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Posts Tagged ‘Climategate’

With the second week of the Copenhagen conference underway a post about the goings on in the ongoing discussion of climate change is merited. I know that I haven’t been following the Canadian media’s response to ‘Climategate’ as much as I should, but I was still surprised and saddened when a link to this blog posting was sent to me. The US blogosphere has been afire since a series of emails that were hacked from servers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were posted on the internet in late November. Apparently these emails not only debunk all existing climate research, but also expose a vast conspiracy by the world’s scientific institutions to forge and falsify evidence of global climate change. On the one hand it is relatively easy to highlight any number of falsehoods that climate change deniers fabricate. Unfortunately it is harder to compete with the volume and ferocity of many of those voices crying FOUL (and more!) in response to a selective reading of an email exchange from more than a decade ago. Look, they are so organized they even have a Facebook group!

So, to attend to my first claim; it is easy to demonstrate falsehoods and disingenuousness in the stance that many have taken in response  to these emails. Not until these emails came out had I heard so much about the CRU at East Anglia. If they were the only scientific body doing climate analysis, did not subscribe to any kind of peer review process and were demonstrably falsifying data then there would be a big problem. None of these things are the case. First, from Bradford Plummer at the New Republic:

CRU isn’t the only group in the world tracking global temperature trends. As Michael Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois, points out, there are at least three other groups, including NASA, NOAA, and the Japan Meteorological Agency, that have been analyzing surface temperature data for well over a century (there’s a fair bit of overlap in what raw data they use, but they all have their own ways of analyzing it).

He was even kind enough to include a chart with each of these groups datasets plotted on it:

Global Temperature Departures

I’m no statistician but that sure looks like an upward trend to me. Plummer goes on to say:

[Y]es, climate scientists should take pains to be as transparent as possible, and some of the CRU e-mails cut against that. That needs to be remedied. Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry also has a sharp take, noting that good-faith engagement with skeptics can be a positive thing. But there’s no evidence that climate data has been fudged, and even if there was a smoking gun in the CRU e-mails, the basis for what we know about man-made climate change still comes from a vast array of sources.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a good post about a common tactic that deniers use quite frequently.

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