“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
The quoted sentence, from an e-mail allegedly by a researcher, is being seized upon by global warming skeptics as one leading piece of evidence of collusion and data-tampering among scientists. I don’t have the time right now to sort through the material and discussion in the wake of the Great Hack of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned center focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change, but the above-linked article is a good starting point. Other good rundowns include the blog entry at the UK Telegraph by James Delingpole, or Ed Morrissey’s post at HotAir.
ClimateAudit‘s servers appear to be overwhelmed – but it will remain one of the best places to tease out the potential significance of the material (over 1,000 e-mails and I believe over 60 MB of other data) as it’s uncovered and analyzed. Most of the anti-warmist sites linked on Memeorandum are shuffling around the same e-mails, but all are pointing, or trying to point, to a conspiracy dam burst.
Comments 13
Gotta be careful with that. There are also many warnings that it be an elaborate hoax, or that the emails, if genuine, have been seeded with false discreditatory material.
No foul trick or manipulation is beyond extreme denialists, just as no foul trick or manipulation is beyond extreme warmists like Al Gore.
November 20th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Ve zhall zee.
November 20th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Arrogance is the crux of all so called progressive thought and policy.
Because they think the world should be warming, and even though they religiously ignore all evidence of natural, mostly sun related warming and cooling cycles, because THEY and only THEY have the education and intelligence to correctly perceieve this make believe reality, well then it must be so.
The same arrogance explains their insistance on redistribution. Because they are able to imagine a perfectly redistributed society, well then we must “work” (as Michelle 0 would have it) for a society in which goods and property are fairly distributed.
It’s the fucking arrogance.
That’s all it is.
November 20th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
@ scientific socialist:
The world did apparently warm leading up to abut the year 2000. And it seems pretty reasonable to speculate that the warming was due to increasing CO2 and other warming gases that we are producing. We have to be careful not to reflexively put the real scientists in the same cracked pot with Al Gore and that fellow Hansen at NASA who assumed that there was a straight line relationship.
We owe a great debt to the crackpots for producing things like the discredited hockey stick graph and also forecasts that have now been revealed to be worthless.
That said, we cannot continue to be completely heedless of how things we do may affect the climate. If we are not now powerful enough to do things that will affect the planet there will eventually come a time when we or our descendents will be that powerful.
Between here and when our descendants completely build over the planet like Asimov’s Trantor we need to spend a lot of effort on research and, yes, perhaps remediation or changes in the way we produce the power we use.
November 20th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I have never understood why the right and the left are unable to meet right down the middle and work together for a cleaner, greener planet with healthy lakes, rivers, seas and oceans.
November 20th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Isn’t that pretty much what has happened as we’ve gotten wealthier. We’re discussing things like cap and trade because a substantial percentage of us feels we can afford them.
Not me, by the way. I think that if CO2 controls are proven to be needed we should implement a tax on CO2 emissions starting relatively low, but with predictably scheduled increases to whatever level it of tax it takes to handle the problem. That’s the most straightforward way to handle it; but it gets no traction because it offers little potential for mainpulation and graft by politicians.
November 20th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
To me, the insincerity is most glaring when you consider the remedies proposed rather than the statements of the problem. If the problem is CO2, why isn’t nuclear power very very high on the lsit of remedies? Why doesn’t it deserve even a mention?
Taxing and controlling are the preferred remedies, because they are preferred in and of themselves. When crises are so convenient, I’m inclined to think they are mostly manufactured.
Sully, a “straightforward” tax on energy is a straightforward permission for the government to regulate all use of energy in the society. I think the reason lots of people think they can “afford” it is that as a society we have lost our proper fear of government.
November 21st, 2009 at 6:44 am
@ Margo:
“Commons” type problems require a government solution if there’s no way to privatize the commons, and it’s hard for me to imagine how to privatize the atmosphere and the climate.
I’m just favoring the least intrusive and arbitrary government solution when we get to the point where we clearly need a solution. Even though I agree with you that current generation of warmists is both gratuitously alarmist and untrustworthy, we will eventually get to that point.
November 21st, 2009 at 7:11 am
@ Sully:
I strongly disagree, Sully.
We may eventually get to the point where, unchecked and unchanged, our economic activity in itself represents a threat via the ecosystem to human welfare, but it’s just as possible that alternatives of various types – better capture at the source of CO2, successful geo-engineering, non-CO2 energy sources – mitigate or even eliminate whatever threats posed by our current energy consumption patterns.
When we were discussing the water vapor spewing ships that someone proposed a couple of months ago as one means of augmenting the Earth’s albedo, I made the same argument. If we accept the worst-case GW theories, we can react either by constriction – taxing and regulating the world economy, especially the economies of the advanced and currently most rapidly developing nations, into stagnation – or by mitigation and innovation within the context of an expanding technological and economic base.
No one has demonstrated a “cure” for the supposed disease that isn’t worse than the disease. That includes the cure of taxation that would – within the current context – amount to discouragement of economic activity and consumption, eventually, as in the texts of eco-theorists, a marginal and not so marginal discouragement of human life itself and everything that makes life worth living.
November 21st, 2009 at 9:39 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Why would anyone implement any of those alternatives unless forced to do so? For example, why build a CO2 sequestering power plant when the guy down the street can build a conventional one for 2/3rds the cost. Must be because a committee of semi tech literate politicians decided to force a bet of trillions on that particular technology.
A carbon tax would be complex and subject to manipulation; but less so than the alternatives because more transparent.
For historical analogy look to all the insanity around oil imports, energy policy, fusion research, etc. that has occurred since the 1970′s. Imagine instead an initial $1 duty on imported oil increasing at $1 per year for the past 35 years and scheduled to keep increasing for the next 100 years.
I don’t believe the proof is yet at a level to start such a carbon tax regime but such a regime would be better than cap and trade which has the potential to be a corruption money pot on a scale never before seen as has nearly been proven by the way the legislation has evolved.
Plus, the effects of a carbon tax, being transparent would be far harder to hide from the people than the effects of things like cap and trade and things like subsidization of nuclear.
November 21st, 2009 at 10:19 am
The pros and cons of a fuel tax are a separate issue, Sully. Lots of thoughtful cons are in favor of some such regime, and certainly as an alternative to Cap & Tax – often for security reasons as much as environmental ones.
The more basic and timely question, however, is what are the real potential costs of climate change over what relevant timeline, and what are the most effective ways of dealing with those costs.
The current scandal aborning may make the first part of the anti-warmist case easier to make: In essence that the danger is far from proved and understood, and therefore cannot justify the measures that the transnational Gorians envision. Up until recently, this seemed a more difficult case to make. The stronger ground, or at least the easiest argument to win, was always that, even if the sane worst case scenarios were coming to pass, that the actual measures being proposed weren’t coming close to coping with them – so what was the point?
If we simply can’t tax, regulate, and economically constrain ourselves out of the predicament – for whatever complex political, economic, and psychological reasons – the only logical response is to try something else, which would be to grow, advance, and liberate ourselves out of the predicament. Some anti-CO2 measures not strictly “free market” in design might or might not play a major role in such an effort. We can’t make the call until we’ve done a better job of comprehending the alternative in full.
November 21st, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Here ( http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/292/#more-6246 ) is an example of warming you can believe in (caps in original):
This is the site that broke the story on the shenanigans at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit in the UK.
November 22nd, 2009 at 6:54 am
Hey JOE!
How’s the teaching gig going? How’s the teachers’ unions treating you?
How about writing a separate piece about teaching public school? I’ve got 2 in public school.
Welcome back, dude.
November 22nd, 2009 at 8:41 am