With the Copenhagen climate conference approaching in less than a week, hundreds of world leaders and climate experts are drawing together to debate a new pact to slow global warming, and reduce GHG emissions globally.
However, recent events have created a stir before the upcoming meeting. A string of hacked private e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were recently released detailing global climate change scientists in the U.S. and Europe casting doubts about the very scientific facts that this upcoming summit will be biased upon. The Climate Research Unit has thus far been incredibly influential in the global warming debate.
Researchers such as Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick who you may know from Al Gore’s inconvenient truth, and the “hockey stick controversy” were involved in private emails that show that these experts along with many of the worlds leading scientists on climate change decided to exclude or manipulate some of their research that didn’t help prove global warming exists.
The most evident area where record-keeping appears to have been skewed by the scientists, was temperature readings from 1998. Although temperatures have gone down since 1998 and only spiked a couple times since, researchers showed an upward trend when releasing their data. The email exchange, that occurred in 1999, shows not only this, but that they talked of using a “trick” to try and “hid the decline” in global temperatures.
For critics of climate change this appears to be another “nail in the coffin” that global climate change isn’t indeed an issue, and has been an extrapolation from true and untrue theories and facts. How will this affect Copenhagen this Saturday, is the question many are asking.
However, the scientists although not denying the email exchange say the emails are being misinterpreted. However, the leakings of the emails have created a stir internationally and in the White house. While the two largest carbon producers, India and China still agree that climate change is happening and will be setting goals to lower their own carbon emissions, others have casted new doubts.
The United States has yet to make a clear stance on reducing GHG emissions, and leaked emails have given ammunition to critics of climate change. Climate change supporters say Copenhagen may only produce a framework for an agreement for an agreement that could be finalized next year.
How do you think this will affect climate change supporters at Copenhagen this week? What do you think this means for any sort of international agreement being finalized in the next year? Or funding for green renewable energies in the United States?
--- Kirsten Dobson
Though there has been a lot made of this email leak, and it certainly shows a lack of integrity in the scientific community responsible for proving anthropogenic global warming, the information leaked is not enough to change anyone's mind. Yes, the deniers see this as more evidence of their point, but the fact is that there is a much larger scientific consensus outside of the Climate Research Unit.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, just today, the EPA finally released their findings that greenhouse gases are a public health hazard and must be regulated.
Hmm ... I myself am still skeptical of Global Warming and this only casts even more doubts on Global Warming for me. I read a book called “The Little Ice Age” which claims that Global Warming is actually just another climate change that occurs naturally. There is actually a period of cooling that occurred during the Medieval Period after an era of warm weather. I'm not sure if we will ever know if Global Warming is happening or not. Either way it is better to be safe than sorry!
ReplyDelete~Shawn Page
Alex makes a very good point. I don't think that Copenhagen will be drastically affected by this email leak that is based off an insignificant amount of information. Secondly, its going to take an overwhelming amount of information to change people's opinions about whether or not global warming "exists" as it has been argued. I also question the motives behind "leaking" this information. Meaning, I wonder "who" was behind it. I question whether it may have something to do with big corporations and industries emitting GHG's and other hazardous substances into the air that want to manipulate any information they can in order to deter regulation. Although it won't necessarily deter regulation comprehensively, because the EPA has released a statement regarding their findings that ghg's are a public health hazard, I wonder if further findings that deny global warming will lessen the extent of such regulations.
ReplyDeleteThe United States seems to be the last nation on Earth to fully understand that the global warming that we are experiencing is due to man-made causes. Although the Earth did go through a "little ice age" during the Middle Ages in the last millenium, the Earth did not suddenly get out of that ice age in the course of two decades... that is the radical change we are experiencing on Earth today. Climategate is exactly the kind of thing that the conservative media in the United States would make happen a couple of days before the most important climate change event ever. The Washington Times, to which Ms. Dobson links, is well known as a conservative paper. At the end of the first paragraph, the Washington Times is already comparing climate scientists to criminals and seems to laugh hardly at the dean who says the emails were quoted out of context. The international community here in Copenhagen has not taken note of the the United States' "Climategate" because they recognize it as yellow journalism. To say that a single university's research (flawed or unflawed?) is the basis for the entire theory of man-made global warming and that we should stop our efforts is a slap in the face to every head of state, government employee, scientist, academic, business person, and activist here in Copenhagen during the conference.
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