posted December 14, 2009 05:14 PM         

Summary

In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded:

• The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.

• Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.

• E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

Analysis

Skeptics claim this trove of e-mails shows the scientists at the U.K. research center were engaging in evidence-tampering, and they are portraying the affair as a major scandal: "Climategate." Saudi Arabian climate negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban went so far as to tell the BBC: "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change." He said that he expected news of the e-mails to disrupt the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen this month. An article from the conservative-leaning Canada Free Press claims that the stolen files are proof of a "deliberate fraud" and "the greatest deception in history."

Missing the Mark

We find such claims to be far wide of the mark. The e-mails (which have been made available by an unidentified individual here) do show a few scientists talking frankly among themselves — sometimes being rude, dismissive, insular, or even behaving like jerks. Whether they show anything beyond that is still in doubt. There are two investigations underway, by the U.K.’s Met Office and East Anglia University, and the head of CRU, Phil Jones, has "stepped aside" until they are completed. However, many of the e-mails that are being held up as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented by global-warming skeptics eager to find evidence of a conspiracy. And even if they showed what the critics claim, there remains ample evidence that the earth is getting warmer. Even as the affair was unfolding, the World Meteorological Organization announced on Dec. 8 that the 2000-2009 decade would likely be the warmest on record, and that 2009 might be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. (The hottest year on record was 1998.) This conclusion is based not only on the CRU data that critics are now questioning, but also incorporates data from the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). All three organizations synthesized data from many sources. Some critics claim that the e-mails invalidate the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world scientific body that reaffirmed in a 2007 report that the earth is warming, sea levels are rising and that human activity is "very likely" the cause of "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century." But the IPCC’s 2007 report, its most recent synthesis of scientific findings from around the globe, incorporates data from three working groups, each of which made use of data from a huge number of sources — of which CRU was only one. The synthesis report notes key disagreements and uncertainties but makes the "robust" conclusion that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal." (A robust finding is defined as "one that holds under a variety of approaches, methods, models and assumptions, and is expected to be relatively unaffected by uncertainties.") The IPCC has released a statement playing down the notion that CRU scientists skewed the world body’s report or kept it from considering the views of skeptical scientists:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments. Consequently, there is at every stage full opportunity for experts in the field to draw attention to any piece of literature and its basic findings that would ensure inclusion of a wide range of views. There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed.

The facts support this assertion. In one 2004 e-mail that’s come under much scrutiny, Jones wrote of two controversial papers that "Kevin and I will keep them out [of the IPCC report] somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" But both papers under discussion, Kalnay and Cai (2003) and McKitrick and Michaels (2004), were cited in one of the three working group reports from which the 2007 IPCC report is synthesized.

Mixed Messages

The 1,000-plus e-mails sometimes illustrate the hairier side of scientific research. Criticisms of climate change are sometimes dismissed as "fraud" or "pure crap," as in this 2005 e-mail from CRU Director Phil Jones. Other messages, like a 2007 e-mail from Michael Mann of Penn State University, show indignation at being the target of skeptics’ ire. Some of the e-mails are in bad form; for instance, climate scientist Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory makes a crack about "beat[ing] the crap out of" opponent Pat Michaels.

Claims that the e-mails are evidence of fraud or deceit, however, misrepresent what they actually say. A prime example is a 1999 e-mail from Jones, who wrote: "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." Skeptics claim the words "trick" and "decline" show Jones is using sneaky manipulations to mask a decline in global temperatures. But that’s not the case. Actual temperatures, as measured by scientific instruments such as thermometers, were rising at the time of the writing of this decade-old e-mail, and (as we’ve noted) have continued to rise since then. Jones was referring to the decline in temperatures implied by measurements of the width and density of tree rings. In recent decades, these measures indicate a dip, while more accurate instrument-measured temperatures continue to rise.

Scientists at CRU use tree-ring data and other "proxy" measurements to estimate temperatures from times before instrumental temperature data began to be collected. However, since about 1960, tree-ring data have diverged from actual measured temperatures. Far from covering it up, CRU scientists and others have published reports of this divergence many times. The "trick" that Jones was writing about in his 1999 e-mail was simply adding the actual, measured instrumental data into a graph of historic temperatures. Jones says it’s a “trick” in the colloquial sense of an adroit feat — "a clever thing to do," as he put it — not a deception. What’s hidden is the fact that tree-ring data in recent decades doesn’t track with thermometer measurements. East Anglia Research Professor Andrew Watson explained in an article in The Times of London:

Watson: Jones is talking about a line on a graph for the cover of a World Meteorological Organisation report, published in 2000, which shows the results of different attempts to reconstruct temperature over the past 1,000 years. The line represents one particular attempt, using tree-ring data for temperature. The method agrees with actual measurements before about 1960, but diverges from them after that — for reasons only partly understood, discussed in the literature.

Other quotes that skeptics say are evidence of "data manipulation" actually refer to how numbers are presented, not to falsifying those numbers. For instance, in one e-mail climate scientist Tom Crowley writes: "I have been fiddling with the best way to illustrate the stable nature of the medieval warm period." Crowley is referring to the best way to translate the data into a graphic format. We’re the first to admit that charts and graphs can give a false or misleading impression of what data actually show. In the past, for instance, we’ve criticized a pie chart used by some liberals to make military spending look like a much larger slice of the federal budget than it really is. In fact, it’s been a major contention of climate change skeptics that a so-called "hockey stick" chart, so named because it shows a steep climb in temperatures in the last few decades, exaggerates the true extent of warming. That claim is contradicted by climate scientists, including the creator of one of the most contended "hockey stick" charts, and we make no judgment about that dispute here. We simply note that "fiddling" with the way data are displayed — even in a way that some may see as misleading — is not the same thing as falsifying the numbers. Much has also been made of the scientists’ discussion of Freedom of Information Act requests for their raw data. In fact, the vast majority of CRU’s data is already freely available. According to the University of East Anglia, a small amount of the data is restricted by non-publication agreements. Discussion of British FOIA requests in the stolen e-mails show scientists bristling at demands that they supply records of their own correspondence, computer code and data to people whose motives they question. In one e-mail about a request for data and correspondence, Santer writes critically of Steven McIntyre, a Canadian science blogger who runs the Climateaudit.org Web site:

Ben Santer e-mail, Nov. 12, 2009: My personal opinion is that both FOI requests [for data related to a 2008 paper and for correspondence dating back to 2006] are intrusive and unreasonable. Steven McIntyre provides absolutely no scientific justification or explanation for such requests. … McIntyre has no interest in improving our scientific understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. He has no interest in rational scientific discourse. He deals in the currency of threats and intimidation. We should be able to conduct our scientific research without constant fear of an "audit" by Steven McIntyre; without having to weigh every word we write in every email we send to our scientific colleagues.

It’s clear from the e-mails that there are people with whom the scientists would rather not share. What’s less clear is whether any deliberate obstruction actually occurred — that’s one of the subjects of the East Anglia investigation. Some e-mails refer to long discussions with lawyers and university officials about what the scientists may, or must, make available and to whom. In others, scientists let their critics know directly that data are freely accessible, or mention that they’ve already sent the information along, though they may not fulfill their opponents’ every informational wish. Climate change skeptics also say that the e-mails prove they’ve been excluded from peer review. In one e-mail, for example, climate scientist Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Academic Research writes: "If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted." Saiers later departed from the journal in question (Geophysical Research Letters, or GRL). However, Saiers says he isn’t a warming skeptic and that Wigley had nothing to do with his departure. When another professor (and blogger) asked Saiers about the Wigley e-mail, Saiers responded: "I stepped down as GRL editor at the end of my three-year term. … My departure had nothing to do with attempts by Wigley or anyone else to have me sacked." Investigators are still sifting through 13 years’ worth of CRU e-mails looking for evidence of impropriety. But what’s been revealed so far hasn’t shaken the broad scientific consensus about global warming. In an open letter to Congress posted on Climate Science Watch and other sites, 25 leading climate scientists (including eight members of the National Academy of Science) wrote:

Letter to Congress from U.S. scientists, Dec. 4: The body of evidence that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming is overwhelming. The content of the stolen emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming. … Even without including analyses from the UK research center from which the emails were stolen, the body of evidence underlying our understanding of human-caused global warming remains robust.

Confusing the Public

News converage of the e-mails and the various claims about what they supposedly show may have contributed to public confusion on the subject. A Dec. 3 Rasmussen survey found that only 25 percent of adults surveyed said that "most scientists agree on global warming" while 52 percent said that "there is significant disagreement within the scientific community" and 23 percent said they were not sure. The truth is that over the 13 years covered by the CRU e-mails, scientific consensus has only become stronger as the evidence for global warming from various sources has mounted. Reports from the National Academies and the U.S. Global Change Research Program that analyze large amounts of data from various sources also agree, as does the IPCC, that climate change is not in doubt. In advance of the 2009 U.N. climate change summit, the national academies of 13 nations issued a joint statement of their recommendations for combating climate change, in which they discussed the "human forcing" of global warming and said that the need for action was "indisputable." Leading scientists are unequivocally reaffirming the consensus on global warming in the wake of "Climategate." White House science adviser John Holdren said at a congressional hearing on climate change: "However this particular controversy comes out, the result will not call into question the bulk of our understanding of how the climate works or how humans are affecting it." The American Association for the Advancement of Science released a statement "reaffirm[ing] the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society." The American Meteorological Society and the Union of Concerned Scientists have also reiterated their positions on climate change, which they say are unaffected by the leaked e-mails.

– by Jess Henig

Factcheck.org

posted December 14, 2009 07:01 PM         

It's par for the course for this leftist Annenberg propaganda mill.

That's right, the person delivering the analysis of Climategate is not a scientist of any variety at all.

An MA in English Lit is the only academic qualification Jess Henig has to her name. Because that's true, Henig is totally unqualified to speak on the facts of any scientific subject.

posted December 14, 2009 07:29 PM         

So now every person without a degree in science is rendered unable to ascertain that scientists still widely agree about climate change? That's ridiculous.

posted December 14, 2009 11:27 PM         

Climategate damaged the scientific credentials of the global warming hucksters and it's now unlikely there will be any world wide agreement to cut carbon emissions.

Crap and Tax as envisioned by the scientific illiterate O'Bomber is dead in the Senate of the United States.

posted December 15, 2009 08:46 AM         

This idiot doesn't know the difference between a "Certificate of Live Birth" and a "Birth Certificate".

There's not the slightest reason for anyone to believe a word Jess Henig or Fact Check says about anything at all.

posted December 15, 2009 09:27 AM         

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This idiot doesn't know the difference between a "Certificate of Live Birth" and a "Birth Certificate".

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It's not a distinction that needs to be made. Hawaiian officials have repeatedly authenticated it as being true and official. No court has ever found otherwise. Your attempt at pointing out a Factcheck fallacy falls on it's face if this is the only thing you can come up with.

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There's not the slightest reason for anyone to believe a word Jess Henig or Fact Check says about anything at all.

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It would be more accurate to say, "There's not the slightest reason for anyone to believe a word Jwhop says about anything at all." Jwhop has a far worse track record for truth telling, and has been disproven repeatedly.

posted December 15, 2009 02:58 PM         

There's an even more important distinction when it's realized that Hawaii permitted...during the time frame O'Bomber claims to have been born....babies born outside of Hawaii and not in the United States to have their births registered in Hawaii using a "Certificate of Live Birth".

What's O'Bomber hiding?

He's hiding his long form original birth certificate.

He's hiding his university admissions applications.

He's hiding his university grade transcripts.

He's hiding his State Senate records.

He's hiding his passport records. AND

He's hiding his medical records.

Fact Check is an unreliable source for any factual analysis and your perfect little twit is the last person you should be attempting to put forth as an factual expert on any subject and especially on a matter of science.

posted December 15, 2009 03:09 PM         

You would think Algore would be more careful after a British Court ruled there were a slew of errors in his so called documentary.

You would think Algore would be more careful after getting caught parading a polar bear on a ice floe pretending it was out at sea when in fact it was close into the shore and the photographer who took the photo is ****** that Algore stole the photo which was his property and used it to totally misrepresent the facts.

You would think Algore would be more careful after getting caught creating a computer image...not a real image of an ice shelf breaking off and falling into the sea.

But no, Algore is the same kind of fraud the rest of the man made global warming crackpots are who misrepresent data, falsify data, create phony computer code...and all to perpetrate a fraud called Man Made Global Warming.

December 15, 2009
Oops! ...He Did It Again
Joseph Ashby

The former Vice-President has been caught spewing climate propaganda again. This time claiming “fresh” climate models show that the northern polar ice cap could (75%chance) completely melt in as little as five years.

Gore described the new projections as shocking, but perhaps the biggest shock came to the scientist Gore credited with the research. Timesonline reports:

The climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

To recap, Gore’s “fresh” news was several years old. The data was not so much data as it was a visit with a scientist; and most importantly the polar ice caps are not going to melt in five years.

posted December 15, 2009 09:28 PM         

I used to have strong opinions on the human-made climate change - now I'm rethinking.

Why?

Because I realise that governments will do whatever to manipulate and abuse the innocence of people to get more money through taxes.

Open up the world market for a start. Get India and China following behind in huge industrial output, ie, pollution.

Now get the western world humble workers to pay the taxes to cover:

*** the baby boomers gross over-industrialisation

*** the new industrial countries that can't afford hydro-carbon taxes

posted December 16, 2009 01:31 PM         

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Fact Check is an unreliable source for any factual analysis and your perfect little twit is the last person you should be attempting to put forth as an factual expert on any subject and especially on a matter of science.

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Factcheck is cited by both Democrats and Republicans quite often even having been entered in the Senate log by Republicans. No one -outside of you- thinks their analysis is unreliable (and they're certainly 100% more reliable than the blogs you post from).

Secondly, the author of that article isn't posing as an expert in science. Duh. However, the author does cite the experts rather widely, and those are the people you have to rightly disprove. That would be logical. Trying to make the journalist out as unreliable is a no-go. It's a false argument.

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But then again, I do worry when icebergs go floating past New Zealand....

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posted December 16, 2009 06:42 PM         

It's now come to light that all those "so called scientists" number 52 who worked in the Universities which were party to falsifying input and output data to produce the desired result for the UN IPCC That's not science.

2 years ago 31,000 real scientists from a wide range of climate related fields, most of whom are PhDs signed a statement saying man made global warming is a crock of crap.

This is the real climate record which these nuts were attempting to conceal and as anyone with eyes and 2 brain cells can determine, there is no unusual warming activity today. It was warmer in the period 1000-1300AD than it is now...and there were no SUVs, no carbon fueled industries and no jets spewing CO2 into the atmosphere.

Only the die hard nuts are still clinging to the man made global warming religion.

This is all you really need to know to determine that man made global warming is a hoax

Neither you or anyone at fact check knows whether O'Bomber is a "natural born citizen" of the United States. Neither you nor anyone at fact check has seen O'Bomber's long form "Birth Certificate". O'Bomber has spent millions of dollars to make sure he never has to produce his actual/original birth certificate, his university admissions applications, his grade transcripts, his passport records or his medical records.

posted December 16, 2009 11:48 PM         

and i repeat, even if the alarmists were right humans have yet to "improve" on nature without making things worse than they already were.

posted December 17, 2009 07:06 PM         

The last mark on the right side of the time scale is year 2000. Since 1998, there has been a cooling trend which continues today.

I would guess you have seen that graph before. I've posted it here numerous times and it's the standard graph showing the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. It's these 2 periods the global warming crackpot scientists have attempted to make disappear so they could show flat line temperatures for the last 1000 years and produce what is now called the "Hockey Stick" graph which the crackpots say shows catastrophic warming in the 20Th Century.

acoustic introduced fact check here and the very person involved in covering up the fact Bomber has not produced his long form "Birth Certificate" from Hawaii.

The Senate of the United States examined John McCain's "Natural Born Citizen" status and concluded...from a "Birth Certificate" and the prevailing US laws that John McCain IS a "Natural Born Citizen" of the United States.

No one has examined or vetted the citizenship status of Bomber and he's spend an inordinate amount of money to prevent anyone from doing so.

posted December 17, 2009 11:56 PM         

as i said, i agree with the facts your graph is supposed to back up. i just don't think this edition is very readable or clear. and 2000 was 10 years ago, so it doesn't go far enough by your explanation.

posted December 18, 2009 05:06 PM         

Palin vs. Gore Climate Showdown
The former vice president and former vice presidential candidate both offer distortions on global warming.
December 18, 2009

Summary
On Dec. 9, an op-ed by Sarah Palin on climate change ran in the Washington Post. Al Gore responded to Palin¡¯s piece and made some fresh claims of his own later that day in an interview with MSNBC. We find that both engaged in some distortions and have been rightly called out by experts in the field.

• Gore said that 40 percent of the polar ice cap is already gone. That's an outdated figure --it has recovered in the last two years, and is now about 24 percent smaller than the 1979-2000 average.
  
  
• Gore's claim that all Arctic ice would "go completely" over the next decade is greatly exaggerated. The scientist he is citing was actually talking about nearly ice-free conditions, and only in the summer months.

• Gore and Palin both left out information when discussing the economic impact of climate legislation. Gore dodged a question about job losses, and Palin ignored the potentially severe effects of doing nothing.

• Palin misrepresented the contents of the leaked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit, saying that they show "fraudulent scientific practices." That's not the case.

Analysis
The original Inconvenient Truther and the oil pipeline proponent actually had some common ground -- both agreed that global warming was real. However, they differed on almost every other point, starting with whether that warming has anything to do with human activity.

A Convenient Exaggeration

Gore offered some stale scientific data and some overly grim predictions when he said the "entire north polar ice cap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade."

The north polar ice cap is melting at rates that are certainly cause for concern. But it's not going quite as fast as Gore says. Gore's 40 percent figure is outdated. Arctic ice levels, as measured by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Boulder, were 40 percent lower at the end of the summer of 2007 than the average observed from 1979 to 2000. But the totals have actually increased for two consecutive years since. According to a release from the group, the average ice cover was 5.36 million square kilometers for the month of September 2009, compared with the 1979 to 2000 September average of 7.04 million square kilometers. That's a difference of about 24 percent, nearly half what Gore said.

And Gore was wildly off the mark when he predicted that all Arctic ice would "go completely within the next decade."

We should point out that ice levels in the Arctic region change seasonally. During the summer months some ice melts, and then waters freeze again in winter as the temperature goes down. The levels of summer melting have been going up for a number of years, and this could eventually lead to very minimal ice coverage during the summer.

One researcher, Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Post-Graduate School, made a projection in 2007 that a nearly ice-free arctic summer might occur as early as 2013, though he recently moved that back to 2020. But saying the north polar ice cap will be entirely gone is hyperbole. Even the most dramatic projections, such as Maslowski's, do not say the ice would be gone during the winter months.

Gore noted these caveats himself a few days later while presenting at the U.N. Climate Summit in Copenhagen when he said:

Gore: Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months will be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.

Even here, Gore was being a bit aggressive with his claims of "ice free" summers. In fact, Maslowski, whose work Gore cited, complained to the U.K. Telegraph that "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this. ...­ I was very explicit that we were talking about near-ice-free conditions and not completely ice-free conditions in the northern ocean."

Environment and Economy

Gore and Palin both made some roughly factual statements about the effect of climate change proposals on the economy. Palin said that proposed "cap-and-tax" [sic] plans will result in job losses, and she's right. Gore, by contrast, said that "the response to global warming can bring jobs back" -- and he's right, too. Overall, nonpartisan experts, including Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf, agree that proposed cap-and-trade legislation will kill some jobs, create others and ultimately have a small but negative effect on employment -- probably.

But neither combatant gave the full picture here. Gore, when asked about the economic effect of climate proposals, responded: "I think that the losses of jobs started a long time ago with the outsourcing to other countries for a variety of reasons, including the cheaper labor costs," he said. "It's not -- not because of the response to global warming." That's called dodging the question.

Palin, meanwhile, presented potential job losses and tax increases as evidence that "any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs." But if scientists are correct, the potential cost of doing nothing could be severe. The Congressional Budget Office said earlier this year:

CBO, September 2009: A strong consensus has developed in the expert community that, if allowed to continue unabated, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will have extensive, highly uncertain, but potentially serious and costly impacts on regional climates throughout the world. Those impacts are expected to include widespread changes in the physical environment, changes in biological systems (including agriculture), and changes in the viability of some economic sectors.

Palin Jumps the Gun

In her op-ed, Palin said that stolen e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.'s University of East Anglia show that we lack "trustworthy science" on the subject of climate change, and she argued that President Obama should have boycotted the U.N.'s Copenhagen summit as a protest against the "fraudulent scientific practices" the e-mails expose. But her catastrophic conclusions about the e-mails are not supported by the evidence.

Palin wrote: "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." As we said in our article on this subject, though, there are two ongoing investigations, but so far there's no evidence that deception or blacklisting actually occurred.

The "decline" under discussion is well-represented in the scientific literature, not covered up. The e-mail in question refers to supplementing tree-ring data with direct temperature readings in order to avoid an artificial dip where the two diverge; the divergence is not fully understood, but it has clearly not been buried. And while it's true that a few of the e-mails discuss the feasibility of barring skeptics from editorial positions, there's so far no evidence that this actually occurred.

Palin also said that "the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd." It is certainly fair to say that experts are not of a single mind about climate science. Groups of experts -- the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the national academies of science of 13 countries including the U.S., the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society and others -- agree that the planet is warming due to increased levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that human activity is in no small part responsible for the increases. But the specifics are, as in any science, a matter of study, research and debate.

One e-mail exchange between Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory scientist Edward Cook and University of Virginia scientist Michael Mann shows what scientific debate can look like in the climate field. After some back-and-forth about Cook's temperature reconstruction and his conclusions about the medieval warming period, Mann writes: "Lets figure this all out based on good, careful work and see what the data has to say in the end. We're working towards this ourselves, using revised methods and including borehole data, etc. and will keep everyone posted on this." Cook sums up:

I am quite happy to work this stuff through in a careful way and am happy to discuss it all with you. I certainly don't want the work to be viewed as an attack on previous work such as yours. Unfortunately, this global change stuff is so politicized by both sides of the issue that it is difficult to do the science in a dispassionate environment. I ran into the same problem in the acid rain/forest decline debate that raged in the 1980s. At one point, I was simultaneous accused of being a raving tree hugger and in the pocket of the coal industry. I have always said that I don't care what answer is found as long as it is the truth or at least bloody close to it.

Palin is right that not all climate scientists agree on everything. But she's wrong to imply that this invalidates the field or undermines the conclusions on which they do agree.

-- by Jess Henig and Justin Bank

Sources
Palin, Sarah, "Sarah Palin on the politicization of the Copenhagen climate conference," The Washington Post. 9 Dec 2009.

"Transcript: NBC¡¯s Mitchell interviews Al Gore," MSNBC. 9 Dec 2009.

Press Release, "Arctic sea ice extent remains low; 2009 sees third-lowest mark," National Snow and Ice Data Center. 6 Oct 2009.

Amos, Jonathon, "Arctic summers ice-free ¡®by 2013,¡¯" BBC News. 12 Dec 2007.

Hanley, Charles J., "Gore: Polar ice may vanish in 5-7 years," Associated Press. 15 Dec 2009.

Wardrop, Murray, "Copenhagen climate summit: Al Gore condemned over Arctic ice melting prediction," Daily Telegraph. 15 Dec 2009.

"The Economic Effects of Legislation to Reduce Greenhouse-Gas Emissions," Congressional Budget Office. Sept 2009

"G8+5 Academies¡¯ joint statement: Climate change and the transformation of energy
technologies for a low carbon future," accessed at the National Academies website 18 Dec 2009.

Seitter, Keith L., "Impact of CRU Hacking on the AMS Statement on Climate Change," American Meteorological Society.

posted December 18, 2009 05:20 PM         

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Since 1998, there has been a cooling trend which continues today.

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Oh? So you're going back on your previous conclusion that there is indeed global warming that's due to the Sun?

posted December 18, 2009 10:19 PM         

and it is undeniable that if we had less people, less crowding, less GARBAGE of every kind, there might be more, better quality food and shelter and life in general.

posted December 22, 2009 09:24 AM         

That solar radiance has now gone into decline and few sunspots are being produced. The temperatures on Earth have been in decline since 1998 and real climate scientists are much more concerned about global cooling.

Those with an attention span greater than gnats are aware of this and have been since reports of scientists concern over decreased solar radiance have stayed on top of real climate scientists concerns another "Little Ice Age" may result from declining solar radiation which began to surface in 2000.

There is no amount of lying or distortion of facts which will excuse the man made global warming crackpot scientists for foisting the total fraudulent hoax of global warming on the earth for political and financial power.

Let me help you get your Anal Dilation Dysfunction, (ADD) under control.

Rx:

Pull your head out of your ass.

posted December 23, 2009 09:20 PM         

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Flower, what is a Pleiadian?

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