Right up front: I believe the data suggests fairly strongly that the globe has warmed since the 1970s. However, the extent of that warming and, more importantly, mankinds contribution to that are topics that I believe can be reasonably debated. There have been, however, several developments that indicate that the “O Noes! Evil American Cars are gonna kill us all!” crowd has been, shall we say, fudging the numbers a tad.
First up, there’s this nugget, courtesy The Telegraph:
… a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.
…
As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
…
But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:
Manipulation of evidence
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up
Suppression of evidence
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)
…
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.
For more, read this.
Additionally, check out Surfacestations.org. This site documents hundreds of official surface stations… the ground-based temperature sensors that are used to measure climate change in the United States. There are strict guidelines in how to build the sensor “shelters,” and where to locate them… and sadly, a disturbing number of them are located somewhere they *really* shouldn’t be. Like right next to the hot-air exhaust vent of an air conditioner, or next to asphalt parking lots. It would be difficult to locate a sensor somewhere that would give it a false cold reading… but it’s easy to locate it somewhere which will make it read falsely high.
Global warming is a major issue. And while the actual “warming” part of it is of course important, by far the biggest and most important aspect of global warming is the fact that it is being used by a vast number of collectivists in order to ram through massive changes to western countries – America in particular. If the scaremongers are accurate, then, yes, somethign should be done. But if the scaremongers, such as Al Gore (who stands to profit massively from global warming hysteria), are wrong, then it is not only pointless to “do something,” it is counterproductive… and ethically and morally wrong to screw up our economy and quality of life.
Here’s a simple test the next time you ponder a global warming alarmist: if they are demanding that we “do something,” is the “something” they demand we do somethign that would be good and proper regardless of whether there’s warming, or is is something that will serve to increase the power of government, reduce the freedom of the people, and transfer wealth from the productive to the non-productive?
From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of those who are most vocal about the need to fight global warming do not support reasonable solutions, but instead seek solutions that are indistinguishable from the goals of old-school Communists. If global warmign is a real problem, and humans are really responsible, there is one answer above all others that could mitigate the CO2 problem: nuclear reactors. And when it comes to actually controllign the temperature, the ability to do so via regualting “carbon credits” and the like is trivial compared to the power of “geoengineering.” So any global warmign alarmist who shrugs off nukes and geoengineering in favor of socialism… well, that alarmist is either an ignorant boob, or is a socialist simply using global warming as a cover.
And if the data supporting the warming is bogus… then the socialists need to be run out of town on a damned rail. Only then can we face the issue rationally.
UPDATE: A summary of some of the more entertaining and damning emails can be found HERE.
- Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
- Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
- Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709)
- Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news”.
- Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
- Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series”…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
And many, many more.
UPDATE 2: Searchable database of the emails.
UPDATE 3: Just cuz.
