Earth Worms: The Eco-Corruption of Higher Education

Abstract

“Climategate” has made global warming skepticism respectable. The release onto the web by a hacker or whistleblower of emails and 15,000 lines of computer code from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia has changed the debate over global warming. Researchers at CRU and some of their collaborators elsewhere applied what CRU’s own programmers called “a VERY ARTIFICIAL correction for decline” in temperatures that, according to the scientists’ pre-conceived theory, shouldn’t be declining at all. Elsewhere they wrote of the need for temperature data to be “artificially adjusted” to fit the theory, the need for a “fudge factor,” and, most infamously, the need to apply a “trick” to make the data conform. They also destroyed the original data so that no one could ever check how closely their manipulated data set matched the actual numbers. CRU’s official, though now highly suspect, data formed the primary empirical basis for the most influential theory of global warming. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 report was based on CRU reports. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in Acad. Quest. (2010) 23:11–19 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9150-6