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Source: Reuters
Revelation of a series of embarrassing e-mails by climate
scientists provides fodder for critics, but experts believe the
issue will not hurt the US climate bill's chance for passage or
efforts to forge a global climate change deal.
Already dubbed "Climategate," e-mails stolen from a British
university are sparking outrage from climate change skeptics who
say they show that the scientists were colluding on suppressing
data on how humans affect climate change.
The e-mails, some written as long as 13 years ago, ranged from
nasty comments by global warming researchers about climate skeptics
to exchanges between researchers on how to present data in charts
to make global warming look convincing.
In one e-mail, according to news accounts, Kevin Trenberth, a
climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research,
wrote: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming
at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
Climate skeptics seized on the release of the e-mails as a game
changer. The documents will speed the end of "global warming
alarmism," said Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic at the
Competitive Enterprise Institute. He said research that has been
relied upon for official reports "is now very suspect."
Patrick Michaels, one of the scientists derided in the e-mails for
doubting global warming, said he thinks the documents will finally
"open up the scientific debate."
"That's probably the good news," said Michaels, a senior fellow at
the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
But others say the damage may be limited as the evidence is still
overwhelming that a buildup of greenhouse gases is melting snow on
mountain tops and shrinking global ice caps.
"The issue of scientists behaving badly does nothing to invalidate
the science," said Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy
Partners, LLC in Washington. "This does nothing to the US climate
bill, which will be decided mostly by economic forces, not
environmental ones."
Meat to the wolves
Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate
Change, said the release of the e-mails will be remembered mostly
as as embarrassment to the researchers.
"It shows that the process of science is not always pristine," said
Leiserowitz. "But there's no smoking gun in the e-mails from what
I've seen."
Leiserowitz, who is a social scientist, said the e-mails would
provide fodder for the 2% to 3% of the general public that are
hard-core climate change doubters. "For that small group it is like
meat to the wolves."
At UN climate talks set for next month in Copenhagen, the top
producers of greenhouse gases are expected to reach political
agreements on tackling climate change, but not agree on hard
targets for taking action.
The e-mails may serve as good gossip in the halls at the meeting,
but will not play a big role otherwise, experts said.
For one thing, the researchers involved were only a handful out of
thousands across the world that have contributed to a vast
convergence of data that shows the world has warmed.
"Whilst some of the e-mails show scientists to be all too human,
nothing I have read makes me doubt the veracity of the peer review
process or the general warming trend in the global temperature
recorded," said Piers Forster, an environment professor at the
University of Leeds.
Analyst Book doesn't see it changing the debate in the US Congress
where with few exceptions lawmakers have moved past the issue of
whether mankind was warming the planet.
Lawmakers reached that conclusion even before the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an assessment by
thousands of scientists around the world that concluded in 2007
that warming was real and more than 90% certain that it was caused
by man-made gases.
Book said "there are many reasons why the climate bill could choke,
but it won't be about a group of e-mails."
He said the climate bill supporters are pushing it as a jobs bill
that could provide employment in nuclear and other clean energy
industries. The lawmakers will succeed or fail in passing the bill
based on how well they sell those benefits to the public, he
added.
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