I have talked of a lack of debate on the global warming causation here (also check our global warming category), and now there is the hoopla about – forgive me – “climategate” (I really wish I didn’t use that term). I don’t really have anything new to add to all the news about the UAE hacking that led to the discovery of the discussion of destroying evidence that didn’t fit the needs of certain climate scientists. There are many who are hyperventilating about this being the end of the global warming agenda for Al Gore and others – I don’t agree. And there are also plenty of people defending the scientists by saying that there are valid reasons, and explanations, and that there are plenty of checks and balances at the IPCC – again, I don’t agree.
All I can add is my continued dismay at the way this discussion and debate is handled, and that my skepticism grows, not shrinks, because of the “experts”.
Josh
Elijah
Greg
Michael
Mark
Dude Man
Agreed. I hope that this story gets its due press, and it’s not just us skeptics who read those emails. I personally don’t mind that its got a stupid name like climategate because I want people to realize that it’s a real scandal deserving of a stupid name. I don’t expect this story to stop such a popular (and, might I add, profitable) theory dead in it’s tracks, but I hope it will at least cause some to second guess conventional wisdom when it comes to global warming- oops, I mean climate change.
“Climategate” started out when there appeared on the Internet a collection of e-mails of a group of climatologists who work in the University of East Anglia in England. These documents reveal that some climatologists of international preeminence have manipulated the data of their investigations and have strongly tried to discredit climatologists who are not convinced that the increasing quantities of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are the cause of global warming.
It is true that a majority of the scientists who study climatic tendencies in our atmosphere have arrived at the conclusion that the world’s climate is changing, and they have convinced a group of politicians, some of whom are politically powerful, of the truth of their conclusions.
A minority, however, is skeptical. Some believe that recent data that suggest that the average temperature of the atmosphere is going up can be explained by natural variations in solar radiation and that global warming is a temporary phenomenon. Others believe that the historical evidence indicating that the temperature of the atmosphere is going up at a dangerous rate is simply not reliable.
Such lacks of agreement are common in the sciences. They are reduced and eventually eliminated with the accumulation of new evidence and of more refined theories or even by completely new ones. Such debates can persist for a period of decades. Academics often throw invective at one another in these debates. But typically this does not mean much.
But the case of climate change is different. If the evidence indicates that global warming is progressive, is caused principally by our industrial processes, and will probably cause disastrous changes in our atmosphere before the end of the twenty-first century, then we do not have the time to verify precisely if this evidence is reliable. Such a process would be a question of many years of new investigations. And if the alarmist climatologists are right, such a delay would be tragic for all humanity.
The difficulty is that economic and climatologic systems are very complicated. They are not like celestial mechanics, which involves only the interaction of gravity and centrifugal force, and efforts to construct computerized models to describe these complicated systems simply cannot include all the factors that are influential in the evolution of these complicated systems.
All this does not necessarily indicate that the alarmist climatologists are not right. But it really means that if global warming is occurring, we cannot know exactly what will be the average temperature of our atmosphere in the year 2100 and what will be the average sea level of the world’s ocean in that year.
It also means that we cannot be confident that efforts by the industrialized countries to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will have a significant influence on the evolution of the world’s climate.
Alas, the reduction of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would be very costly and would greatly change the lives of all the inhabitants of our planet–with the possibility (perhaps even the probability!) that all these efforts will be completely useless.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
HK Jr,
I appreciated this comment until I realised that you just copied a post from your blog. Our comment space are for the furthering of discussion and we’d appreciate your input, but perhaps you should be more straightforward and write something like, “I recently posted something about this topic in my own blog…” Feel free to provide a link to your own blog, but don’t simply copy and paste what you’ve written before and leave it at that. Such practises are borderline spam.