Climategate- Part I

We are in the early stages of another grand right wing phony conspiracy- this one with a name and all. It's called Climategate, and in the last few days there have been literally dozens of posts on right wing blogs, and endless nonsense on their talk shows about it. Obviously, it relates to global warming, and the chief global warming denier (i.e. corrupt corporate stooge) in Congress, James Inhofe, is already promising "investigations."

I hate dealing with this kind of synthetic, lying crap, but this is a textbook example of the way the right generates noise to prevent actions being taken which might hurt their corporate masters, and it is something with which Ihave some familiarity, having been involved in environmental issues since serving as a regional organizer of the first earth day, so I am going to force myself to tackle it. I want to do this in a couple of parts, to avoid a tediously long post. Today, I want to briefly describe the alleged story of this pseudoscandal, and then just remind people about some of the facts of global warming.

The story, as first "reported" in the Moonie-financed Washington Times, modestly titled "EDITORIAL: Hiding evidence of global cooling," involves something like 26,000 e-mails from the last two decades, hacked from the English Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Against my normal practice, I am linking to the article here, in case you desire to waste your time reading it. In two or three of these e-mails, cumsy wording can be taken out of context to support some sort of dubious claim that climate scientists invented the notion of global warming, for some unknown reason.

A consideration of the e-mails will make up the next part of this series. For now, I wish to make a couple of observations. First, someone could come up with an e-mail from Isaac Newton stating that his writing on gravity was a big joke. That wouldn't make things fall up. In science, the evidence is what counts. Nothing else has any relevance.

Now, lets remember a little about man-made global warming. In 2004, the magazine Nature published an analysis of all of the peer reviewed papers that had been written on the subject. It found over 700 articles. There was not a single one that disagreed with the notion that global warming was real, or the notion that it was at least in part caused by man-made forces. In fact, at that time, every supposedly scientific article that opposed these two notions emanated from a single source- an organization called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which was funded largely by oil companies. Let me be blunt- these papers which disputed the plain facts about global warming were corporate lies, designed to protect profits.

Now, here are a few of the most recent scientific findings on climate change, from this report:

"Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990.

Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.190C per decade, in every good agreement with predictions based on greenhouse gas increases.

A wide array of satellite and ice measurements now demonstrate beyond doubt that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate.

Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models.

Satellites show great global average sea-level rise (3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years) to be 80% above past IPCC predictions."

Sad to say, there is plenty more. The issue here is simply that of the truth versus corporate greed and lies. There is no real question about the existence and danger of man-made global warming.

In my next post on this subject, I will look at the supposed "evidence" in the climategate "scandal." As you might expect, it will turn out to be just more lies, smears and distortions, like every argument conservatives have to make about everything.