It has taken decades of effort, the investment of tens of millions in research dollars, and the dedication of some of the brightest minds around the globe to collect, sift through and analyze the scientific evidence, which establishes a link between the change in the climate and man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. But in an age driven by the 24-hour news cycle, declining standards of journalism and point-counterpoint segments in which the truth is “debated,” a single email stolen from the files of a little-known but highly respected group of climate researchers places all of that work in jeopardy.
It has been three weeks since we first learned that hackers stole over 1,000 emails from the files of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Center (CRU). In the days immediately following the theft, global warming doubters raced to media outlets and began crowing that the emails demonstrate the existence of a global conspiracy among politically motivated climate scientists to push their agenda. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) announced he would probe whether the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.” Even Sarah Palin got into the act, penning an editorial for the Washington Post in which she calls upon President Obama to reconsider attending the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties, given that “leading climate scientists deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming.”
Based on these sound bites from Palin, Inhofe and other climate change doubters, you probably assume that the massive trove of stolen emails must contain at least one smoking gun, one unambiguous email in which a climate change expert admits “we got it all wrong.” Au contraire.
Climate change doubters point to a 1999 email from CRU scientist Phil Jones in which he states the following regarding his attempt to reconcile data in his own study with data from a Penn State study by Michael Mann, published in Nature: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The “decline” Jones is referring to is that if one uses tree-ring density to estimate temperatures, the resulting data inexplicably show that temperatures have declined since the 1960s, when in fact we know from meteorological data that temperatures have increased. Climate change doubters take Jones’ poor word choices (“trick” and “hide”) out of context and claim that he was engaged in “cooking the science.” According to Michael Mann, however, the statistical “trick” referred to is replacing the tree ring-based temperature estimates with actual data on ambient air temperatures — an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade.
Climate change doubters also point to an email exchange between CRU’s Jones and Penn State’s Mann in which they vow to keep two anti-climate change papers out of an assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and another email exchange in which they consider urging colleagues not to submit papers to a journal that publishes submissions from climate change skeptics. (Apparently, they contemplated boycotting the offending journal because it had published a study later determined to have been underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute.) Certainly, such attempts at scientific censorship are unwise. That said, it hardly amounts to evidence of a global climate change conspiracy.
Indeed, nothing in the stolen emails undermines the evidence that the climate is changing and that the change is due in part to man-made GHG emissions. The evidence demonstrating that CO2 levels have risen since the start of the industrial revolution and that man is the source of increasing CO2 levels over that period can no longer be seriously disputed. The various impacts of that change in atmospheric CO2 levels are well-documented and need not be repeated here. But as to the public’s belief in climate change and man’s contribution to that change — that is waning. The polls make this clear: according to a recent poll, over half of Americans believe that there remains significant disagreement among scientists over global warming. Tellingly, 84% of Americans believe it is likely that some scientists have falsified data to support their theories on global warming. Clearly, the climate change doubters’ promotion of Climategate is having an effect — one which may well doom the chances of passing climate change legislation in 2010. I sincerely hope that the media begins to expose the truth behind Climategate: it is a tempest in the teapot, exploited by tea baggers and those who stand to lose business, not evidence of a conspiracy or evidence that global warming isn’t occurring.
Google is making some progress in promoting its Apps suite and has recently scored a major win, at least in mind share, by convincing the city of Los Angeles to “go Google.” Now the company is announcing that the switch to Google Apps has already begun and, by the time its done, 34,000 city employees will be using the suite. 
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