Sobering perspective on Climate Change

With all of the hoopla over "Climategate" and the stolen emails from East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU)some important and basic points that have been well established are being overlooked. This isn't surprising as the "CRU hack" provided just enough out of context fodder for the denialist to launch a partially effective attack on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and the scientific community. A salvo in this attack was launched locally by the Eagle-Tribune in a poorly written, ill informed editorial that appeared in this past Sunday's paper. Missing from the Merrimack Valley's daily paper of record was objective coverage of the CRU emails as not a single story appeared in the paper prior to the editorial being published. That's a shame because the E-T missed an opportunity to fully inform the public instead of piling on talking points. The potential fallout from this theft is so great that it prompted a strongly worded editorial from the journal Nature, one of the most respected scientific journals in the world.

As with many stories like this, context means everything and is usually left out. CRU's Phil Jones now joins an illustrious list of people from Charles Darwin to Sonia Sotomyor who have been misquoted and attacked by statements taken to far out of context that they have almost no real meaning. I won't go into detail about the specific emails and their context as our friends at Real Climate have done an excellent job of that already. AGW deniers will look at these emails and see exactly what they want to see, and even then will make shit up. One of the biggest offenders is serial denier George Will (who really should stick to baseball and politics). As Media Matters pointed out, Will has gone completely over the edge.

What is being lost in this debate is that even if the 2 or 3 studies referred to in the stolen CRU emails were to be invalidated it would mean nothing. I say that, not because I'm so convinced that AGW is real that I refuse to consider other evidence to the contrary, but because there are multiple lines of inquiry and robust evidence that supports AGW. Deniers would have you believe that there are 4 or 5 studies that all AGW theory rests on or that CRU was the nerve center of all climate research. In fact there are researchers from the Hadley Center, NASA's GISS, NOAA, Woods Hole, Scripps Oceanographic Institute the EPA, Universities all over the world including locally; MIT, UNH, College of the Atlantic, Lesley, Tufts and hundreds of scientists not connected with any of the major research centers all producing published research. Despite claims to the contrary, the majority of the raw data produced by this research is available as well as the computer code used for modeling and analysis. NASAs raw data and code have been in the internet for years and researchers are coming out of the woodwork, posting links to their research on realclimate. If anything is unraveling, its the false claims of the conspiracy nuts.

Also specious are claims that climatologists are suppressing the work of contrarians who oppose the AGW orthodoxy. Claims of scientific fascism have been made form the floor of the US House of Representative (few things anger me more than words like communist and fascist being tossed around so loosely). Not only is it untrue, but consider the claims of the few contrarians against the mountain of research suporting AGW:

The current thinking of scientists on climate change is based on thousands of studies (Google Scholar gives 19,000 scientific articles for the full search phrase “global climate change”). Any new study will be one small grain of evidence that adds to this big pile, and it will shift the thinking of scientists slightly. Science proceeds like this in a slow, incremental way. It is extremely unlikely that any new study will immediately overthrow all the past knowledge. So even if the conclusions of the Shaviv and Veizer (2003) study discussed earlier, for instance, had been correct, this would be one small piece of evidence pitted against hundreds of others which contradict it. Scientists would find the apparent contradiction interesting and worthy of further investigation, and would devote further study to isolating the source of the contradiction. They would not suddenly throw out all previous results. Yet, one often gets the impression that scientific progress consists of a series of revolutions where scientists discard all their past thinking each time a new result gets published. This is often because only a small handful of high-profile studies in a given field are known by the wider public and media, and thus unrealistic weight is attached to those studies. New results are often over-emphasised (sometimes by the authors, sometimes by lobby groups) to make them sound important enough to have news value. Thus “bombshells” usually end up being duds.

This month, world leaders will gather for the climate change summit in Copenhagen. It is unlikely that any serious agreement will be produced and that's nothing for anyone to cheer about. As a recent report issued points out, the indicators of climate change are far stronger than anyone expected based on the last IPCC assessment. Despite the current temporary cooling (caused by exceptionally low solar output), global warming hasn't stopped and the need for action has never been clearer or more urgent.