Chris Horner, who’s not a scientist but rather an attorney, held his own and then some. He’s written several books on the subject and knows much more than the typical layman.

I’d never seen Steve McIntyre before (he’s the guy who debunked the Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”). Unfortunately, like many scientists, presenting oral arguments doesn’t come as easily to him as it does to Horner.

Oppenheimer was smooth, but he’s had at least 25 years to polish his presentation.

Maybe I’m an optimist, but I still stand by my belief that AGW will either rise or fall on the data. It may take years, or even decades (the Piltdown Man took some 40 years to be discredited), but ultimately science should win out over politics.

At the end of the segment, Campbell Brown expressed the hope that transparency will prevail. I agree, but the debate has to go beyond the emails and center on the actual research.

Last night, the evening TV news prgram “Tageschau” on the German First Program (ARD) ran a piece about ClimateGate. The announcer mentioned that in mid-November, a hacker gained access to emails and documents from the University of East Anglia. Yet there was no explanation as to why this wasn’t reported until December 5th, almost literally on the eve of the Copenhagen summit.

One interesting portion of the piece was an excerpt of an interview with Phil Jones, erstwhile Director of the CRU, in which he said (in English, with German overdubbing) that we can’t explain the rapid increase of temperatures without including greenhouse gases into the model. This was immediately juxtoposed with the CRU email that exclaimed, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t” [ARD's emphasis (in German)]. This was followed with the imfamous “Mike’s nature trick” email.

Next was an excerpt of an interview with Edward Acton, the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, admitting that there were some regrettable emails, but the research itself has yet to be investigated by an indepedent commission.

Although ARD admitted that the damage was already great (citing Senator Inhofe’s call to postpone all climate decisions), there was also a statement from Ed Milliband, the UK Environmental Minister, who claimed that a couple of emails can’t negate a couple of decades of climate science.

I don’t know whether the U.S. mainstream media has begun reporting on ClimateGate; the last I heard, it was 14 days of silence (and counting). At this point, I don’t hold out much hope, nor do I care, quite frankly. Media bias has proven so widespread that I’ve all but given up on getting my news from the broadcast networks, as well as most cable news outlets, for that matter.

But where it is being reported, a consensus is beginning to emerge. Embarrassing emails notwithstanding, the resolution of this debate is going to be where it always should have been in the first place: in the data, and how it was manipulated.

Even if global warming is predominently man-made (a possibility I haven’t totally ruled out), how will we ever know for sure if original data has been destroyed and/or computer programs are hopelessly flawed?

In the age of the Internet, when we have the capability of virtually unlimited amounts of data being accessed by anyone with a modem, the only excuse for not maintaining total scientific transparency is either national security (e.g. the Manhattan Project) or proprietary material (i.e. patented or copyrighted). Pure science should be out there for all to see – and critique.