I like your site very much and enjoy all the links as they allow me to do what I’ve always believed and that is to form my own opinions and to never take everything someones says as absolute regardless of their stature or credibility. I find all your posts intelligent and thought provoking. My only advice is as you become impressed upon by the many profs you will have in university that you keep your eyes wide open and keep the ability to form your own thoughts, ideas and conclusions. Question everything! Something I learned from a great science teacher, Mr. Chalmers.

[Of course the consensus is sometimes wrong, but that doesn't mean we should always listen to the opposite of what it's saying. Think of all the times the consensus has been right. -Kate]

I think “misleading” is the better term for the example of the CO2-temperature lead-lag story. I have called it a “half truth” for the same reason, see http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/half-truths/ (fourth point down).

1- http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/us/tobacco-industry-in-fight-to-get-universities-data.html
More here: http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/tobacco-part-4-subpoenas-and-legal-chill/

Because you brought this up, here is what I have been pounding blogs with over the past several days:

The news varies depending on the political views of the organization but some blogs and newspapers/television claim that this hack has revealed that human caused global warming has been faked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is my opinion:

To date, there has not been a single credible journal article that shows a natural cause for the modern day warming while also showing how record high greenhouse gas concentrations are not significant.

NOT ONE.

Do people really believe that the scientists at CRU are able to squelch every scientist on the planet who tried to publish this landmark anti-AGW paper? Is there no sense of the low probability and the large scale of this conspiracy for this to be true?

If one throws out the HadCRU data and all papers by these folks, there is still a mountain of evidence for AGW.

Do the rapidly melting ice sheets and glaciers have access to these emails and joined in on the conspiracy?

Do the various climate models that show GHGs as the dominant forcing mechanism have access to these emails and joined in on the conspiracy?

Do the GISS, UAH, RSS data that show global warming of approximately 0.2C per decade over the past 30 years have access to these emails and joined in on the conspiracy? Certainly Spencer and Christy who run UAH and are well-known skeptics of AGW would not align themselves with AGW and yet their satellite-derived measurements track reasonably with GISS, RSS, and HadCRU.

Does the ocean read these emails and magically increase its heat content?

Does the cooling stratosphere (even accounting for ozone loss) read the emails and join in on the hoax?

Do the plants and animals read these emails and decide to die off and/or change their migratory habits so that they can support the conspiracy?

I could go on ad infinitum.

For quite a long time, we have known that a doubling of CO2 will warm the climate at least 1C and there is fairly good certainty that the resulting feedbacks will produce at least 2C additional warming with 3C more likely. We are also measuring CO2 increases of 2 ppm and climbing (except last year where there was a slight decrease due to the global recession) and we have levels that have not been seen in the past 15 million years.

Are we to conclude that these emails deny all of this evidence?

There are many scientists from many fields that have published data that show the effects of global warming and why humans are the primary drivers of this warming. These scientists include some of the obvious: climatologists, meteorologists, geologists, modelers, and oceanographers. Some less obvious include: biologists, marine biologists, zoologists, chemists, astrophysicists, economists, environmental politics reasearchers, and others. I am quite confident that MANY of these folks have NEVER spoken to the CRU folks nor emailed them.

It is obvious that pre-Copenhagen, the tried and true method of “if one does not like the message then attack the messenger or redirect the conversation” practiced by Big Tobacco and now ExxonMobil and their front groups (Heartland Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, etc.) is alive and well.

Scott A. Mandia – Professor, Meteorologist, Concerned Citizen
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/

[Well said. The emails may have been unprofessional, but they're certainly not evidence of fabrication or fraud. -Kate]

Thanks for the kind words. I really wavered on that label. Yes, it is a misleading claim in the overall perspective but it is a fictional claim in the present. I decided to use “fiction” to make a stronger point.

What do the rest of you think? Misleading or Fiction?

What is your take on the CRU e-mail hack and its fallout? Do you think that it hurt its credibility in the scientific community, or not? If anything, IMHO, the e-mails asking others to delete mail to they could not be sent to individuals who had FOIA was shocking!

[I haven't read the emails themselves, but I've seen a lot of news stories and blog posts about them. That said, all of the so-called fabricating data, the "hiding the decline" and so on, is obviously just a case of context and scientific jargon. Beyond that, the emails that seemed overly defensive against skeptics, skeptical journals, etc, seem to be just a case of internal politics, venting among friends and colleagues, and letting one's guard down in private communication. I'm not sure about the FOIA email - it will probably have to be investigated more.

CRU is quite embarrassing and regrettable, but probably not unusual among private emails anywhere. I may eventually write about this, but I want to first see Peter Sinclair's video that he's been promising. -Kate]