News coverage of the e-mails and the various claims about what they supposedly show may have contributed to public confusion on the subject. A Dec. The truth is that over the 13 years covered by the CRU e-mails, scientific consensus has only become stronger as the evidence for global warming from various sources has mounted.
Reports from the National Academies and the U. Global Change Research Program that analyze large amounts of data from various sources also agree, as does the IPCC, that climate change is not in doubt.
In advance of the U. Correction, Dec. The Times of London had reported that the Met Office would reexamine its data, but that article was incorrect. A spokesperson for the office told us that there were no plans to do so.
The Met Office does plan to release the station temperature records publicly, but not to reevaluate them. The university investigation is continuing. Walsh, Bryan. Black, Richard. Ball, Tim. Webster, Ben. BBC News. Satter, Raphael G. Sandell, Clayton. World Meteorological Association.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Pachauri, R. Solomon, S. Briffa, K. Watson, Andrew. With all the "hot air" surrounding climate change discussions, none has been hotter in recent weeks than that spewed over a trove of stolen e-mails and computer code from the Climatic Research Unit CRU at the University of East Anglia in England.
Longstanding contrarians, such as Sen. James Inhofe R—Okla. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to halt any development of regulation of greenhouse gases pending his investigation into the e-mails. And recent polls have found that fewer Americans today than just two years ago believe that greenhouse gases will cause average temperatures to increase—a drop from 71 percent to 51 percent.
Yet, Arctic sea ice continues to dwindle —as do glaciers across the globe; average temperatures have increased by 0. Nor has the fundamental physics of the greenhouse effect changed: CO2 in the atmosphere continues to trap heat that would otherwise slip into space, as was established by Irish scientist John Tyndall in That's been known for hundreds of years.
That's a very big number indeed. For example, the word "trick" in one message , which has been cited as evidence that a conspiracy is afoot, is actually being used to describe a mathematical approach to reconciling observed temperatures with stand-in data inferred from tree ring measurements.
The scientists on the conference call, including atmospheric scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, also addressed other parts of the content of the stolen e-mails, including some that griped about particular journals Climate Research or editors at Geophysical Research Letters. As a result, climate scientists were complaining, among themselves, about the quality of the journals. Your work becomes devalued. In an email to University of Alabama climatologist John Christy I asked, "Is there a possibility that the teams that compile temperature data could all be making the same set of errors which would result in them finding similar and perhaps spurious trends?
In that article he found that using both the maximum and minimum temperature rather than the mean temperature TMean used by the three official data sets gives a better indication of actual temperature trends in the region. Christy found that the maximum temperature TMax trend has been essentially zero since while the minimum temperature TMin trend has been increasing. In his email to me, Christy explained, "As it turns out, TMin warms significantly due to factors other than the greenhouse effect, so TMean, because it is affected by TMin, is a poor proxy for understanding the greenhouse effect of 'global warming'.
Christy has found similar effects on temperature trend reporting for other regions of the world. Roger Pielke Jr. In general, the global satellite temperature trends tend to be on the low end of the climate computer model projections. The more benign interpretation of what has been going on in climate change science is that as the man-made global warming narrative took hold among climatologists, research that confirmed the dominant paradigm had a much easier time getting through the peer review process.
Meanwhile research that contradicted the paradigm was subject to much greater scrutiny and thus had a harder time making it through the peer review sieve. Scientists are human too and not free from confirmation bias. But for now, regardless of the motivations of the researchers, damage has been done.
How can the world of climate science recover? First, carry out independent investigations of the activities of the researchers involved. Pennsylvania State University has announced that it will investigate the activities of researcher Michael Mann, who worked closely with the CRU and several times expressed in the leaked emails his desire to stifle the scientific work of researchers with whom he disagreed.
Tireless journalistic global warming scold George Monbiot has declared , "It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow…. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Another important step to recovering from the tragedy of Climategate is to institute the kind of research transparency that should have been happening in the first place.
In addition, they believe that the usefulness of the U. Hulme and Ravetz worry that the IPCC's "structural tendency to politicize climate change science…has helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production—just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
And greater transparency should not be limited to just temperature data, but to all aspects of climate science. In an email response to me, climatologist Pielke Sr. Otherwise these models should not be used in climate assessment reports. One thing more transparency won't fix: the complications and uncertainty inherent in the policy debate about global warming.
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