More Climategate Fallout

As I said in my post below, Climategate and Surrealism, Climategate will only fully flower when AGW scientists begin to turn on each other in an effort to salvage their careers and, indeed, the legitimacy of science itself. We now have another another significant crack in the AGW armor, this from Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia as he strongly criticizes the IPCC and his fellow researchers. He characterizes the IPCC meeting in Copenhagen as "raw politics, not . . . the politics of science," states that the IPCC has been at the heart of politicizing climate science, and suggests that the IPCC has "run its course." Commenting on the e-mails made public, Mr. Hulme makes a damning, if understated, indictment of his colleagues:

This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

That is a tactful way to put it. What makes it all the more interesting is that Hulme is an "insider" in the top echelon of the AGW community who is, as Bishop Hill points out, implicated in some of nefarious practices outlined in the now public CRU e-mails.

Hulmes' act of AGW canabalism / attempt at self-preservation comes on the heals of the calls of many, such as Chritopher Booker at The Telegraph, who are much less tactful in their assments:

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age."