Slashdot Mirror
New Batch of Leaked Climate Emails
New submitter kenboldt writes "Someone going by the alias 'foia' has dropped a link to a zip file containing thousands more emails similar to those released in 2009. There are apparently many more which are locked behind a password, presumably waiting to be released at some time in the future."
The University of East Anglia has released a brief statement indicating that the emails were probably obtained during the 2009 breach and held back until now as "a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy."
If they are so infuriated about the timing they could publish the emails themselves in less sensible times, thus evading some of the shitstorm and gaining back a bit of reliability.
There are never definite answers, the lack of a definite answer isn't sufficient to prevent taking meaningful action to combat climate change. If you're wanting a perfect model, it's not going to happen ever.
In this case the record goes back many thousands of years. Sugesting that it's only 50 years is ignorant. But more than that the Earth isn't 14 billion years old, it's only about 4.5bn years old. The climate record itself via ice cores and tree rings goes far further back than just 50 years.
On top of that it's pretty well understood that climate changes tend to happen rather slowly under normal conditions. I'm not aware of any other period where the composition of the atmosphere changed this much this quickly naturally. There have been some substantial eruptions and impacts, but the resulting changes don't last as long as the ones we've been causing.
Not really.
I spent about 3 hours reading through the raw emails.
What I saw (and I'll at the very front-end say that my bias is I'm a "denier") was:
- lots and lots of crap, like you'd see in anyone's emails.
- some very smart guys discussing nuances of details in their particular field, so the discussions were very narrow and detailed.
- the predictable 'scorn' for the unwashed masses (ie anyone outside their field) who didn't "get it"
- a distinct defensiveness in any case where the data was being questioned, and a tendency to reach for the tinfoil hat about some sort of conspiracy of people working to discredit them
In short, I didn't see any 'smoking gun' of collusion or hiding anything. I doubt these will have that either.
What I saw was people very firmly convinced not simply that they were RIGHT, but that what they were doing was righteous and anyone who dared question it was either evil or a complete fool...which isn't precisely the mindset one would expect of a scientist for whom the data (alone) drives their decisions - or should.
Generally, they sounded very much like Slashdotters.
-Styopa
Believe models that have never predicted anything correctly.
Never say never.
Trust data that is manually manipulated ...
As opposed to what? Automatically manipulated? Do you think that baseball stats just magically turn from huge sets of numbers into RBIs and Hall of Fame records?
Trust politicians whose only concerns are money and power, and whose only "solutions" involve shifting money and power, and not reducing consumption or pollution, or building things that are actually green, like nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.
Actually I'm just asking you to trust scientists and admit that it's happening ... I don't think any of these peer reviewed journals conclude with "Now let's talk solution and my stock portfolio!" They're just telling you what's happening, man.
Believe that man is the cause of the current trend, and that man can do something to stop it.
I'm confused, are you acknowledging that there's a current trend upward? Downward? You just totally ripped all that data to shreds, what exactly are you saying when you say "current trend."
Believe that the Earth will be doomed if temperatures rise closer to points in Earth's past, despite the fact that throughout all of Earth's history, higher temperatures are when life flourished.
The fear isn't that the temperature is going to get 'hotter than anything in history of the Earth.' The fear is that the rate of change accelerates to a point where a lot of the food chain starts to falter and entire species go extinct that we depend on for functions known or unknown. If you think I'm worried about life, I'm not. I'm worried about humans. You and me. And how much unnecessary death will result from this. This Earth has seen some hard times and life's still around. I just want to be sure that in thousands of years man is still around because the dinosaurs are completely gone. I'm not worried that we're going to magically ruin Earth so that no life can exist on it. I am a little worried that we knock evolution back down to something stupid like prokaryotes and cockroaches, though.
My work here is dung.