Climategate 2.0
So, just before I left to visit the family for Thanksgiving, I got another present. The same person responsible for leaking the e-mails featuring efforts to “hide the decline” two years ago released thousands more e-mails that further re-enforce what those of us not predisposed to alarmism and doom have known for several years—the climate “science” game is rigged to marginalize and demonize dissenting voices and that even true believers have doubts about their science.
You can find the definitive round-up of juicy stories over at the indispensible Watts Up With That. The highlights include a concerted effort by the “Team” to get the editor of a research journal fired from that job and his university job for daring to publish an article the alarmists didn’t like and various plots to lie about lost data and thwart FOIA attempts to get data.
If you’ve heard any details of this latest release, it certainly hasn’t been in the mainstream media. The science is settled after all.
I do want to criticize tech website Ars Technica however. Ars Technica does great coverage of technology issues and pretty good coverage of science—except when it comes to climate alarmism; they’re firmly in the Al Gore camp. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised at this whitewash. The comments section quickly devolved into uselessness—the true believers will admit no wrongdoing by their clergy—but included non-sequiturs on Warren Buffett’s tax liability and the efficacy of offshore oil drilling.
What wasn’t mentioned, and is perhaps most important, was the leaker’s reason for disseminating these e-mails. From the Readme document:
/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///
“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”
“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”
“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.
“Poverty is a death sentence.”
“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”
Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline.
This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.
The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase.
We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such as…
This is something that is seldom brought up when discussing catastrophic anthropogenic global warming: What is the cost?
All the environmental bigwigs are meeting in Durban, South Africa right now to come up with an agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It won’t work, but they must go through the motions. To reduce CO2 emissions to the “right” level would require de-industrialization on a scale that no country will accept and what will it cost? $37 trillion? The United States’ unsustainable debt is only (only!?!) $15 trillion. If we spent $37 trillion, by how much would the models predict that we would reduce the average worldwide temperature? 1 degree celsius? 2 degrees? No, probably a fraction of that. An amount so small so as to be undetectable by current scientific instruments.
If we’re truly worried about the plight of the poor in the Third World, then this is absolutely the last thing you want to spend money on.
But this is seldom mentioned, because if the plight of the poor was what we were focusing on, then we wouldn’t be tossing $500 billion down a Solyndra rathole or subsidizing the purchase of Chevy Volts to the tune of $7,500 a pop. We’d be trying to grow our economies and those of the Third World, because the richer everyone is, the easier it is to deal with the ravages of rising oceans and raging hurricanes.
If there’s one thing these e-mails have once again proved it’s this: Climate Science isn’t.
One comment on “Climategate 2.0”
Tags
Bjoern Lomborg in his book "Cool it!" makes essentially your argument. He is actually an AGW believer, but believes (my paraphrase) we should deal with the "low-hanging environmental fruit" first before we attempt --- at astronomically greater expense --- to try to make a dent in AGW.