Yesterday, on the inaugural day of the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Charles J. Hanley, special correspondent for the Associated Press on matters of climate change, published an article announcing that the past decade was the warmest ever on record. Hanley wrote the article as if all the world's climatologists are in unanimous agreement that: a) the Earth is warming, and, b) that the cause is man-made. In fact, there is no global consensus in the scientific community on either of those assertions. Indeed, there exists a substantial sub-community of scientists who are global warming skeptics.
Two Russian solar physicists, Galina Mashnich and Vladmir Bashkirtsev are so confident that the Earth is cooling that they challenged any climatologist to a $10,000 wager that global temperatures will fall between the years 2012 and 2017. Not a single climatologist--nor scientists from any field for that matter--has accepted their challenge.
Some scientists claim the Earth is currently cooling, while others go so far as to debunk atmospheric global warming as outright hysteria. They claim to have data that directly contradicts Hanley's assertion, and claim the decade of 2000s in fact shows a cooling trend.
There are many troubling aspects to the email scandal coming from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University. Two of the most troubling aspects regard the manner in which former CRU director Phil Jones attempted to squelch dissenting points of view on global warming by eliminated the peer review process and by having the editor of Climate Research journal and AGW skeptic, Chris de Freitas, fired.
Scientists and advocates supporting human-induced global warming theory are quick to say that the scandal is contained at East Anglia's CRU, and to Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. But there are troubling signs that this scandal could reach all corners of the globe.
For example, Jim Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has come under recent fire for neglecting a FOIA request for two years, filed by Chris Horner, Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."
Further, New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), is also under scrutiny for assuming a temperature adjustment in their data.
Clearly, this is not merely a temporary set back for the delegates at the Climate Change summit in Copenhagen. In their goal to establish a global exchange of carbon credits, this scandal could set them back years, and possibly decades.
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
