I'm sure most people who get their news from sources other than ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX (FAUX), etc., have heard about this whole "Climategate" incident involving hacked e-mails from the CRU (Climate Research Unit) of the University of East Anglia, UK.

For those who haven't, check it out.

Ranging chronologically from 1996 to just last month, the e-mails, models, and IDL and FORTRAN programming code strongly suggest falsification of data concerning rising global temperatures. Poignant timing, what with Copenhagen coming up.

Personally, I'm not that surprised. Considering all the bigwigs who stand to benefit from emission cuts/carbon tax, it was only a matter of time before some veil was pulled off to reveal skewed science and corruption. Follow the money trail, right? Of course there is big industry in both camps. I just find it ironic that virtually every major Western news organization is saying zilch about all this. It's big, controversial news; and methinks their silence speaks louder than words.

Anyways, I didn't see a thread about this, thus I wanted to get the official consensus(es) of the great brooding hive mind that is Massassi.

Discuss!

Having looked at some of the most "controversial" e-mails, it seems like they're basically about two things - new data that is causing them to rethink and reinterpret their models, and that they're sick of having to cooperate with climate change deniers.

The first part, while it's being overblown to make it sound like the data is being faked and the models are wrong and whatever, only shows that climate science is very much a work in progress. New data is always coming in, and not all of it is going to fit whatever models they have, so naturally they're going to have to tweak those models to incorporate the new information.

The second part is actually more worrying, as there were suggestions of withholding data from critics. While - especially in light of the first part - I can understand their exasperation at scientific work being turned into a political agenda, the only way anyone is going to know what's going on is if all their raw data is available to whoever wants it.

Conclusion: Yes, climate change is still happening. Whether or not you believe it's anthropogenic is entirely irrelevant. The sooner we can stop turning it into a petty partisan issue and start doing something about it, the better.

This is my problem with global warming: All of the "issues" seem emotional rather than scientific. Most of the entrenched backlash from skeptics has been brought about by people like Al Gore using the issue as a platform to gain personal acclaim and act pretentiously. Actions by people like Gore have permanently branded global warming as hippie nonsense in the minds of the right.

Meanwhile, scientific types despise the right for being anti-intellectual and anti-science. This knee-jerk reaction has caused an irrational and unscientific attitude toward the actual problem, which often boils down irrational pretentiousness. This in turn serves to confirm the suspicious of the skeptical right, leading to a vicious cycle of retarded.

In the scientific community, professional bias and academic drama is surely raised to ridiculous levels with all of the outside attention, pressure and funding, inhibiting the scientific community's ability to properly asses the situation. This has lead to an unrealistic degree of faith on models that have no way of being any where near as accurate as they are reported to be in the media.

Everyone is acting like a bunch of screaming monkeys. The monkeys in the trees say that there is a fire coming because they see smoke. The monkeys on the ground say there isn't, and they all spend quite a lot of time arguing about that and weather or not they should throw most of their food in the fire's general direction in order to stop it.

The monkeys on the ground think that they are being had, and the monkeys in the trees are furious with the monkeys on the ground for impeding efforts to stop the fire, but are so busy arguing with the monkeys on the ground that they haven't really put much effort into finding a real solution. So in the end, a there is a lot of screeching and flying fleeces, but none of it has any bearing on weather the monkeys get burned up.

So in this analogy....the monkeys are cars?

Your mom is a car.

Yep.

I'm a Christian and I don't believe in monkeys

The way I see it, the majority of 'action points' for combating climate change are good things to do whether or not they have any significant affect on the fate of the planet.

Personally, I'm all on favour of cutting down emissions and unsustainable use of natural resources. It would be nice to cycle home and not feel extremely ill from all the pollution on the roads. I know this doesn't justify scientific bias, but from what I've read of the leaked documents, a lot of the controversial emails seem to have been taken way out of context.

There's no real excuse for destroying documents or witholding data though, other than the reasons for doing so being understandable.

the word is whether.

This is why I've always been with T. Boone Pickens, despite the fact that he's a huge dbag and wants to serve his own self interests.

It doesn't matter if climate change is real or not, shifting to alternatives for energy serve us better in the long run, by removing our dependence on foreign energy, creating jobs and stimulating our own economy, which is why I never got why conservatives never jumped on board.

Plenty of conservatives are on board. They/we just don't think forcing us all into it through taxes and laws is the right thing to do. T. Boone has it basically right, like you said.

Lots and lots and lots of conservatives are on board. I'm on board too. And we already have an answer:

The best possible solution from a conservative point of view is to operate within the framework of the existing economy, using regular market pressures to achieve an efficient level of pollution reduction at the lowest possible cost. Americans call this solution "cap and trade."

Any American conservatives who still vote for the Republican party have some questions to answer, don't they? It costs companies more to produce a certain good than they are paying to produce it - the resulting difference, in the form of 'pollution,' is paid for by the rest of society. Why should society subsidize the activities of a minority of large companies? That's socialism! Why do you hate America, Wookie06?

Wrong, the best possible decision is not for the government to impose market pressures to achieve pollution reduction, and since when is getting the government involved EVER associated with the lowest possible cost of anything?

All this big legislation that is claimed to be intended to control pollution is really more about the control and less about the pollution. There is really no arguing the fact that the current trend is "you can't be trusted with this, but don't worry, we will take control of you and protect you from yourself". So yeah, a lot of my opposition is on principle. You can reason and logic all you want about the scientific principles and the most ecologically and economically prudent thing to do, but often the most prudent thing is not the smart thing in the long run for the overall state of the nation. More nanny-state BS is bad for all of us in the long run.

This is just a bunch of the elite class (I use this term very generally (and I don't use it entirely sarcastically, you can take it to mean climate experts, or people who think they're climate experts, or politicians who fall into either category) forcing us to do what they think is best for us. It's like trying to smash a broken leg back together with a sledgehammer. If you want to really change, you have to change the entire country's attitude about reducing emissions. Research into better technologies, and informing the public about these technologies is a good start, and yes I know there are provisions for this.

I don't know the complete unified answer to stopping climate change (to whatever extent it may exist, which I also don't know), but I know that this is not the best way to do it. Maybe it is for other countries, but not us.

The thing is, it is better to let that happen naturally through market pressures. If you artificially try to do that, you might end up moving in a less than optimum direction. For example, as great as the interstate system is, I can't help but think that our infrastructure wouldn't be so hopelessly car oriented if we hadn't all of a sudden decided to place all of the highways all over the place, instead of responding to actual need.

An incredibly wordy and roundabout way of saying you don't read whole posts.

It costs companies more to produce a certain good than they are paying to produce it - the resulting difference, in the form of 'pollution,' is paid for by the rest of society. Why should society subsidize the activities of a minority of large companies?

You're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Providing an industry-wide cap on pollution output and letting the industry decide how to distribute that cap achieves the desired output level while minimizing government intervention.

If the government did nothing, eventually the government would have to clean up the whole thing, a goddamn Superfund money hole. There is NO!!!!!!!! economic motive for companies to reduce pollution because companies DO NOT PAY FOR IT. You pay for it! Your health insurer pays for it! Why, why why why, with what moon logic can you argue a polluter would ever voluntarily pay to reduce it without the government forcing them to internalize the externality?

If you're going to tell someone they're wrong you'd better be goddamn sure you know what you're talking about.

For pollution to get reduced without government involvement, it has to become more profitable not to pollute. Chances are that this will happen eventually, but the air quality in cities is bad now. Any company board that tries to do the 'right' thing, rather than the more profitable thing is going to get fired. It happened with Yahoo trying to reject getting into bed with Microsoft, it's going to happen with any big polluter who takes on the massive expense of reducing their emissions.

I do see what you mean about it becoming a "petty partisan issue," but what do you think about the major media blackout on the subject? That's what intrigues me the most.

I'm not trying to scream conspiracy theory or anything; I think those nuts from "We Are Change Chicago" went ballistically overboard by shouted "new world order!" and "crook!" at Al Gore at his book signing. Haha. It's still funny to watch. YouTube it.

But what I'm trying to say is that this whole happening has been a great opportunity to observe how big media works. Just watch...any official US inquiry will be delayed until after the Copenhagen meetings next week. It's just interesting watching what gets reported to the general public and what gets swept under the rug - even just temporarily - for political interests. In my opinion, media networks are neglecting their journalistic obligations by staying 100% silent. Not that that's anything new or striking. Money buys a lot of silence.

Or, at least, less expensive.

That's why cap and trade is so interesting. Companies that can reduce pollution cheaply will do so, and then sell their excess permits to companies with crappier equipment. It's pretty much by definition that the money they get for those permits will be more than the money they spent on reducing pollution.

I predict this will never happen. Ever.

People (and businesses) are generally self-interested. Not a lot of people go out of their way to be environmentally friendly. Like, how often do you buy carbon offsets for driving a car, riding a bus or taking a plane flight? As long as it's freely permitted, it will always be cheaper to simply vent waste than dispose of it safely.

This is all indisputably correct. The amount of pollution the environment can absorb is a scarce resource. The issue is how much of that resource we have, and how we conserve it on a global scale. If we had a hard number and an easy way of enforcing the system, there would essentially be no problem.

I heard about it from CNN? So... uh. What?

Don't you ever try to use your hippie elitist nanny-state market games to force my leg into a cast! I admit it may be broken, but there is no conclusive evidence that the sledgehammer won't fix it by itself. The jury is still out on casts. I'm not convinced.

Reaction to whole 'climategate' (what is it with xy-gate these days?)
It's like a simple chemical equilibrium. If you disturb one of the factors in the equation/reaction, it will form a new equilibrium, you, however, never know the result of what the change in equilibrium is going to do to it's environment.

CO2 and O2 (together with some hetrotrophes and autotrophes) are in a pretty awesome balance. Throw some stored CO2 back into the equation, and you're obviously going to disturb the equilibrium. I'm not an awesome environment scientist (better yet, I know almost nothing about it), but I thought I've read somewhere that CO2 does have an effect on the environment. Throw in the fact that autotroph sea-organisms (which are the largest CO2 -> O2 converters) are dying due to sea pollution (plastics, chemicals), and tree's being cut at such a rate they can't grow back, I think we actually do have some environment problem.

Reaction to people 'not wanting' to stop polluting:
Does anybody really object to less usage of energy? Great side-effect of using less energy (this time of day anyway) is a less polluted air. I mean, I'm not encouraging anyone to be solar panels right away, they're quite expensive, but maybe you could... Turn of your computer when you're not doing anything, buy a netbook for things like reading e-mail and writing documents (production of laptops is polluting too, I know). Not buying an off-road gasoline-drinking car to drive around in a city (I'm look at YOU, range rovers!). Make sure you have some sort of 'double door' system to keep hot air from escape your home, buy double glass. Buy paper and wood with an 'approved wood' stamp ('dunno how it's called in other countries, here it's FSC). Maybe you could go all crazy and decide to only get one or two children when you're reproducing, to limit the overcrowding of the human species.

It's not really THAT hard to do something small 'for the world'...

I'm just waiting for a NASA scandal I can call "StarGate"

Nice.

Indeed.

This doesn't make any sense. Of course climate change is happening because change is constant with regards to the climate. In order for us to "start doing something about it" you are either implying that it is anthropogenic or that we should start anthropogenic climate change in order to cause the change we desire.

Wouldn't that mean the planet would either be ridiculously hot or very, very cold by now?

If you presume the constant change to always be in one direction or the other. Even the warmers are out there saying that the current cooling trend is due to the warming. Go figure.

Um, by definition constant change is in one direction or the other, unless there is zero change.

He probably meant "persistent change".

To be more clear - by "do something about it" I mean reducing CO2 and other pollutant emissions, lessening our use of fossil fuels; living more sustainably in general. If climate change is anthropogenic (which is likely is, let's not kid ourselves) then this will help stop or at least slow the warming trend, and if it turns out this is just a natural warming cycle, we'll still be helping the environment and saving ourselves in the long run when the coal and oil run out. There are about a million ways we're ****ing up this planet without even considering that we might be warming it up; warming just gets all the press because it's relatively simple to explain and anyone can understand that rising sea levels would be a problem for coastal cities.

I think the problem that people have with climate change skeptics is there seem to be a lot of people who want to be able to use lack of anthropogenic climate change as an excuse to do whatever they want. "Human activity isn't warming the planet THEREFORE I can continue driving my hummer and watering my suburban lawn and having my lifestyle of excessive consumption." Add to that the fact that it's turned somehow into a right vs. left political issue and it's easy to see why people get so riled up about it.

Right. Climate change skeptics pick up on the class-contempt-thinly-veiled-as-science and call it out as such. Whether the issue has scientific merit won't matter while enough of you poison the well.

Unless you're a mathematician, in which case you'd define 'constant' as always increasing by zero.

The same thing goes for basically any extreme left/right economic argument. For example, cap and trade is a very bad thing for those wacky inbred Republicans who think 'conservative' and 'selfish' are synonyms. The same thing goes for hippie perma-stoned Democrats and their 'communism' and 'greenpeace' and 'belief that veganism is an environmentally sound and sustainable lifestyle'

That's right! Don't fall for the poisoning of the well tactics of kyle90! And also Martyn and Jedikirby!

Excessive consumption is bad for the environment.

UH OH LOOK OUT I'M POISONING THE WELL, I'D BETTER JUST NEVER POINT OUT THINGS THAT ARE TRUE

I shouldn't have bothered. People have been so indoctrinated with the "we're destroying the planet" mantra that even a simple discussion escalates into madness. I am open minded that human activity could affect the climate but the type of underhanded things going on with the research make it impossible to ascertain the credibility of the purportedly prevalent theory. I thought some basic principles of science were preserving data and peer review?

Interesting site that I heard of two years ago but just checked earlier today: surfacestations.org

I was pleased that you were being reasonable, Wookie; I'd love to have an actual discussion where I'm not accused of making classist remarks and poisoning the well when I say things.

Poisoning the well is bad for the environment you know.

Haha

I am referring to the lack of diplomacy. Telling people their actions are bad is a great way to make them defensive, but a horrible way to solve a problem. Think of something else.