It has been impossible the past few weeks to avoid things about the so-called scandal called “Climategate”.
Really, it’s a bunch of garbage. My original opinion stands: the folks at East Anglia (if they did in fact manipulate data) screwed up. Global warming is still a very real threat.
Anyway, just thought I’d take a break from procrastinating on writing term papers to repost this from Graham Thomson of the Edmonton Journal. His piece called The cloudy air of Climategate was in The Province today and I thought it was great.
I’d like to thank everyone who has written to me the past week about the “Climategate” affair to tell me this is proof positive that the theory of climate change is a hoax.
After all, I always appreciate hearing from readers.
But I’m not sure you needed to make your point by putting your comments in capital letters followed by exclamation points, although I suppose “GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!!!” has a certain flair.
However, no matter how large the type or all the exclamation points, the fact remains the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets continue to melt, the seas continue to rise, and the climate continues to change.
And the fact remains that no matter how loud the furor surrounding “Climategate” becomes, it does not disprove the theory of man-made climate change any more than the “Piltdown Man” fraud of 1912 disproved the theory of evolution.
“Climategate,” as it has been dubbed by global-warming deniers, involves the theft from the University of East Anglia of thousands of e-mails between several top climate change scientists. Cherry-picked quotations from the e-mails certainly make it appear the scientists acted unscientifically in trying to suppress contradictory research.
But many of the excerpts were taken out of context. The word “trick” in the e-mails, for example, has been played up as proof the scientists were trying to deceive the public, when in fact it’s a term used to describe a technique to deal with complex data.
More troubling, admittedly, are allegations the scientists conspired to suppress evidence that didn’t support their conclusions.
The scientists have denied any wrongdoing– but the scandal has forced Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit, to step down as an investigation starts up. Indeed, an investigation is needed to clear the air, so to speak.
The facts over Climategate are perplexing but what it clearly demonstrates is the lengths the denial industry will travel to in an attempt to to confuse the public over climate change. One Canadian climatologist, Andrew Weaver at the University of Victoria, says scientists face a well-orchestrated campaign of harassment by deniers of global warming. He says his office has been broken into twice and hackers have tried to break into his computer system several times. “They were trying to find any dirt they could, as they have done in the U.K.,” said Weaver. If they can’t find “dirt,” they manufacture it from out-of-context e-mails or skewed statistics.
Climategate has also demonstrated how inept scientists are at public relations. The moment the scandal broke the scientists involved tried to lay low, refusing to answer reporters’ questions. That gave the impression they had something to hide. When they did respond, the damage had been done.
The denial industry is ruthless, tireless and in more than a few cases well-funded by the energy industry. It is remarkably similar to the campaign launched by the tobacco industry over the years against scientific evidence linking cigarette smoke– first-hand and second-hand — to cancer. In fact, some of the very same people behind the tobacco-denial industry are behind the climate-change-denial industry.
Author George Monbiot wrote about this in his book Heat: How to Stop the World From Burning, and quoted a memo from one tobacco company saying, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Tobacco companies raised doubt by trotting out bought-and-paid-for experts who cherry-picked data. The tobacco industry and the climate-change-denial industry don’t have to prove that respected scientific data are wrong, they merely have to raise doubts about the data and confuse the public.
One favourite statistic used by deniers is that the Earth’s climate has been cooling, not warming, since 1998. However, the year 1998 was what Monbiot calls a “wild outlier,” where a strong El Nino effect combined with background climate change to create the warmest year on record. While no individual year has been as warm since then, the past decade has been the warmest on record.
Besides confusing people, Climategate has detracted attention from the latest evidence of climate change. A team of 26 scientists has released a new report called The Copenhagen Diagnosis that warns “several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago.”
Among the findings:
- Both Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass and contributing to sea-level rise at an increasing rate.”
- Arctic sea ice has melted far beyond the expectations of climate models.
- Sea level has risen more than five centimetres over the past 15 years, about 80-per-cent higher than Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections from 2001.
The report concludes “global emissions must peak then decline rapidly within the next five to 10 years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change.”
Even if you were to take the handful of scientists tainted by “Climategate” and banish them to a disintegrating ice floe in the Arctic, the science of climate change wouldn’t disappear with them.
