Why it matters:
A handful of scientists guilty of improper conduct does not refute the science of climate change and allowing talking heads to make that argument is unacceptable and dangerous.
Recap:
This just in from the New York Times (and many thousands of other new sources)… Hacked and leaked emails from the University of East Anglia in Great Britain have climate change skeptics bristling. The messages, ten years worth, are considered by some the smoking gun that proves scientists have “conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.”
The emails in question, attributed to “prominent American and British climate researchers,” run the gamut from whether or not to make public certain data, to personal attacks on skeptical colleagues. In at least one such exchange, the authors suggest finding ways to have skeptical scientists removed from the editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals.
Commentary:
Whoo-boy! The talking heads are loving this story. Some (inexplicably) claim these emails are irrefutable proof that global warming is a hoax. The other side asserts this is just scientists being scientists, at worst guilty of leaving out confusing data that might confuse lay-persons.
Two of the most level-headed commentaries about this “scandal” come from The Colbert Report, where Yale professor Dan Esty asserted that the scientists had (ill-advisedly) omitted some data to simplify the climate change debate. Well, they got what they deserved, an over simplification of the debate…as Colbert (and some of his pundit peers) put it, “They lied => Global warming not real.”
But if satire isn’t your bag, Popular Mechanics’ Peter Keleman, a geologist with “30 years of research experience, takes a much more clinical approach. In short, he condemns the authors of the emails, asserting that their actions and attitudes only harm efforts for climate action. Like Esty, he concludes with what we know for certain about climate change, most notably: the greenhouse effect is fact, CO2 levels are dangerously high and rising at an unprecedented rate, and these CO2 levels have risen exponentially in correlation with human industrialization.
Some of the talking heads are gleefully claiming these emails are the smoking gun that proves climate change is a myth. But with the vast majority of the scientific community accepting the reality of human-induced climate change, the only thing these emails prove is that a few scientists felt threatened by the skeptics and weren’t willing to let the facts speak for themselves.
There is one gun analogy that does fit beautifully though. Keleman points out that many climate change models show disastrous effects in the near future, some in the next ten years. To do nothing, Keleman asserts, would be the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette.
At a recent presentation about just how risky continuing with business as usual would be, MIT Professor Dr. John Sterman took it a step further to say it would be like playing Russian Roulette with 16 of 17 chambers loaded. I don’t like those odds.
Creative Solutions:
- Turn Off Your TV
- Join 350.org
- Green Your Business
- Go see “No Impact Man”
- Understand Climate Change through Interactive Simulations
- Write a letter
- Support the Center for Public Integrity
- Become a Member of the Rainforest Action Network, Krypotinite to Big Business
Great piece and it is true. Why isn’t the mainstream media playing this over and over? I especially like your solutions at the end of the article!
Scientists purposefully eeking out skeptics does not mean that they’re wrong – it means that they’re smart and motivated to get their message out to the public.
The shoe has been on the other foot many times with the exact same scenario (i.e. skeptics intentionally try to push out scientists from panels and conceal differing evidence).
In fact, THAT scenario has happened more often on multiple subjects because they have lobbyists who actually are paid to make it happen!
The talking heads don’t think twice about the fact that big tobacco paid scientists to say that ‘cigarettes are good for you’ or when chemical companies paid scientists to say ‘there’s no link between crop pesticides and cancer’ – and when unbiased scientists conduct the tests, all of a sudden those studies get proven wrong…
Just like Deep Throat from ‘All the President’s Men’, or Lester Freamon from ‘the Wire’ put said: “Just follow the money” – what financial incentives did the climate change scientists have to discredit skeptics and withhold confusing evidence?
While I don’t pretend to know the full answer, I know if they were somehow paid to do it – it CANNOT be nearly as much money as the oil industry is throwing at the skeptics and researchers who created the confusing evidence…
Simple logic = Earth has been around for 4.5 Billion years. Humans have been around for maybe 15 Million years. In the past 500 years, we’ve exponentially grown, evolved, and impacted a number of things that both sides can agree on.
But when it comes to climate change, somehow ‘it’s all a hoax’?
Come on now…
The total installed power sources (by mankind) equal about 17 teraWatts (17e12 W). The total power of solar radiation is about 1.34 kW/m2, which equals about 1.7e17 W (for the surface of Earth exposed to Sun). Four orders of magnitude difference (10,000x).
Now – we can assess the energy delivered by Sun with accuracy of about 0.1% – which is about 1/1000..
What does that mean ? It means that the variations in solar activity which deliver 10x more energy than all energy produced by mankind – are just barely detectable…
In other words – stop all production of energy, and it will not even register in the global energy balance. Earth is in thermal equilibrium – the amount of energy received equals the amount of energy radiated into space.
To increase average temperature of Earth by say 3degC, we would need to burn enough fuels to deliver about 4% of energy which Earth receives from Sun (look up Planck’s black body radiation). How much is 4% of 1.7e17W ? It is about 6.8E15W…about 450x more than we produce today.
Draw your own conclusions (and please, do not be smart and point out that I mixed up power and energy units – I didn’t. These are averaged power numbers – averaged over 24hrs. If this makes anyone better – you may multiply these power numbers by 24×3600).