wild conspiracy theory David Suzuki exposes his deep seated bias on the topic, a bias that has taken on quasi-religious fervour with so many people.