Climate-gate!
by ilene - November 21st, 2009 4:39 pm
Here’s more on the climategate story, from a few different perspectives. – Ilene
Climate-gate!
By Andrew Leonard at Salon
The climate-change obsessed blogosphere — including both those who accept the science behind anthropogenic climate change and those who deny it — is in an absolute uproar today after the revelation that an unknown party hacked into the computer system of an important climate research center and posted hundreds of private e-mails to a Russian FTP server.
To climate skeptics, the e-mails prove that global warming is a conspiracy theory. At Wonk Room, Brad Johnson rounded up the politicized reaction:
- If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW," says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.
- Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss "repetitive, false data of higher temperatures."
- The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, "The blue-dress moment may have arrived."
- "The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century," blares Michelle Malkin.
- The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are "proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in modern [sic] science."
RealClimate, a blog maintained by real climate scientists, is busy doing damage control. This story will no doubt rage for weeks, so I’m just going to pick one example of the back and forth before trying to take some time to go deeper, if merited…
So what’s going on here? Put aside the question of whether the words "trick" or "hide" have nefarious or innocuous meanings. The scientific problem is that in attempting to reconstruct temperatures in the past, climate scientists are often faced with the problem that there were no humans standing around holding thermometers and writing down temperatures. So scientists use "proxies" — tree rings, or ice cores, or fossilized clams, or lake pollen trapped in sediment…
Overall, the more data we have, the more clear it has become to the vast majority of scientists working in this field that the earth has gotten significantly hotter at an alarming rate in the last century, most likely due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And if there really is a smoking gun in the…