Trust and the ClimateGate scandal
“The best way to lose the public’s trust is to act in a way that is untrustworthy.” ~ Ryan Sager
I think Sager gets to the heart of the ClimateGate email scandal with this line (and the rest of his post). More than anything else, the emails reveal that the way climate science has been approached, and the way that climate change in general has been discussed in the scientific community, is not the way we should tackle a subject with such massive policy implications. Entire economies are being structured around the premise of anthropogenic global warming, and without more transparency, we’re putting our faith and our dollars into the hands of a group of scientists who may or may not have earned our trust. We don’t know.
Another problem I see is that the consensus on global warming is not simply built around the problem, but around the solution. In other words, one cannot believe in human created global warming and still disagree with cap and trade or other widely accepted “solutions” to the problem without being cast out of the discussion as little better than a “denialist.” But there are other solutions, like geo-engineering, that are legitimate alternatives. These are almost off-limits, however, as illustrated by the cacophony surrounding the release of Super Freakonomics, a book which included a chapter on this very thing.
Is global warming a new secular religion? Not really, but it’s becoming more and more so the more people demand faith in it, and rebuke any and all skepticism on the matter as, well, bad faith.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Clean Energy, E.D. Kain. E.D. Kain said: Trust and the ClimateGate scandal http://tinyurl.com/ye39lyb @trueslant [...]
Mr. Kain,
No one knows that those emails are real or unaltered and we certainly know that we do not have the full context as whoever stole them has only released the ones that that they want released. In any event these emails do not cast any doubt on the science of global warming.
Science is not faith based, it is based on observations, observations that in principle anyone can make. The concentrations of greenhouses gases has been increasing for decades. This observation was first reported before your or me or Al Gore were even born. It has been confirmed by many scientists in many countries in the decades since. This is not in doubt. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When visible light hits the earth it warms the surface and is released back into the atmosphere as infra-red (IR) radiation (Stephan-Boltzmann Law). Carbon dioxide does not absorb visible light but does absorb IR. It thus traps heat beneath the atmosphere. That was proven decades ago and has been confirmed by scientists all over the world many times and not by any of the scientists involved in the emails. This is beyond doubt. The rest is just details about how and when and where. It is really just that simple. None of the supposed emails alter any of this.
People who doubt climate change do so because they want it not to be true and search for any reason to do so. They are the same peopled who doubted it before the emails released. So if you want to doubt, go for it, but do not think that the content of these supposed emails is the source of your doubts.
You wrote:
“People who doubt climate change do so because they want it not to be true and search for any reason to do so.”
This is called a straw-man argument. While I agree that there are people like this, there are also a great many who honestly question whether things are as dire as they are portrayed. As the e-mails show, some appear to have significant political leanings toward a terrifying result.
Add to that a move by many leftists who act as if the only solution is to reconstruct the world’s entire infrastructure according to their dictates –and you have a politically polarized fight that doesn’t need to be there.
Geo-Engineering is one aspect of a solution that few have the temerity to discuss. So is population relocation. Both are reasonable reactions to a changing climate and yet for some reason neither seems to be discussed with nearly the fervor that Cap and Trade receives.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] tactics of influential … World Magazine Salt Lake Tribune – Telegraph.co.uk Trust and the climategate scandal True/Slant – 22 hours ago Ryan Sager I think Sager gets to the heart of the [...]
davidlosangeles: I agree with you about science, but it seems not all scientists are in agreement with us.
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/
You may also like to review this link regarding the greenhouse effect:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
You might also like to think about those people who believe in global warming because they want to. You may want to look a little more deeply into what CO2 can and cannot do in terms of atmospheric heating.