Omg Chaos - you have overtaken the other morons in this thread...
If you want to argue about what we should or can do, and what we can afford to do about man's impact on the climate - I'm 100% open for that discussion.
That said - the pathetic attempts at discrediting the science behind all of this - and you actually underline the part about John Coleman? Are you f'ing kidding me? Here's a blurb about Coleman - you may want to at least do a google check before you post AND UNDERLINE stuff:
"Taking a page straight out of Christopher Monckton, Coleman whined to host Greg Gutfeld – a paragon of fair and balanced journalism, I might add – that he and his coalition of “30,000” scientists were sick and tired of all this consensus talk and that they weren’t going to take it lying down anymore (especially now that the evil Liberal Media had essentially shut him out).
If that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard it before.
At last year’s 2008 International Conference on Climate Change (or, as I like to call it, the “2008 Skeptic-Palooza That Wasn’t”
, Coleman spewed the same tired diatribe, accusing Al Gore and carbon credit sellers of perpetrating mass “financial fraud” and of burying a “legitimate” debate. He urged his fellow discontents to help him launch a lawsuit in order to expose their shady practices:
“If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the witness stand and testified, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”
Well, it’s been almost a year since that epochal meeting, and there’s still no sign of a lawsuit – this despite the heroic efforts of Frank Bi of the International Journal of Inactivism and others to ease his endeavor. (Of course, it doesn’t help that previous attempts to do so failed miserably.) It’s certainly within the realm of possibility that Coleman and his acolytes could be biding their time, looking for just the right opportunity (perhaps this year’s Copenhagen climate talks) to strike. But somehow I doubt that.
If Coleman’s on-air appearance is any indication of the strength of his legal argument, he’ll probably want to spend more time preparing anyway. For one thing, he claimed that average global temperatures had risen by “maybe a tenth of a degree” over the last century; strange then that the IPCC reported in 2007 that temperatures actually increased by an average of 0.74°C over the same period.
Coleman’s take on the “hockey stick” graph (a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past millennium that shows a sharp rise in the last century) was equally laughable. Far from being disproven by “science,” as he asserted, its findings were in fact reaffirmed by a sprawling 2006 report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences. The authors drew on 1,200 overlapping proxy records, or data sets, including ice and sediment core contents and coral and tree growth trends, to derive historical temperature patterns for the past 2,000 years in both hemispheres. Their conclusion: Yes, Virginia, global warming is real.
As for Coleman’s 30,000 backers: Let’s just say that that number may be slightly inflated. Based on a long-discredited petition passed around by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine during the 90s, it was even debunked by the Skeptics Society. The National Academy of Sciences called it “misleading” and “not based on a review of the science of global climate change, nor were its signers experts in the field of climate science.” Oh, and did I mention that several of its signatories are already dead?"
More specifically - on that "30,000" scientists number - you may want to read this:
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs-skeptic/denier-myths-debunked/the-oregon-petition/
I'll summarize for you - it's total, complete bullshit.
Finally, as for 'cooking the books', or, as were-idiot put it, 'falsifying numbers and cheating'....did you ever even read any of that stuff, or did the sensational headlines have you at the first word?
From John Cook - who knows more about this stuff than all of us put together:
"In November 2009, the servers at the University of East Anglia in Britain were illegally hacked and emails were stolen. When a selection of emails between climate scientists were published on the internet, a few suggestive quotes were seized upon by many claiming global warming was all just a conspiracy. A number of independent enquiries have investigated the conduct of the scientists involved in the emails. All have cleared the scientists of any wrong doing:
In February 2010, the Pennsylvania State University released an Inquiry Report that investigated any 'Climategate' emails involving Dr Michael Mann, a Professor of Penn State's Department of Meteorology. They found that "there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data". On "Mike's Nature trick", they concluded "The so-called “trick”1 was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field."
In March 2010, the UK government's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report finding that the criticisms of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) were misplaced and that CRU’s "Professor Jones’s actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community".
In April 2010, the University of East Anglia set up an international Scientific Assessment Panel, in consultation with the Royal Society and chaired by Professor Ron Oxburgh. The Report of the International Panel assessed the integrity of the research published by the CRU and found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit".
In June 2010, the Pennsylvania State University published their Final Investigation Report, determining "there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann".
In July 2010, the University of East Anglia published the Independent Climate Change Email Review report. They examined the emails to assess whether manipulation or suppression of data occurred and concluded that "The scientists’ rigor and honesty are not in doubt".
In July 2010, the US Environmental Protection Agency investigated the emails and "found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets."
In September 2010, the UK Government responded to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report, chaired by Sir Muir Russell. On the issue of releasing data, they found "In the instance of the CRU, the scientists were not legally allowed to give out the data". On the issue of attempting to corrupt the peer-review process, they found "The evidence that we have seen does not suggest that Professor Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process. Academics should not be criticised for making informal comments on academic papers".
In February 2011, the Department of Commerce Inspector General conducted an independent review of the emails and found "no evidence in the CRU emails that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data".
In August 2011, the National Science Foundation concluded "Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed".
Just as there are many independent lines of evidence that humans are causing global warming, similarly a number of independent investigations have found no evidence of falsification or conspiracy by climate scientists.
"Mike's Nature trick" and "hide the decline"
The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures (emphasis mine):
"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
"Mike's Nature trick" refers to a technique (aka "trick of the trade") used in a paper published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann 1998). The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.
The most common misconception regarding this email is the assumption that "decline" refers to declining temperatures. It actually refers to a decline in the reliability of tree rings to reflect temperatures after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem" where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed in the peer reviewed literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature. More on the hockey stick divergence problem...
Trenberth's "travesty we can't account for the lack of warming"
The second most cited email is from climate scientist and IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth. The highlighted quote is this: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." This has been most commonly interpreted (among skeptics) as climate scientists secretly admitting amongst themselves that global warming really has stopped. Trenberth is actually discussing a paper he'd recently published that discusses the planet's energy budget - how much net energy is flowing into our climate and where it's going (Trenberth 2009).
In Trenberth's paper, he discusses how we know the planet is continually heating due to increasing carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, surface temperature sometimes shows short term cooling periods. This is due to internal variability and Trenberth was lamenting that our observation systems can't comprehensively track all the energy flow through the climate system. More on Trenberth's travesty...
The full body of evidence for man-made global warming
An important point to realise is that the emails involve a handful of scientists discussing a few pieces of climate data. Even without this data, there is still an overwhelming and consistent body of evidence, painstakingly compiled by independent scientific teams from institutions across the world.
What do they find? The planet is steadily accumulating heat. When you add up all the heat building in the oceans, land and atmosphere plus the energy required to melt glaciers and ice sheets, the planet has been accumulating heat at a rate of 190,260 Gigawatts over the past 40 years (Murphy 2009). Considering a typical nuclear power plant has an output of 1 Gigawatt, imagine over 190,000 power plants pouring their energy output directly into heating our land and oceans, melting ice and warming the air.
This build-up of heat is causing ice loss across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Both Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at an accelerated rate (Velicogna 2009, ). Even East Antarctica, previously thought to be too cold and stable, is now losing ice mass (Chen 2009). Glacier shrinkage is accelerating. Arctic sea ice has fallen so sharply, observations exceed even the IPCC worst case scenario. The combination of warming oceans and melting ice has resulted in sea level rise tracking the upper limit of IPCC predictions.
Rising temperatures have impacted animal and plant species worldwide. The distribution of tree lines, plants and many species of animals are moving into cooler regions towards the poles. As the onset of spring is happening earlier each year, animal and plant species are responding to the shift in seasons. Scientists observe that frog breeding, bird nesting, flowering and migration patterns are all occurring earlier in the year (Parmeson 2003). There are many other physical signs of widespread warming. The height of the tropopause, a layer in our atmosphere, is rising (Santer 2003). Arctic permafrost, covering about 25% of Northern Hemisphere land, is warming and degrading (Walsh 2009). The tropical belt is widening (Seidel 2007). These results are all consistent with global warming.
What’s causing this heat build-up? Humans are emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - 29 billion tonnes in 2009 (CDIAC). Greenhouse theory predicts that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will trap heat energy as it escapes out to space. What do we observe? Carbon dioxide absorbs heat at certain wavelengths. Satellites over the past 40 years find less heat escaping to space at these wavelengths (Harries 2001, Griggs 2004, Chen 2007). Where does the heat go? Surface measurements find more heat returning back to the Earth's surface (Philipona 2004). Tellingly, the increase occurs at those same carbon dioxide absorption wavelengths (Evans 2006). This is the human fingerprint in global warming.
There are multiple lines of empirical evidence that global warming is happening and human activity is the cause. A few suggestive emails may serve as a useful distraction for those wishing to avoid the physical realities of climate change. But they change nothing about our scientific understanding of humanity’s role in global warming."
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