In response to a hacked theft of thousands of emails from a British research center, an attack which implicitly challenges the idealism of scientists studying climate, three of our most popular science publications have rushed to reaffirm the scientific consensus on the subject.
Yes, global warming is a reality on the planet today, unfortunately.
It's not news, but it's still true.
In Scientific American, in a piece called Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense:
1998 was the world's warmest year in the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre’s records; recent years have been cooler; therefore, the previous century's global warming trend is over, right?
Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with statistics should be able to spot the weaknesses of that argument. Given the extended duration of the warming trend, the expected (and observed) variations in the rate of increase and the range of uncertainties in the temperature measurements and forecasts, a decade's worth of mild interruption is too small a deviation to prove a break in the pattern, climatologists say.
Recently, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein asked four independent statisticians to look for trends in the temperature data sets without telling them what the numbers represented. "The experts found no true temperature declines over time," he wrote.
In the NewScientist, in a piece called Why there's no sign of a conspiracy in hacked emails:
Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you'll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.
You can't fake spring coming earlier, or trees growing higher up on mountains, or glaciers retreating for kilometres up valleys, or shrinking ice cover in the Arctic, or birds changing their migration times, or permafrost melting in Alaska, or the tropics expanding, or ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula breaking up, or peak river flow occurring earlier in summer because of earlier snowmelt, or sea level rising faster and faster, or any of the thousands of similar examples.
None of these observations by themselves prove the world is warming; they could simply be regional effects, for instance. But put all the data from around the world together, and you have overwhelming evidence of a long-term warming trend.
And in Popular Mechanics:
Climate Science Not a House of Cards
Perhaps the most worrisome part of this incident is that it could easily leave the public wondering about the science of human-induced global warming. But do the potentially unethical acts implied by these e-mails invalidate the hypothesis that human output of greenhouse gases, most notably CO2, creates a serious risk of rapid climate change? No.
Outspoken critics often portray climate science as a house of cards, built on a shaky edifice of limited data and broad suppositions. However, it's more realistic to think of the science as a deck of cards, spread out, face up. Some data and interpretations of those data are more certain than others, of course. But pulling out one or two interpretations, or the results of a few scientists, does not change the overall picture. Take away two or three cards, and there are still 49 or 50 cards facing you.
The "house of cards" view results partly from the representation of human-induced climate change in opinion polls and in the press, which split the debate into "believers" and "skeptics." This dichotomy is misleading for many reasons, particularly because it implies that those who are concerned about human-induced climate change believe every single claim made by every scientist on this topic, in the way that some fundamentalists claim to believe in the literal truth of every word in a religious text. Similarly, it implies that all skeptics doubt the entire theory.
Could this attack by unknown hackers on the climate consensus turn out to be self-defeating?
It certainly seems to have brought out the worst from the denier community.
Centrist (and former right-winger) Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs links to an astonishing BBC confrontation between a flack for the Senate's most prominent denier, Mark Morano, and an English scientist in East Anglia. It's a scene some are calling Climategate vs. Arseholegate. Worth a look:
