CLIMATE CHANGE

Since those of us with roots in Oklahoma and Texas must deal with the insanity of elected representatives who would have fit more aptly in the 15th Century rather than the 21st, we must deal with the notorious blathering of the notion of “climate change being a hoax” (by Senator James Inhofe) or the necessity of the Governor of Texas to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for regulating carbon emissions. Last November, the emails of several top climate scientists were hacked and published. Climate deniers seized upon a handful of quotes as evidence that man-made global warming is actually in doubt in the scientific community. However, several independent investigations have concluded that the emails in no way casts doubt on the overwhelming, decades-long scientific research and the reality of climate change.

In case your friends who have an allergy to intellect and scientific research, I provide the accumulation below for you to offer our friends in denial. And, one additional thing…let’s just say the deniers are correct…wouldn’t it still make sense to develop cleaner sources of energy because we have to breath the air we pollute. Maybe you should suggest to your friends who doubt the damage done by greenhouse emissions that you would be better convinced if they would just hook up a plastic tube to one of their carbon emitting cars and breathe that air directly into their lungs for a week or two. I’m just guessing none of them will be bending over to wrap their lips around the exhaust pipe of their car to prove the point to you. This said…wouldn’t that be great if all the talent of FOX (so called) News and Rush Limbaugh would prove this point to us. Just think…Fox and the Excellence in Broadcast Network (Rush’s broadcast flagship) could just pump car exhaust right into the studios for the next year. Shoot, if they’d do that I be really convinced they believed what they said.

Now…here’s the claims and the responses to those claims.

#1 CLAIM: Scientists have manipulated data.

Skeptics have been pointing to an email from scientist Phil Jones where he said he used a "trick" with his data. As climate expert Bob Ward writes, "Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something -- a short cut can be a trick." RealClimate also explained that "the 'trick' is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term 'trick' to refer to ... 'a good way to deal with a problem', rather than something that is 'secret', and so there is nothing problematic in this at all."

#2 CLAIM: Scientists had private doubts about whether the world really is heating up.

TRUTH: Combing through over a decade of personal correspondence, which is then taken out of context can seem to prove just about anything. Skeptics have been pointing to one email from Kevin Trenberth, in which he said, "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." However, this is clear example of cherry picking quotes. Trenberth was referring to hat there was an "incomplete explanation" of the short-term variability of temperatures, but concludes that "global warming is unequivocally happening."

#3 CLAIM: These scientists worked to suppress evidence and deleted emails.

TRUTH: Thousands of emails from over 13 years were stolen, and edited, and have been taken out of context for those with a political agenda. As blogger Jeff Masters writes,

"Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change—which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines—is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists being subject to the fiercest attacks."

As climate czar Carol Browner says, "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists [of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.] These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real."

#4 CLAIM: Scientists have been working to remove skeptical peers from the climate discussion.

TRUTH: Organization politics, disagreement and strife are hardly foreign ideas in university, research and scientific communities. As the blog run by climate scientists Real Climate writes, "Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement." Again, this does not remotely prove any sort of cover-up, and the critiques of these papers were made and debated by scientists PUBLICLY, but perhaps less bluntly than they were stated in the emails. (Here's what the "infamous" line about keeping people out and peer review was ACCTUALLY about.)

#5 CLAIM: These emails are the final nail in the coffin for the idea that humans cause global warming.

TRUTH: If the denier's wildest claims were true that are bantered around throughout the Internet, wouldn't nearly 15 years of emails ACTUALLY SHOW some of these insipid rumors to be true?

More from Real Climate: "More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."

#6 CLAIM: This reignites the debate about if global warming is real.

TRUTH: There is strong consensus in scientific community that global warming is real and is caused by humans. The top scientists in the world have just released a new report on the realities of global warming. Kevin Grandia summarizes some of the key points about emissions, melting ice sheets, and rising sea levels. The emails don't change any of this reality.