What has been really interesting, to me, is the heat generated in the blogosphere, especially when a news story or recent study pops up about climate change. The first comments come from individuals commenting on the science and then new voices start to emerge heaping scorn on anyone who does not see that the hacked emails change everything (whether the emails have anything to do with the topic or not). Their arguments are interesting on their own, quite apart from the questions of what the hacked emails do or do not prove.
Most obvious, to me, is the assertion that the climate change "hoax" is driven by the huge amounts of money these scientists are making. If you really think that money is ipso facto the corrupting influence, it should be clear (a "no-brainer"?) where the money is, and it ain't with the academics. The largest corporate players on the planet all depend on business as usual (BAU), especially in regards to their control and continued market for fossil fuels, the main source of CO2 emissions. We know what kinds of profits are at stake for Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, et al., let alone Monsanto or GE or Boeing. We know what they've been spending on directed research, PR efforts, lobbying in every government that matter. So, please, don't insult our intelligence with references to fat-cat scientists.
Perhaps not so obvious, but more telling, is the deniers' emphasis on temperature data and whether or not they show "warming." For one thing, most of the denier-bloggers show a deep distrust of the statistics without much attempt to illuminate what the numbers do tell us. Nor do they answer the solid statistical evidence from other sources.
But then, the proof for climate change argument does not rest on temperatures alone. Atmospheric and sea temperatures were only meant to be indicators of coming changes. The models that have been developed over the last 40 years were meant to give us a warning, to be indicators that would tell us we need to change before the really big, planet-wide systems, lagging some years behind observed temperatures, swing to a new balance point.
At this point, the proof is now distressingly clear -- rising sea levels, thinning ice at both poles, melting glaciers at all lattitudes, disappearing permafrost throughout the far north: Alaska, Canada, Siberia. We can debate the temperature data and models all we want, but the planet-level swing has already happened. The game has changed. And though we could see it, we didn't see it. Why not?
This is where the image of Plato's Cave came to mind. Plato developed this allegory to make a point about the unreliability of sense-derived information, and the need to pursue the truth of the forms that lie behind what we see or hear.
To summarize, Plato (in the character of Socrates) painted a picture of a group of people who have grown up in a cave, restrained so they can only see a wall a little ways in front of them. Behind them, out of their sight, is a big fire. And in between the fire and the watchers there is a constant stream of people, moving and talking, thought the watchers can only hear the echos that bounced off the wall and could only see the shadows they cast on the wall. Plato's point was that the two-dimensional world of the shadows on the wall is, for the watchers, the sum total of reality. If by some chance one of the watchers could escape his restraints and turn to see the three-dimensional world behind him, and then return to tell the others what he had learned, he would be ridiculed, if not ostracized or killed.
I sometimes think that the world we think we live in is actually a highly edited version of the real world, for the simple reason that we can't really process all the information out there (it's chaos!) so we are necessarily selective. Humans need to break a huge amount of input into the signals that really matter, ignoring the static. But the more we learn about the world, the more we learn that it is all signal. Because chaos is not random. But chaos is too much to comprehend, so we watch the shadow that chaos projects on our walls and try to cope the best we can.
"Chaos" (Wiki) describes a dynamic (changing) system that is sensitive to initial conditions -- systems where a tiny change in an input can result in a huge systemic change. The textbook real-world example is the weather. Humans have been gathering weather data for decades. We have powerful computers. But the horizon for accurate forecasting is still hours, not weeks, let alone months. The complexity of the system makes it unlikely we can ever capture and input the right information, even if we had the computational power to crunch it. That's the challenge that comes from trying to predict the local effects of systemic processes by looking at individual inputs. Chaos -- the world -- just doesn't work like that.
There is also a ton of money going to the climate change researchers. Billions to be exact.
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This Bret Stephens article from December 1 has some figures that are pretty mind blowing. I would venture to say that both sides of this debate are as dirty as the other.
My understanding is also that while Arctic ice has decreased by an alarming rate (4.2% per decade), Antarctic ice has been increasing during the same period at a much smaller rate (0.8% per decade according to the snow and ice data center at the U of Colorado.) While this tends to show general melting, it is hardly uniform at both poles. This should obviously lead to questions regarding climate change. In the end I think it's more likely that climate change is man made than not, but it hardly seems like a settled topic and it shouldn't be treated as such. It's also alarming that some people would use terminology likening those who are global warming skeptics to those that deny the holocaust. There is no place for it and it makes someone, such as myself, who is not firmly in one camp or the other reticent to support a side that so clearly engages in hyperbole.
Obviously the right does this as well and in the same manner when they bemoan the "American way of life." This way of life has consisted of, among other things racism, inequality, wasteful behavior etc.
In the end, we should follow steps to decrease emissions regardless of the effect of climate change due to the other effects on the environment. However, the moral component and tone of the hard core climate change proponents is misguided. The attitude of these scientists further cements this point. The problem is that the scientists were obviously misleading the public and ignoring the scientific method. Couple that with their obviously vested interest and they are no different from Chevron or other large polluters. Just because their underlying beliefs might be more "moral" or "just," this does not excuse their actions.