Thursday, December 3, 2009

Climategate



I've not had the time to web surf to explore so-called Climategate.Climate change skeptics have siezed on the hacking of the e-mails of British climate scientists as a smoking gun they feel reveals the idea of man-made global  warming as a fraud. That's the opinion found here. Alternatively, Slate.com says here that there's another way to look at the Climategate.
Certainly the news could alter the dynamics of the upcoming Copenhagen climate summit, although the tough sacrifices needed to cut carbon emissions would seem to be a greater factor. Climategate notwithstanding, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said definitively that the world is warming and that man's role is significant. And the IPCC view remains, albeit controversial, the scientific consensus.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great pictures for a guy who is colorblind.aunto

Unknown said...

How can you say it's scientific consensus when 31,486 American scientists,
including 9,029 with PhDs, all conclude anthropogenic (man-made) global-warming is bunk (check the link below), and no one on the alarmist side is willing to debate the issue, or subject the underlying data for full peer review from the skeptics? And when did 'skeptic' take on a bad connotation? It used to be that in the context of science skepticism was a good thing!

http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php

Kentucky Bob said...

One can argue his or her opinion, apparently until the penguins come to roost, but the "consensus" of the best qualified opinions is well established. As for the petition project, well, it is just that, a petition and nothing more:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-11-12

zoot said...

What time of day did you take the above pic with awesome color on the cliffs? Sierra Club will be after you for copies of this and the sunset.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for raising the Climategate issue. Vigorous debate is the basis of all true science. Lord Kelvin once proclaimed that everything important in physics had been discovered. That was a few years before Einstein published his paper on Relativity. This issue is too important to half-ass it with models that do not reproduce real world results.
KCPL8r

Kentucky Bob said...

Both Tim & I are way too busy (and I'm not well versed enough) to argue the technical intracacies of this issue, but I will say that the best available models and the most competent modelers have been addressed to this problem. Even so, models can not give irrefutable answers, only predictions based on input. Whether one believes the problem is significantly anthropogenic or not, the observable/measurable evidence that we are approaching (or past) a tipping point that will have a dramatic ecological and ergo a societal effect is hard to deny. Tipping points are just that(think strong acid/base reactions): they can be avoided or exceeded by a slim margin, with monumental benefits, or consequences, as the case may be. Even if its a flip of the coin, the risk of irreversible change (in terms of, say, centuries)outweighs the call for all parties to agree that the prediction is irrefutable. My 2 cents.