LiveGreenNOW

By Emma Chapman

The latest drama to hit the global warming community is over a set of published emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom (see photo, courtesy of the AP). These emails show questionable conduct among members of the scientific community who believe that human activities have contributed to global warming. They include “apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others,” as well as derisive comments against dissenting scientists who are skeptical of global warming and the involvement of humans.

These emails were released on the heels of news that global warming has gotten worse since the Kyoto treaty signed in 1997. According to an article by the Associated Press, there are a number of concerning indicators about current global conditions: oceans have risen by over an inch, droughts and wildfires are more severe, temperatures from the past 12 years are .4 degrees warmer than the 12 years preceding 1997, and the level of carbon dioxide in the air has increased 6.5% since 1997.

It is becoming clear that these facts will be overshadowed by the controversy of the hacked emails. The scientists who contributed to these emails, among them prominent researchers from the United States and the U.K., have put all of their research into question. Unfortunately, any speculation about the cause of global warming or indicators of it from now on will suffer from charges of forgery and misrepresentation. Skeptics of global warming have always been making these charges; now they have a basis for their accusations. A quick look at the comments on The Times-Picayune printing of the AP article mentioned above makes this clear: “These scientists are using scare tactics and manipulating scientific data to induce hysteria in people;” “Lies, the earth is not warming it’s cooling, the seas are not rising and the sky is not falling, we will not accept this political science any more.”

It will be interesting to see how these emails will affect the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change Conference scheduled for December 7-18^th.  The scientific community (or at least those who believe that human activity is exacerbating global warming) was looking to the Conference as the next opportunity to effect policy developments regarding climate change in countries around the world. The United States dropped the ball on the Kyoto Protocol and never actually signed it; this time, however, President Obama has indicated that he wants the Copenhagen talks to have “immediate operational effect.”

While I doubt that these emails will affect President Obama’s views on the Copenhagen Conference, they certainly cast doubt on the credibility of scientists around the world. Hopefully, they can redeem themselves and prove that their data and assertions are founded in fact, not misinterpretation and “tricks.”

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Green Street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.