The tipping point has been reached...

...and the burden of proof is now with the alarmists. A subtle change in MSM coverage of the issue has been apparent since Climategate. This excellent post from Samizdata...

...I've just been watching this video, of Lord Monkton laying into the Climategate gang. What makes it so potent is that he is quite bluntly calling them crooks, and calling anyone who still follows their fraudulent prophecies dupes and fools. He names names, and crimes. Yes, crimes. And yes, criminals. Criminals with names. Monkton does all this in his posh British public school voice. Nevertheless, you can almost see him doing that thing that fist fighters do, but with their beckoning hands rather than with their mouths, and pointing at their own chins. Come and get me! Give me your best shot! I say you are a pack of scoundrels. Prove me wrong! I say that the logical thing to do about "climate change" is: nothing. Nothing. Why on earth do you still have the damned nerve to think anything else? Such pugilistic vulgarities are not to be found in the text of the talk. Monkton is too canny, too cool, to get that excited. But that is the subtext. Here is some other evidence that those with the job of chasing crooks are now getting interested in this. I agree with Johnathan Pearce...that the old-school media are definitely, albeit belatedly and with much embarrassment and confusion, starting to notice all this. You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives...though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It's all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time...

...this too (H/T PKH) excerpted from a letter to the UK Economist...Nikolay Semyonov, a Soviet scientist and Nobel prize winner in chemistry, wrote that:

“There is nothing more dangerous than blind passion in science. This is a direct path to unjustified self-confidence, to loss of self-criticalness, to scientific fanaticism, to false science. Given support from someone in power, it can lead to suppression of true science and, since science is now a matter of state importance, to inflicting great injury on the country.”

...the writer adds...Semyonov was referring to the ruthless manipulation of Soviet science by Trofim Lysenko and other opportunists. In a similar vein, it is time we recognise that we are becoming prey to a new fanaticism, a religious fervour that runs contrary to rational society...more here...

...AND breaking news from WuWT, a Russian report that the Hadley CRU used selective data only when analysing Russian weather stations so as to reinforce their warming prejudices...This is a very powerful accusation, which if true could change much about the climate science debate. Many papers are based on this dataset which has the highest trend of the major ground datasets...the complete report here...

Fraudsters, huckstering snake oil salesmen, profiteers and crooks...

...has he left anyone out ? From Christopher Monckton...This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.
The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be (link here) — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.
Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.
I am angry, and so should you be...more here...
...and news from the US based Competitive Enerprise Institute, a lawsuit pending against NASA GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies)...more here...

...and this little titbit re President Obama and the US Freedom of Information Act...On his first full day in office, January 21, 2009, President Obama issued a memorandum to the heads of all departments and agencies on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The President directed that FOIA “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” Moreover, the President instructed agencies that information should not be withheld merely because “public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

...and to top it off, this from George (Moonbeam) Monbiot of the UK Guardian...It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow... I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them....there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the IPCC... I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

...and for some light relief, brought to you by Minessotans for Global Warming, and sung to the tune of Draggin the Line, Hide the Decline...here...