By: Jamie Biggar on Go-Beyond.ca
On the eve of the most important climate summit ever hacked emails from a research center in England are being promoted as a “game changer” by people who don’t want to see climate action. These people say that the emails prove that global warming is a hoax – a conspiracy that is either socialist or corporatist or, most terrifying of all, Al Gorist.
Why?
Out of the thousands of emails there is no evidence of a massive worldwide conspiracy of thousands of scientists to impose socialism or corporatism or Al Gorism.
Instead, there is evidence of scientists reacting badly to the enormous pressure they are under from a small, motivated and well funded group of people and institutions who have made it their mission to confuse the public about climate science, and have the backing of big dollars from big oil. This is the Manufactured Doubt Industry. It started decades ago to protect tobacco company profits by confusing the public about cancer research, it consists of a network of researchers with dubious credentials and right-wing think tanks designed to grab media attention, and its very happy with itself right now.
The scientists whose emails were hacked adopted a “bunker mentality” about their data because they are under constant attack from the Manufactured Doubt Industry who question their motives, their competence and will distort the scientists’ data and analysis to further an ideological agenda (government is bad!) and protect fossil fuel company profits (oil money is good).
Today’s leading climate scientists did not choose this fight. We have to remember that we’re talking about people who decided to spend decades in school researching something that can’t talk to them. Climate scientists are not people people, let alone the organizers of a global socialist or corporatist or Gorist conspiracy.
Let’s talk about the other side here. Last year Exxon Mobil made $45 billion dollars, the most profit of any corporation, ever. Exxon Mobil didn’t become the dominant player in an industry that features dictatorships by being a bunch of nice guys with your interests at heart. Exxon Mobil is the biggest backer of the Manufactured Doubt Industry because they know that doubt will work to protect their ability to keep us addicted to fossil fuels.
Remember: what do oil companies value the most? Their profits.
Now, what do scientists value the most? Their credibility.
Who has the motive to lie and confuse the public?
Nature, perhaps the most presitgious scientific journals in the world, wrote in an editorial:
“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.”
The editorial, again written by perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, proceeds with a detailed rebuttal of the Manufactured Doubt Industry’s talking points.
I think it’s a good thing to send around – http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a.html
So when it comes down to it the question is this: who do you trust more? Thousands of scientists and every presitigious scientific organization or the world’s biggest oil companies? I pick the scientists.
This is the central question for the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen: will the world rise to the challenge of reducing global warming pollution as fast as the science tells us we must to prevent catastrophic climate change, or will we lower the bar to protect the profits of the most polluting companies on the planet no matter what the consequences for everyone else?
You can help answer that question by fighting back against the hacked email hachet job – and more importantly, by building the pressure on our goverment for real climate leadership.
No! No! No! Climate Change HAS to be true! We MUST be doing SOMETHING to our helpless planet that we are polluting to no end. It MUST be true! How can it not be true?
If climate change is defeated in the press, just think of how that will set back our efforts to defeat world wide greed and EXXON and evil right wingers like Limbaugh and Bush and Harper? We must do what ever it takes to make the world a place of peace and love and equality for everyone. We must trust these blessed scientists who selflessly devote their entire lives to studying the planet’s complicated climate systems that we will some day understand. We must help our fragile and weak planet evolve more so as its creatures can flourish in peace and harmony free from right wing evil.
Help our planet, help its creatures, help love and peace and keep the climate change train going so we can be victorious.
Please trust the true and REAL science and give what ever the politicians need to get the job done of fixing our planet Earth.
From the National Academy of Sciences, Here is the crux of climategate (assuming the reader is familiar with the FOIA and the “lost” source data aspects of the issue):
Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and
Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age
ISBN: 978-0-309-13684-6 National Academy of Sciences.
http://www.nap.edu/html/12615/12615_EXS.pdf
Data Access and Sharing Principle: Research data, methods, and other information integral to publicly reported results should be publicly accessible.
Recommendation 5: All researchers should make research data, methods, and other information integral to their publicly reported results publicly accessible in a timely manner to allow verification of published findings and to enable other researchers to build on published results, except in unusual cases in which there are compelling reasons for not releasing data. In these cases, researchers should explain in a publicly accessible
manner why the data are being withheld from release.
Data Stewardship Principle: Research data should be retained to serve future uses.
Data that may have long-term value should be documented, referenced, and indexed so that others can find and use them accurately and appropriately. Curating data requires documenting, referencing, and indexing the data so that they can be used accurately and appropriately in the future.
Recommendation 9: Researchers should establish data management plans at the beginning of each research project that include appropriate provisions for the stewardship of research data.
I claim no conspiracy. Never attribute to conspiracy what one can attribute to incompetence or pettiness.
It doesn’t take a huge consipiracy, and indeed, a huge conspiracy would have been discovered and laid to rest a long time ago.
The conspiracy is between a small group of well-placed individuals who were in a position to fake their science and then cover their tracks. All of the world’s “peer reviewed” papers on climate science tied back to their database which they were tweaking and kneading to make it ever so attractive and persuasive for the politico’s to point at as a crisis (and then “lead” us out of the “crisis”.)
Well meaning people were taken in by the hoax. Less well placed scientists have been blowing the whistle on this for the past several years and they have been getting ignored. Why? Well because the “peer reviewed” work supressed them. Don’t believe that? Just read the emails. They openly joke about keeping the watchdogs out of their business.
Remember Enron? Well here is the same sort of thing, so I would be very careful defending these guys because you, your family, your children and children’s children will be paying the bill for the economic mess they are creating. Kind of like the doomsday cults – no time to think or consider this, just run!
If you choose to treat this as your “crusade du jour” just remember, you are only being used as a useful idiot. Instead of saving the world you are simply ensuring dishonest people get to stick their hands in your and my pockets.
Big Al
I suggest that the author of this look a little deeper into the issue. Just because your set of beliefs are being challenged to thier very core does not mean that hysteria is the correct response. Perhaps you should reflect on what Science is and how it is furthered. If you did you would take a mare toned down response and look at the situation a little more critically rather than emotionally. It is very clear that you are not a scientist or used to logical thought. Your arguments are based on arguments from authority and an hominum attacks. Clearly, you have not even taken an introductory Logic Course. Get an education and evaluate the geological record over the past million years or so and you will see a cyclic phenomenon. Taking a small section of a sine wave and saying that the trend will continue in a linear fashion shows an ignorance of natural events. The Earth rotates about its axis every 24 hours, it revolves once a year around the sun, it wobbles on its axis, the sun has solar intensity cycles etc. And here you believe that we are on a straight linear run into a fiery hell – relax and try to enjoy life’s changes. Even if we were on a one way road to Hades there is nothing you, taxes on the rich or the Government can do about it. Study some basic Science if you want to be critical. That will provide you the ability to see things for yourself rather than having to rely on others interpretations and being left open to overt and covert manipulation to ends that are against your own best interests. At least then you will be able to couch your arguments in terms that make some sort of logical sense. After all, we have passed the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment and the industrial age based on the power of individual interpretation of events. You seem to be stepping back into an age of belief last seen in the dark ages. I for one am not going back and I won’t let you take me with you either.
You’re kidding right?….and what did Exxon ever do to you? Really? You must be kidding? and does anybody really take you seriously?
I made a post about this issue last week, it’s very important to fight back against the deniers on this one
http://madrad2002.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/in-defense-of-science/
It also recently surfaced yesterday that there was an attempt hack Canada’s climate data center as well
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/breaking-impersonators-at_b_380948.html
Great post. How can we tell? Because the climate change deniers are now paying attention to the RAN blog. I suggest RAN screen out their comments–they are part of the manufactured doubt industry and their presence on this blog is a distraction from the purpose of the discussions here. If they doubt the science, let them take that up with the leading U.S. scientific agencies on this topic, NASA and NOAA.
Someone needs to hack the think-talks and their emails with their corporate sponsors…
Thanks anjalih for this great summary of exactly why the deniers are dead wrong. Personally, I don’t see anything that new about the “climategate” sham; it seems to me like basically a revised and updated version of the same old story anti-science deniers have been feeding us since the 1990s. As always, the deniers continue to try and convince us that the world’s leading scientists and scientific journals don’t know what they’re talking about, and a few random right-wingers off the Internet are the ones we should really all be listening to. Their arguments, perfectly embodied by some of the comments above, are laughable (what is WesleyMouch even talking about with that tirade about the Earth spinning on it’s access?. That is relevant to the discussion at hand exactly how?). Thanks again for the post.
Um, WesleyMouch, Jallen, I’d say you are the ones with apparently no firm grounding in basic scientific methods. Science is based on the collection of actual data, not some extremist interpretation of a batch of emails. Just to clarify for you WesleyMouch, the science of global warming is grounded in the fact that heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane are accumulating in the atmosphere, leading to higher global temperatures on average; you do know that, right? Unbeleivable as it may seem, the scientists who are telling us to beware of global warming are well aware that it gets colder at night, and even that an overall trend of increasing temperatures doesn’t mean every single year will be warmer than the one before it.
And yes, I’ve taken many college-level science classes that examined the scientific method and how to collect reliable data – and I got A’s in all of them. Any one of my former science professors would be horrified by the way WesleyMouch, Jallen, and others are attempting to flat-out ignore actual science.
I haove often found it interesting what the public considers a science controversy vs a real one. For example, evolution in the US has long been a public controversy, but the scientific community has long had consensus. On the other hand, there is the HUGE gaping hole in the physics models between gravity and quantum mechanics (i.e., the equations that work for gravity are completely different than those predicted by quantum mechanics). The public could care less (except for a few warp drive and time machine designers…).
Climate change touches strong societal and cultural nerves in the public sphere. This means that the public will latch on to any dissenting scientists to keep hold of the belief there is no consensus. Changing 80% of our energy system means a lot of short-term pain for a lot of people (not just ExxonMobil executives). Public ambivalence is quite understandable.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/09/content_12618348.htm
Santill: Res Ipsa Locuitor
“the fact that heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane are accumulating in the atmosphere, leading to higher global temperatures on average; you do know that, right?
Don’t patronize me. And no, I do not know that. All indications are that CRU, GISS, and GHCN data are manipulated i.e “processed”. Those organizations refuse, against all legal attempts, (as does the Met Office in the UK) to release base data for public investigation. Those are facts. Only processed data is being released. But it appears you have lost your ability to think critically with regard to this issue.