Global Cooling?

Greetings Heretics,

“The fact that this whole idea on the global warming, I’m glad that’s over, gone, done. We won, you lost, get a life.” – Senator James Inhofe (R-OK)

Granted, Mr. Inhofe is an easy target for my scorn. I would hope you would find a slightly more intelligent and reasonable argument made by the vast majority of global warming skeptics. To put the quote in context, as many of you know (I’m talking to the four people who read this blog) almost two weeks ago a hacker gained access to thousands of emails detailing correspondence between prominent climate researchers at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. According to climate change skeptics these emails show a prolonged effort to silence all dissenting opinion on the matter, and to also use statistical tricks to hide the obvious decline in global temperatures. These claims stem from a handful of aggressively written emails demeaning the integrity and work of skeptical climate scientists. Also this passage from Phil Jones of the CRU is referenced as proof that scientists manipulate the data to suit their own hypothesis.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) [and] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Now, when these two pieces of information are presented to the masses on cable news under the scrolling brightly lit heading of “Climate-gate” (whoever decided that adding the suffix “gate” to any noun suddenly creates a dastardly conspiracy needs to be shot) it stands to reason that people would be concerned. The questions true skeptics and freethinkers need to ask themselves are these: What is the context in which these debates have taken place? Can the validity of an entire scientific theory be trumped by a couple of cherry picked emails from one research institution?

Ever since the effects of our hedonistic lifestyles have been made evident in the enormous rise of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, scientists have warned us that continued use of fossil fuels as our primary energy source would hasten the progress of our planets 6th Great Extinction. CO2 levels today have increased by almost 100 parts per million over even the highest point in the last 400,000 years, and have made the jump from a mere 280 ppm to 380 ppm in less than 300 years. Because the Earth’s surface heats up more slowly than the atmosphere, temperatures have not yet caught up to these escalating concentrations of carbon dioxide. Predictably, the industries and people that rely so heavily on fossil fuels have been fierce in their attacks of these findings. Every year, hundreds of peer reviewed journal articles from around the world are published supporting and challenging the consensus view on climate change.

In most scientific controversies, scientifically inferior viewpoints are quickly discarded and fall to the wayside. That’s why we know that evolution is responsible for the life we see on our planet today, and not intelligent design (the bastard child of Creationism). The same goes for the bygone theories of alchemy and blood-letting. You don’t see peer-reviewed journals claiming these practices and beliefs to be scientific, because they have not withstood the tests of the scientific method. When dealing with climate change skepticism, the game changes considerably. Special interests prop up the flawed science behind this skepticism, and fund its study so as to maintain the massive profits to be gained from our reckless abuse of the only planet we will likely ever have the good fortune to inhabit. Its also no coincidence that these emails were released just prior to the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen this December.

To address the emails themselves, having participated in my fair share of scientific experiments, I know first hand that sometimes the results you get don’t reflect the hypothesis you posed. In that case sometimes your methods for gathering the data were faulty, the hypothesis you posed was incorrect, or you have failed to manipulate the data correctly in order to draw out the correct correlation behind the numbers. In this case, the word “manipulate” doesn’t always refer to an attempt mislead the scientific community, and within the correspondence between colleagues at the CRU, the use of the word “trick” could refer to that kind of manipulation. UPDATE: Kris Scott provided an explanation for the email in question in a comment below, and I am re-posting it here to shed some light on the issue

Actually you’re a bit off… The “hiding” mentioned isn’t actually a cover-up. Scientists use tree rings to gather temperature data from before thermometers existed. However, there is an issue called the “divergence problem” in which starting in the 1980’s temperatures inferred from tree rings did not match the actual temperatures measured by scientific instruments for the year. Instead, the rings appear to show either cooler or non-rising temperatures. Scientists are not yet aware why this is happening in tree rings, but some speculate it is actually caused by global warming itself.

Notice they added “real temps” to “hide the decline” meaning that they used the actual data collected from weather stations and various scientific instruments to adjust for the decline shown from tree ring data. Why use tree ring data at all then? Because using this data allows them to accurately see temperatures going hundreds of years back. This way current data can be compared to see if we are in a unique warming scenario or if we are just in some sort of natural cycle.

While the choice of words is undeniably poor, when taken in context as an exchange between colleagues who could not have expected their privacy to be breached in such a serious way, it certainly does not automatically infer that these scientists are trying to present knowingly false information to the public.

Even if these particular researchers were trying to cover up mistakes that they made in their research, that hardly implicates the entire scientific community in a vast conspiracy. At this situation’s very very worst (and let me stress that this seems highly unlikely), the only conclusion a reasonable person could possibly make would be that two scientists engaged in some bad science, and that’s something that climate change skeptics are certainly familiar with.