My latest DeSmogBlog post is about the continued legal pursuit of Michael Mann's emails and documents from his time at the University of Virginia. Drawing on my recent reading of Michael Shermer's new book The Believing Brain, I make a prediction: Conservatives will find exactly what they are looking for, whatever documents they get:
Those who went seeking went in with a theory--that wrongdoing has been done. They all believe "ClimateGate," shown by multiple investigations to be a fake scandal, was actually a real one. So that is their premise. They will therefore read whatever emails they receive and find wrongdoing in them. They will find politics. They will find closed-mindedness and bias. And who knows what else they will find--but it will all be made to look bad. Will any of the charges be valid? I don't know, although I seriously doubt it. One thing we can be sure of, though, is that things will be taken out of context and used selectively. That's what happened in "ClimateGate" and that's what will happen again. Conservatives, in short, are targeting Mann and expecting to find another ClimateGate scandal. And I am watching conservatives and also predicting that they will find another ClimateGate "scandal." There's only the slightest difference between our views: The quotation marks. Which one of us do you think is going to be right?
You can read the full post here.
