Sirs
In the wake of the initial climategate scandal back in 2009, I wrote to the Taipei Times several times to urge you to run at least some coverage of the breaking story. As I recall, you eventually did - but a month late, and pushed to the back of the features section.
Last week, a similar scandal has emerged in which a leading U.S. climate scientist has admitted to committing identity fraud in order to acquire documents from the Heartland Institute. Although those documents revealed personal information about the Institute's donors, they did not cast the Institute in the cartoon image of "Big-Oil-funded right-wing propagandists" so typical of how rank, CAGW activists apparently imagine skeptics to be. Moreover, there is ample reason to believe that one of these documents, the so-called "2012 Climate Strategy" memo, was a forgery; it included the claim that the controversial nature of climate science was a key point in "dissuading teachers from teaching science". Although "anti-science" may be a popular defamatory cartoon with which rank CAGW activists like to portray skeptics, it merely reflects their own discomfort with debate.
To date, the Taipei Times has run only one piece on this story - and that was an AFP piece in which the perpetration of identity fraud was referred to in inverted commas as a "crime". When will the editors of the Taipei Times distance themselves from the hubris of the international Left and realize that people skeptical of the claims of climate scientists are not the "crazy", "anti-science", "lying", "denialists" that rank CAGW activists imagine us to be?
The longer you continue to entertain such febrile and uncritical views in your pages, the greater disservice you give to journalistic virtues.
Cover the story and its' implications for the credibility of climate science.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent: Monday February 27th 2012).
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