ClimateGate gets even more bizarre

ClimateGate is serious.  When prominent climate scientists fudge results, refuse FOIA requests, take steps to restrict publication of dissident views, etc., it’s serious business, especially when their global temperature records were used by policymakers to call for a transformation of modern economies.

However, there is some humor in ClimateGate.  Here’s some odd stuff a commenter on the website Climate Audit picked up as a result of checking out the file HARRY_READ_ME.txt – one of the hacked files.  The “Harry” file tells the tortured story of a programmer at CRU struggling to make sense of inconsistent, missing, and incompatible data files and seemingly to try to replicate them.  Many of those files had earlier been compiled by someone named “Tim,” who seems to have really made a mess of things.  According to the commenter, this “Tim” seems to be Tim Mitchell – who worked at the Climactic Research Unit at University of East Anglia when he was a Ph.D. student and then received his degree.  At the time, he also was a member of — no joke — South Park Evangelical Church, as he notes in his religious writings on climate change and religion.

Here’s an example:

The government urges us to reduce our energy usage so that we may indulge ourselves in other ways, but we have a higher motive for reducing waste (1 Timothy 6.17-19). Although I have yet to see any evidence that climate change is a sign of Christ’s imminent return, human pollution is clearly another of the birth pangs of creation, as it eagerly awaits being delivered from the bondage of corruption (Romans. 19-22).

That does make me a little uncomfortable about this guy being in charge of global temperature records to show we’re destroying the earth.  Can’t check out his academic/research papers at CRU.  Surprisingly, they’ve been taken down.