Nature Magazine, the international weekly journal of science, is at it again. In the 1940′s the magazine published opinion pieces in support of purging Jews from academia. Now they run opinion pieces in defense of Al Gore’s scam. Normal people recognize that the East-Anglia emails prove, beyond any shadow of doubt, that climatologists and politicians are the scum of the earth, conspiring to rob the rest of us to the benefit of their own cash flow. Now, make sure you are sitting down, the significance of the emails according to Nature is that:
- They were obtained “unethically.”
- They prove that scientists are human.
- They demonstrate that scientists are smart.
- They demonstrate that normal people are ignorant boobs.
- They are a call for decent people to support the East-Anglia fascists!
- They prove that “something is happening”
- You must give your money to poor people and scientists, or something.
- The “denialists” must be defeated!
- Scientists should avoid getting caught.
- The scam must go on.
This opinion piece in Nature falls into the “as the stomach turns” category.
Climatologists under pressure
Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.
The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
First, Earth’s cryosphere is changing as one would expect in a warming climate. These changes include glacier retreat, thinning and areal reduction of Arctic sea ice, reductions in permafrost and accelerated loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Second, the global sea level is rising. The rise is caused in part by water pouring in from melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also by thermal expansion as the oceans warm. Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.
Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential (see pages 568 and 570).
How can such clever scientists be so stupid?
