LOS ANGELES (YBH.ME) – Climategate’s hacked emails from Britain’s East Anglia University number at about 1000, but the words from Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania’s one email stating “hide the decline” are ringing across the web like a call to arms for both sides of the debate. They have popped to the forefront of web coverage, web satire (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk) and serious analysis of the email fallout.
Michael Mann, Hockey Stick Graph Creator
Critics say the damning emails suggest Mann’s chart of Northern Hemisphere temperatures since the year 1000 purportedly hid data, based on conjecture and timeline reconstructions, that would have shown less of a warming trend and thus diminished the case for global warming.Mr. Mann, creator of Al Gore’s famed “hockey stick” – the scary, immediate trajectory of fast-climbing global temperatures - said ”decline” refers to the decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960, not an instruction to fudge data. Meanwhile Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climate Research lab, has resigned over the leaks as his university investigates.
Others have weighed in, among them:
Granger Morgan heads the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and directs the Center for Climate Decision Making. He has stated, “the fundamental science, that more carbon dioxide in the climate warms up the atmosphere, is not subject to any significant academic debate.”
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Brett Stephens pointed out that a vested interest in continuing one’s climate research funding if it follows a popular direction can hardly argue for perfectly dispassionate science in the field. A popular blog for data crunchers and code writers who are poring over the data lapses in the climate research, now revealed for all to see, had a wealth of comments. As one said, quoting eminent chemist Fred Menger, “If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.”
Politically adroit climate bandwagon members are ignoring the scandal and data questions, and focusing on Copenhagen as a place where agreements will be forged to transfer wealth from developed nations to newly industrializing, high polluting third worlders. A popular Australian columnist, contemplating their Prime Minister’s planned action in this direction, says this:
Is [Kevin] Rudd really going to approve a draft treaty that could force Australia to hand over an astonishing $7 billion a year to a new and unelected global authority?
Yes, that’s $7 billion, or about $330 from every man, woman and child. Every year. To be passed on to countries such as China and Bangladesh, and the sticky-fingered in-between.
Meanwhile, lone wolf anti-climate change bloggers like Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, a trained mathematician, geologist and sometime Canadian government advisor, are looking prescient. In 2007, McIntyre started looking at temperature gathering for the global warming data project and found aberrations such as this: one of the “rural” temperature gauges was located next to a boiling parking lot in downtown Tucson, Arizona.
As one blogger put it: are the Climate Research Unit folks self-inflicted victims of “Weapons of Math Destruction”?
