I’m sure you’ll say no, because your fundamental values drive your illogic. It’s not as if you really can see the other side of things because the other side of things, if true, would be such an affront to what defines you. I mean this is clear from your complete dismissible of any counter-evidence and immediate assumption that it must be, MUST BE a fraud. The simple fact is that these emails do not invalidate a single paper published in the last 100 years, 96% of scientists still believe AGW at the 90% CL (all scientifically studied).

The blog you should post is under what circumstances you would admit that you were wrong, because–let’s face it–since IPCC WG1 a lot of progress has been made (about 13 years) and the graphs are only going up and becoming evermore obvious. I certainly have had a soul-searching exercise about what it would take for me to admit I was wrong, have you? I really hope so, because although your misplaced values and ignorance of the science is on your side, reality has a very liberal bias–at least in this case.

Many find the arguments confusing, since there is strong evidence that the climate is undergoing changes, natural or not, the political argument seems to revolve around who or what is causing the change.

Those of libertarian leanings think it is not the responsibility of government to blame industry and thus force them to change.

Although in the past both sides of the aisle thought cleaning up rivers polluted by paper mills be cleaned up and force paper mills to clean their water before dumping it. The clean air and water legislation was backed by Nixon and if I’m not mistaken signed by Bush the elder.

The government also made the local sewage plant in my city clean up after surfers noted swimming with turds and high enough bacteria levels to endanger their lives. Beaches were closed, a real summer bummer for surf cities.

The government also tried and had some success in reducing the pollutants that caused acid rain because forests were being devastated.

I really don’t care what type of car or truck anyone chooses to drive but if your truck or car is making the air hard to breath in a place like Los Angeles a city that has a natural inversion problem, something has to be done. Pollution that affects my children and grandparents and growth for the area, I believe the government forcing industry to make cleaner cars is for the benefit of the community. It’s like your cigar, you can smoke it all you want, but if you start blowing smoke in my child’s face while she is eating I can either shove it down your throat and beat the shit out of you or we can have some agreement in polite society as to where you can smoke so not to endanger or infringe on the rights of non-cigar smokers. I usually enjoy a pipe myself.

The public good vs. individual rights is always a clash but while one used to be able to ride a horse any which way the government had to come up with traffic laws to ensure some public safety. Now it may be offensive to some to stop at red lights, here in LA there seems to be many who just can’t stand the government interference to delay their trips, but there it is.

This is a democracy and while you have the all sorts of individual rights, religion, guns, speech, freedom of travel and protections from the government. There are limits on all of them based around the rights of public good. So the argument of individual rights is a nice sounding American anthem it is usually trumped by the public good. For instance I would like the government to have a warrant to enter my house and I would like the right to be present for any search but under today’s laws, because of fear of terrorists I have to surrender that right. Trumped I suppose for the public good.

Now I suppose we should allow pollution to go on for the sake of the economy, but if I had a choice of where I would like to raise children, Beijing or some nice town in the Midwest with clean water and air, well I go with America. But when I lived in the Northwest they had rare pollution warnings that affected the weather and the pollution came from China. Hard to believe but as the planet shrinks and populations grow it is not a bad thing to talk about the effects of a global industrial world and the effect on air and water. Forget the cap and trade and carbon tax and whatever, lets think about future and how we can stop shitting in our nests as much as we do.

But, again, the matter at hand is that, even as exaggerated and overblown as it has been, the push of Global Warming (besides the obvious money for those heavily involved in it) has always been to move towards alternative resources of energy and pushing for other renewable ideas like recycling. Y’know, so we can stop doing the little things like smogging up areas so bad the air quality results in birth defects, so we have actual drinkable water that doesn’t have to be ran through a purifier half a dozen times, so that half this country doesn’t become a landfill like India has, and so. So we can finally get ourselves off that foreign oil “teet” we’ve now fought two wars over. How about that one?

But no, lets not be productive about any of this and make this yet another bullshit partisan argument. Because guys like Gore having their hand in the Clean Energy cookie jar is nothing like having a former President/Vice President combo having ties to some of the biggest energy producers in the world while waging a war on the biggest oil producer. Except that, god forbid, his greed at least might move us towards doing something productive for a change, instead of just a lot of dead brown people. Rich people win again while we lose because we can’t be bothered to not play the party card and just do what’s bloody right for a change.

Some days I honestly hope I die within the next twenty years so I won’t be around to see how history starts to remember us, because it sure as hell ain’t going to read pretty. If there’s anything relevant to record at all except a giant “How not to be” reminder…

What the original emails actual say is unknown. We only have copies of emails as delivered to the public domain by thieves. We do not know what changes those thieves introduced into the emails between the theft and their publication. This “evidence” is tainted. Further we only know of the emails that were stolen and released, we know nothing of the other emails either not stolen or not released. The quotes circulating, even if accurate, are taken out of context.

However, let us assume that these emails are in fact unaltered. There is not really very much in these that is substantial as regards to the actual science of global warming. It is all “procedural” issues written informally. The case to date is that they have attempted to prevent the publication of data from other scientists with whom they disagree. That does not make them wrong or those they disagree with right.

They have not “called into question an entire field of study”. I have not seen any thing in the emails that does so and I would challenge you to cite something that does.

However let even assume that all of the science that these particular scientists have produced is false. Fine. There is still all of the work of hundreds of other scientists over the last 120 years. Are we to throw all of that out too? Why?

I still stand by what I posted. I challenge you to read the original paper by Svante Arrhenius and find an error. The same with work of Thomas C. Chamberlin, a very important geologist. Where Arrhenius and Chamberlin they in cahoots to help Al Gore? What about Roger Revelle, Hans Suess, and Gilbert Plass, who were working the 1940’s and 1950’s in CO2 and climate change, were their work also fraudulent? Were they too working with Gore – Arrhenius – Champerlin Cabal even though the former was not born and the latter two dead?

The science of climatic change is bigger and more substantial than a few emails or even individual scientists. “Pas de touché”.