Paul Smith – The Corsair
As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark came to an end a few weeks ago with no real agreement reached between countries, many global-warming deniers back in the U.S. were claiming victory due to the recent so-called “Climate-gate” scandal.
The scandal refers to an incident a couple of months ago where more than a decade’s worth of emails between climatologists were hacked and stolen from a server of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. After going through some of the emails, climate-change detractors suggested these emails contained statements that proved scientists had colluded to hide evidence which disproves climate-change (global warming).
Only there’s one problem with these claims: the emails say nothing of the sort.
So, let’s go through the major claims of this so called Climate-gate scandal.
One of the emails trounced on by climate-change deniers is a message from scientist Phil Jones where he suggested using a “trick” with some of his data to arrive at a certain conclusion. However, the “trick” in question was not one of deception, but rather referred to a clever way of plotting instrumental records of data. He was referring to a scientific “short-cut,” not a sinister plot to misrepresent data.
Another email cited in this scandal is one from scientist 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.” This line from the email is taken completely out of context and actually refers to an article Trenberth wrote calling for the development of more accurate scientific instruments to measure rising sea surface temperatures, and in reality, he concludes that “global warming is unequivocally happening.”
Climate-change deniers have also claimed that one email shows scientists have colluded to silence critics. This refers to an email written by climatologist Michael E. Mann, where he wrote, “I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
This email was referring to a controversy that erupted in 2003 when the journal “Climate Research” published a paper that was partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute which attempted to deny evidence of climate-change. The paper did not go through the normal peer-review process (a way of letting other groups of scientists verify the claims and data), and the conclusions of the paper were later rejected by the larger scientific community.
The editor-in-chief of “Climate Research,” Hans von Storch, resigned in protest due to the publishing of this paper. And the journal’s founder, Otto Kinne, eventually admitted that “[The claims of the paper] cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. ‘Climate Research’ should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication.”
So, after pouring through thousands of illegally hacked emails, climate-change deniers were only able to come up with a small handful of messages which, when taken out of context, appeared to show inappropriate off-the-cuff statements made by scientists, but, when placed in the proper context, actually showed nothing of the sort.
The reality is that the Climate-gate scandal does not prove global warming to be a hoax at all. In fact, what it reveals is that the real hoax is the conspiracy to deny that global warming is taking place.
The vast majority of climate-change deniers are actually either funded or beholden to the interests of the oil, natural gas, and coal industries. Their agenda is to deny that climate-change is taking place for one simple reason: to make more money.
If the world were to combat the reality of climate-change, then the first step is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to raise these emission standards would cost the fossil-fuel industries a small percentage of their profits.
So, rather than lose a little bit of money, they have colluded in a massive conspiracy to paint climate-change as a hoax, putting the entire world in potential jeopardy just so they can make a few more bucks.
Here are the real facts: the vast majority of those within the scientific community (including the American Meteorological Society and every other meteorological society, every peer-reviewed scientific journal, and the national science academies and societies of every industrialized nation, to name just a few) contend that climate-change is not only a reality, but that human activity (especially the burning of fossil fuels) has largely contributed to this global phenomenon.
Furthermore, the vast majority of those within the scientific community are in agreement that if climate-change continues at its current rate or gets worse, then human beings could be in for catastrophic environmental consequences—that is unless we do something about it.