"Climate-Gate": Caught in the act?

Since I believe man-caused climate change is largely a crock, I've been thrilled to glean whatever little bits and pieces of information are available about the so-called scientists at East Anglia University, one guy from Penn State that I've heard about, et. al., being busted for essentially fabricating the evidence that's supposed to support their views, manipulating the peer-review process, suppressing contrary opinions, etc. etc. etc.

Does anyone remember Michael Bellesiles? He was a professor at Emory University, and in 2000, published a book called Arming America: the Origins of a National Gun Culture. He even won a Bancroft Award for the book, quite a prize for a historian.

The book argued that guns were not nearly as prevalent in the colonies and in early America as our national mythology believes. Bellesiles said he went through probate court records, among other local county-level records, trying to actually count how many guns might have been available in an early American community. Probate courts recorded legacies, inventories of household goods for wills, and stuff like that.

Based on this evidence -- and perhaps information from other sources as well -- Bellesiles concluded that guns weren't nearly as available on the frontier as American mythology would lead us to believe. Basically he was undermining the traditional view of guns as an acceptable feature of everday life throughout American history. The liberals loved him. His research helped them, they thought, to build a case against the Second Amendment.

The thing is, on the frontier especially, early Americans had weapons of all kinds. They didn't use them for sport, but for hunting, for chasing off predators, for defending their own property against whatever came down the pike. Guns were an indispensable feature of life on the frontier, perhaps less so on the eastern seaboard as on the frontier that moved steadily west through the first 150 years of American history. If you couldn't hunt or defend yourself, you probably couldn't survive very well for too long.

For example, I read one pioneer's account of regularly loading his shotgun with salt as a means of chasing off wolves, bears and such without wasting ammunition, which apparently could cost a lot of money so far from the cities. (You bought the lead and powder and made shot yourself.) Shotguns were recommended for the farmer's household, while rifles, like the Hawken or Browning initially, were the weapons of choice for hunters, trappers, and others who actually made a living havesting beaver and buffalo. They were all terrified of Indians, too, who were pretty well armed themselves via the trading posts established first by the British and French, even before the Louisiana Purchase.

Anyway, for all these reasons, other historians questioned Bellesiles' data and a few of them actually began checking his footnotes and sources. In some cases, his sources didn't exist -- like, he said he drew information from sets of documents in communities around what's now San Francisco. However, all of those documents were destroyed in the catastrophic earthquake of 1906. No way Bellesiles could have had access to that data.

When others asked to review his notes, Bellesiles claimed that there had been a fire in his office building, which apparently was true, and that his notes had been destroyed when the sprinklers went off. He had a lot of excuses. Basically, his dog ate his notes.

The result was that his Bancroft Award was taken back, he was suspended and eventually resigned from Emory, and he's been thoroughly discredited as a historian.

So now we hear a similar story from the Climate Change researchers. They claim they had something like 150 years of weather and climate data, and that their computer models and projections about climate change were built on that hard data.

Only, guess what? They don't have that data anymore. It was all destroyed way back in the 1980s, so all that's left of it, they say, is the conclusions they drew from it -- which have proven to be inaccurate at best. That is to say, the models failed to predict the global cooling of the last 10 or 11 years, so why should anyone believe their projection for the next 30 years would be anymore accurate?

At the time of Bellesiles scandal, he was accused of letting his zeal for gun control get in the way of his better judgment as a historian.

Think the same kind of thing could be at work currently among the Climate Change "scientists?" The triuimph of ideology over the scientific method?

So before the US congress, or any other congress for that matter, goes about instituting guidelines and treaties that will dismantle the industry of the First World and demand hefty economic aid, or the "redistribution of wealth" to the Third World -- before destroying the world as we know it, can we get some REAL data on this?

Or are the tree-huggers such lunatics that they don't require facts, just ill-considered and destructive action? But I guess we all know the answer to that one.