The precipitous decline of a once-great newspaper.
Today at the Wall Street Journal we find an appalling article titled Climategate 2.0, by one of Britain’s most deranged and dishonest climate change deniers, James Delingpole — who often appears on the crazed radio show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Every sentence in this first paragraph is an outright lie:

Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet….

No, these private emails were stolen, by someone with an obvious agenda to sabotage the UN climate summit.

Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data…

Absolutely false. Neither batch of emails shows scientists “fudging” anything. Seven independent investigations confirmed that the first release showed no scientific wrongdoing whatsoever, and the scientists were utterly vindicated. The second release is just a warmed over rehash, with even less substance than the first; if the deniers behind this illegal theft had any real bombshells, they would have released them already.

…conspiring to bully and silence opponents…

Again, absolutely false. The scientists do discuss the bullying and lying tactics of climate change deniers, and how to respond to them, however — the same sort of bullying and lying you see in this article by Delingpole.

… and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

And this is also absolutely false. The emails show discussion about various aspects of the scientific data, and as always in science, disagreements about the meaning of some findings. There’s no evidence whatsoever in these emails of doubt about the “reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory.” None.

The rest of Delingpole’s article continues in this vein, shamelessly lying about the meaning of these stolen emails. The Wall Street Journal should be humiliated to have fallen so low that they would publish such a dishonest article about such an important subject. Disgusting.

UPDATE at 11/28/11 9:27:06 am

Here’s the man tapped by the Wall Street Journal to write about climate change, demonstrating his deliberate ignorance on the subject — and admitting openly that he never even reads any scientific sources. Instead he relies on other people’s “interpretations.”

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