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Climate Change Skeptic Group Must Pay Damages To UVA, Michael Mann
ideonexus (1257332) writes In January of 2014, the American Traditions Institute (ATI) sought climate scientist Micheal Mann's emails from his time at the University of Virginia, a request that was denied in the courts. Now the Virginia Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that ATI must pay damages for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
Thus ends "Climategate." Hopefully.
But it seems that the only way to get emails and not get sued is to, How shall we say, Hack in.
Evidence against them only makes them stronger.
It seems to me that the Climate Skeptics are making the same mistake the anti-eugenics movement made in 1925 with the Scopes Monkey Trial, which fought the teaching of evolution in schools. Most people don't know this, but the anti-evolution activists were horrified by the textbook's use of Evolution to justify Eugenics, but instead of attacking the public policy proposals of the Eugenics Movement, they attacked the science of Evolution, and history remembers them as buffoons for combating the scientific consensus.
Today, Climate Skeptics are fighting the scientific consensus instead of debating the policies being proposed from that consensus. I myself am an adaptationist, I don't care if we do anything about Global Warming for another 20-30 years and at that point I have faith that civilization will start to engineer its way out of the problem... however, I find myself on the side of the environmentalists with their oftentimes draconian public-policy initiatives because I believe in scientific literacy, and the anti-science positions of today's Climate Skeptics threaten to undo the scientific progress on which our civilization depends for its survival.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
"Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies." -- Scott Westerfeld
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
Why not just release the emails and shut this group up? It seems like they are going to great lengths to hide something.
As far as I can tell, this lawsuit determined that the Freedom of Information Act can't be used to get access to some official email correspondence paid for by public funds. Even if you are really gung-ho on AGW, that's not a result to automatically crow about.
Michael Mann is not my favorite scientist, as he has a pattern of cargo cultist behavior that has annoyed his peers (provoking words like "vomit" and "crock of s**t"). The lawsuit to watch is the one where Mann is suing the National Review (a conservative magazine) and Mark Steyn, a conservative satirist and commentator. Whether or not his overall beliefs about AGW are justified, Professor Mann does have skeletons in his closet, and if the court does its job properly, he will be smacked down hard.
No, really. You can see the actual spin in this very thread. They are starting to form a basic premise of "freedom of speech" being killed by these pesky "libel" laws(and judges who are now also in on the conspiracy).
The oil companies/heartland institute don't have to create spin anymore, because they've had the most important success possible: making denialism an important part of the identity of a lot of people.
There is not a soul who was babbling about this "scandal" when it "broke" who will take this ruling as cause for reconsideration. And that's the big success.
"Why this isn't climate change at all! It's *removes mask from monster* Michael Mann and 97% of the world's scientists!"
"We would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling billionaires!"
(Oops. Should have added a spoiler alert.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The oil companies/heartland institute don't have to create spin anymore, because they've had the most important success possible: making denialism an important part of the identity of a lot of people.
In some ways, it's very cult-like in the way that it forms identity. Denialism gives you victim/threatened status (those evildoers are attacking our beliefs, we need to be warriors), enough victories to think of oneself as a winner but maintain the communal aspects of thinking oneself under threat, charismatic leaders, the companionship of shared beliefs, a sense of superiority to those who disbelieve, and, in the most cult-like aspect, the assurance of being above mere facts, of living in a world where your personal beliefs trump mere objective facts.
and many climate scientists have been cautiously coming out of the closet and poking sticks at the shaky foundations as well
And many of them are finding out the hard way that challenging religious dogma often gets you burned at the stake.
Posting AC because even mild skepticism of AGW will get you burned as a heretic on /. too.
A fun thing about reversing climate change, pointed out by a climatologist in an article I recently read.
If we cut new human emissions to zero, and found a way to stop the methane emissions from thawing permafrost and other positive feedback loops, historical evidence indicates that it might take a century or so for the planet's natural CO2 regulation methods to actually return to postindustrial levels.
I mean, that'd be fine, because our situation today isn't broadly disastrous like another 4-5 degrees C would be. But there's good reason to be concerned about the actual target stabilization temperatures of the plans we're not even implementing yet.
Don't forget a sense of purpose. You are fighting this extremely large group of powerful individuals who are conspiring to make the public believe a lie. (Be it AGW, the moon landing, vaccinations preventing disease, alternative medicine, Obama not being a secret Muslim lizard robot intent on world domination, etc.) Only you and your small band know the truth and must fight against overwhelming odds to battle the lie. I'm sure many conspiracy theorists feel like they are living in a movie and cast themselves as the dashing hero determined to save the day.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The 97% number is not nonsense, as you claim, it comes from this widely cited peer-reviewed study. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
After reviewing over 11,000 scientific papers on climate change, of the papers that took a position on climate change (either for or against), 97% concluded it was indeed happening and induced by man.
The statistic is not 97% of Scientists then is it. It is 97% of papers or 97% of scientist that published on global warming. That is not what the statistic claims to be.
"the same mistake the anti-eugenics movement made in 1925 with the Scopes Monkey Trial [wikipedia.org], which fought the teaching of evolution in schools"
All the history of the Butler act I ever read mention they simply feared teaching of evolution would weaken faith, and that they refused our descendance from great apes, as it would shows us as descending from lower beings like animals. At no point the proponent of Butler's act mentioned eugenism, that sound like a modern rewriting of the history. In fact the prominent web sites which promote this thesis are : answeringenesis and creation.com. Fancy that.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
OK, that was funny. But the 97% number is nonsense, just for the record. Skepticism about AGW catastrophism is rampant among the world's scientists at large (physicists, biologists, etc.), and many climate scientists have been cautiously coming out of the closet and poking sticks at the shaky foundations as well.
[Citation Needed]
This is the original press release about the 97%. By the way, the correct citation is "In analyzing responses by sub-groups, Doran found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. "
Basically the survey found that the experts in the field have 97% consensus. For overall numbers of scientists:
Two questions were key: have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.
About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.
Ordinary people hear "supercomputer driven model simulation" and they think "oooh, it must be really accurate and able to predict the future".
No I think computer models are really the only thing we have as we don't have a spare planet to experiment upon and god-like powers. But with all models, I don't assume that they are all 100% accurate. But I think they can be constructed to be close enough to determine a reasonable outcome.
Anybody who understands statistics and the banal realities of computation knows the good old GIGO principle. Not to mention the reality that nobody has ever successfully predicted long term climate changes, so throwing a supercomputer at an impossible problem doesn't magically add credibility. *sigh*
No one has ever said that these models are 100% for all future predictions. Like most of science, theories (and models) that best fit observable data are used. And like most of science these are tested. I don't know if this is some sort of delusion or lack of understanding of how science works. Just because a scientist proposes something or releases a paper, it is not automatically accepted without challenge. Data is challenged. Conclusions are challenged.
All science is challenged. Consensus is reached after enough data and evidence is presented that favors the conclusions. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity wasn't accepted because Einstein proposed it. It took a solar eclipse before many physicists began to accept that it might be the best theory. Now by today's standards, the results of solar eclipse experiment would not have been enough.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Have you actually read the paper and the rebuttal in the blog you posted? The scientific paper specifically says says they removed the papers that did not take a position on AGW. Then the blog post comes along and says OMG! They threw out some papers and sensationalizes the very thing the scientific paper was up front about. How can the research paper count something in the for or against column (the very point of it's study) if no position is taken? It's a stupid sensationalist strawman.
Scientific Paper: We removed from our study the papers that took no position for or against AGW. Here are the results of the papers with a position. This paper is not about how severe the conditions are, just tabulating the percentage of papers that conclude climate change is man made, and those that are not. That is the purpose of this research. Here is our data, linked to for your review. You can even download the PDF's and spreadsheets and review it in the linked data section.
Your lame blog rebuttal: A sensationalized OMG! The scientific paper EXCLUDED papers that didn't take a position. How can their data possibly be credible now???? And even worse, they won't even say if its dangerous or not!!! This paper is a crock! Your lame blog then cites a letter from a scientist who asked for the data (even though it is all linked to and available on the IOP website) and the stufy authors didn't get back to them. The blog then cites this as daming proof that the study must be a joke. Because no one hand fed this guy data he could have downloaded off the site.
You see why people can't take you seriously? Get yourself some peer reviewed data and we'll talk.
I think it was Sam Harris who said that something strange happens when an issue becomes a moral issue. Reason and questioning are no longer allowed. Another weird thing is that people are easily affected to become irrational, when it is being done by the oil lobby, but environmentalists are immune to anything which might corrupt their judgement in a groupthink way. Enviros deconstruct other's hidden motives and agendas, but they themselves are immune. Weird no? To just happen to be in the right? (Real post-modern deconstruction as someone put it, is when you can deconstruct your own cultural groupthink biases before you try to deconstruct someone else's. Most people just use it as a way to attack others, whilst never questioning their own views.)
Personally I am all for a truly global world free of inequality, of the unfairness of being born accidentally in a poor area, and think a global system that integrates development and environment and clean technology with high education and intelligence and happiness and creativity and purposeful existence for all is where humanity and the planet needs to keep striving for. All too often though the mass movements around this sort of thing fall back to old methods, like groupthink and moralistic judgements, forsaking critical discernment. Then when they don't get good results, they blame the big bad oil lobby.
That 97% number IS bull, and its right there in the link you provided, under abstract:
We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
So of the abstracts which discuss global warming, 97% support AGW. Except, you would not call that an unbiased sample, nor would that be an acceptable selection criteria in any other poll, ever.
I generally nope out of any AGW conversation because theyre cesspools of illogic, ad hominems, and general idiocy, but come on. That 97% claim is like saying "97%*** of CoD players hate the game (***- 97% of players posting negative posts on the message boards)".
OK, that was funny. But the 97% number is nonsense, just for the record. Skepticism about AGW catastrophism is rampant among the world's scientists at large (physicists, biologists, etc.), and many climate scientists have been cautiously coming out of the closet and poking sticks at the shaky foundations as well.
I think you are right, we should let biologists design nuclear reactors as they obviously have an opinion about them. Just as we should employ eugenics as a number of Aryan physicists think we should!
I'm a little bit surprised that Slashdot doesn't have more AGW catastrophism skeptics, to be honest. Ordinary people hear "supercomputer driven model simulation" and they think "oooh, it must be really accurate and able to predict the future". Anybody who understands statistics and the banal realities of computation knows the good old GIGO principle. Not to mention the reality that nobody has ever successfully predicted long term climate changes, so throwing a supercomputer at an impossible problem doesn't magically add credibility. *sigh* (goes back to reading Professor Judith Curry's blog)
What? The fact we understand that we can't understand everything of every topic and that experts are likely to know their area better than us... isn't that a good thing? And your understanding of the area seems very suspect - it isn't only about "supercomputer driven model". Far from it.
"Current CO2 concentration is 380 ppm or so."
You're a bit out of date(2010), I see. Atmospheric CO2 has been crossing the 400ppm mark lately, (avr 399 ppm)
Over the last year(june2013-june2014) it climbed by 2.56ppm, and that rate of increase appears to be accelerating, thus humanity is going to be in deep doo-doo real soon if we don't stop burning fossil fuels.
The other facts you seam to be missing, Our star(SOL) was somewhat dimmer in the past, thus requiring much higher CO2 levels to keep the earth from freezing over. And that humanity is totally dependent on the current climate patterns..
Whoever asked for 100%? The errors on the models are so far rather huge.
As for testing, yes, science is tested and challenged. But here's the rub: that process takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. Like 50 years.
Both the scenarios and the time to correct are running into the decades, which is much longer than the window inside which we're supposed to act to avert catastrophe. In other words, both the prediction and the correction haven't come about yet, so anything we do now is based on faith and best guesses.
You can't magic away the risk with a supercomputer and lots of clever people.
Ideally science would be an ever gradual fine grained improvement, but as soon as you deal with complex systems, like human bodies, or diet, or climate, there is just no magic answer. Like you say, we don't have ten planets to run as experiments. As you say, it is not the scientific method as famous for testing things to death repeatedly that is being used. It is guesswork. Educated guesswork carries risks and unintended consequences.
Plants are not the primary living consumers of CO2 on this planet. That'd be ocean-borne algae.
A couple of points. What was the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level during those times? We know the Sun put out less energy in the past so the Earth previously needed more greenhouse gases to be inhabitable. Eventually (perhaps a billion years) the Earth will get too hot even with zero CO2.
The other point is that for 80% of the Earths history it has been in hot house conditions with tropical temps even at the poles. Ice house conditions (defined as having polar ice caps) have been rare. Thing is we and our ecosystem have evolved for ice-house conditions and the fossil record shows that when the Earth flips from ice-house to hot-house or the other way, there is usually an extinction event.
While human kind may survive, civilization probably wouldn't and if it dies in war, well we have a lot of nukes which could make for a spectacular death to civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You have mixed something up. There are huge grants for disproving or challenging anything related to AGW funded by the powers that oppose (everybody with money). Pro-AGW science only receive money from everybody without money, which while a lot, doesn't really add up to anything.
I'm not sure what grounds there are for reciprocal discovery in this instance. A libel suit has never been an opportunity for the defendant to play detective and attempt to prove their accusations.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Define 'scepticism about AGW catastrophism'. I'm a professional physicist and I would suggest, based on experience talking to my colleagues, that there is very little scepticism amongst physicists that humans are responsible for observed temperature rises and are going to be responsible for a whole lot more. It is certainly not 'rampant'. Consequences of said warming for the human race is a different topic.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
What on earth are you talking about? If you could cast credible doubt on AGW you'd not only have industry throwing money at you, but once you'd overturned the current consensus in climate science you'd have every major university fighting to get hold of the person who revolutionised the field.
If a climatologist and a mathematician disagree on the math used in a climate paper, who is the expert?
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Basically the survey found that the experts in the field have 97% consensus
Problem is that skeptical scientists such as Richard Lindzen agree with that 'consensus', because the question is too narrow. Ask something more interesting like, "should we replace all our coal power with renewables because to prevent AGW?" or "is AGW going to be catastrophic?" and you will find that there is no consensus.
But I think they can be constructed to be close enough to determine a reasonable outcome.
You didn't clarify what you mean by 'reasonable outcome,' but this paper in Nature demonstrates that the climate models have serious errors.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"97% of scientists who actually work in this area" seems like the statistic you want to worry about, doesn't it?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Your post paints an overly simplistic view.
No, it does not. It is not a view, it is fact. When the Earth's atmosphere has a higher partial pressure of CO2 it retains more heat. That is the essential point under consideration, and the exact value of the partial pressure is irrelevant and was not mentioned. We're not talking about the political issues, or the history of the planet, only cold hard measurable facts about [a] the relationship between irradiance and re-radiation, and [b] the absorption spectrum of CO2.
However, on the separate subject you have noted, while we are indeed two orders of magnitude away from the highest CO2 levels, and the highest rates of emission, the previous atmospheric changes happened over the course of millions of years and are usually associated with mass extinctions. We've already been doing pretty well on the mass extinction front; this may not be a good time to rock the boat.
If, as I have been told, conservatives are against change, can we maybe try to not pollute every square inch of the planet? I'm from rural Alaska, and it's getting a bit melty up there. It's not a place that I really enjoy living, but the glaciers were fairly pretty, and have you seen what permafrost does when it melts? Clearly this isn't a problem where you live, but please let's not pretend that it isn't an issue elsewhere. Pollution of any sort is ugly.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The 97% is based on scientific polling of actual climate scientists. It is fair to say that about 19 out of 20 people actually doing research and publishing papers in the field of climatology have concluded that the buildup of greenhouse gas caused by human activity is becoming the driving force behind global warming.
On the other hand, your claim is based on anecdotes about "physicists" and "biologists" who very well may not even do active research in climatology being "skeptical". But the fact is, denialism is not skepticism and genuine climate skeptics are few and far between. One would suppose that some of the 5% minority of climate scientists are genuine skeptics while the rest are paid by industry to pretend to be.
Also, the idea that climate scientists rely on computer models to reach their conclusions is simply untrue. The conclusion would be valid even based on back of the hand calculations that any undergraduate scientist could do. There are only three major factors that affect the total retained heat of the planet:
1) Solar radiance.
2) Albedo
3) The Greenhouse Effect
You don't need a supercomputer to calculate the change in solar irradiance in the past 100 years and how much heat it has added or removed from the planet. Overall, it is a pretty null force.
And, you don't need a supercomputer to calculate how much extra heat the small reduction in the albedo has retained due to us cleaning up our atmosphere.
And finally, you don't need a supercomputer to calculate the large increase in heat energy added to the atmosphere by the increasing greenhouse effect.
What you do need a supercomputer for is to predict how all this extra heat is going to effect the climate on a year-to-year basis. Which parts of the earth are going to get wetter, how much energy will be siphoned off by the oceans, how much less rain will Phoenix get.
But none of these supercomputer models are necessary to figuring out what the primary cause of the temperature increase is, and that is the buildup of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
I didn't really mean to yell at you. I was characterizing the fervor of the blog you linked.
If you feel it was sloppy, that 's the great thing about peer reviewed science. You are welcome to re-do it yourself. This was a simple study, with an easy to understand methodology, so I'm not sure what you find "sloppy". Please do elaborate.
Repeat the experiment yourself.....
Step 1) Researchers made a list of scientific papers from peer reviewed journals that search keywords found to match something about climate change. 11,000-12,000 of them. Here is the raw data (the one that your linked blog said the Norwegian scientist just couldn't somehow get his hands on, no matter how hard he tried or emailed, that your blog implied was a coverup). http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/media/erl460291datafile.txt
Step 2) Review and determine if the paper takes a stand on global warming. Exclude the papers that do not. (Since the whole point of this experiment is to determine that percentage of papers for or against AGW)
Step 3) Determine the percentages of the remaining papers. Are they for or against? Publish result.
All this other stuff you and the blog bring up... is it dangerous? how much is man made? etc, etc is outside the scope of the study. The point of *this* one particular study is to find out what percentage of published, peer reviewed papers, attribute AGW to man made causes. Coming up with the "consensus" of scientists. If you have other questions, look to other research, but don't knock this paper or setup straw man arguments based on something it's not. That's just shady.
And yet, when Mueller was funded by kock brothers, he changed from a well-known skeptic to a believer. Why? Because the data showed him that it was the ONLY possible answer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not a heretic. Burned as someone willfully ignoring the science to cling to their beliefs. This is slashdot, after all, and the way AGW skeptics present arguments often stinks of conspiracy theories.
My complaint is that the 97% draws an invalid link between abstracts written and opinion. 99.999% of scientists have an opinion on AGW; that doesnt mean they have written a paper on that. The way you determine that is to do a random sample poll, not to use a selection-biased sample and draw faulty conclusions on it.
97% of Catholic Priests believe in God. News at 11.
Yes the CO2 levels increased. Yet the global average temperature did not rise as predicted by the AGW model.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...
http://www.nature.com/news/cli...
Sorry you are so limited in scope. What this reenforced is secrecy in government. Mann was working on a government grant, with the permissions of his employer, a state college, also a government entity. He produced a product that has been called flawed. The statistics have been reworked, flawed. People, including other scientists, are asking the what and where of his research, he won"t release that research, or the emails related to the research where his basic tenant started to deviate. Or the databases used, or program that says your CO2 is the problem. But your shipping our jobs to 3rd world countries is now " solving" the problem. He he he!.
Believer here. No evidence required. As the "pro-science" side, we are free to say whatever we like. Nobody will scrutinize us because we all hold the same beliefs. Nobody wants to hurt a member of their own team. 97% of the skeptics here are paid by the Koch brothers.
AEI, for one. $10k for any paper that attacks the IPCC reports. There's other public offers out there, too. And I'm sure they're outnumbered 100 times over by not-so-public ones.
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
Go right ahead and point me to where a decline in Antarctic ice was a forecast of AGW.
You do know that - below freezing - there's an inverse correlation between temperature and snowfall, don't you? And I really hope you know that it's very rare that temperatures rise above freezing in the vast majority of Antarctica, whether you add a couple degrees to the temperature or not, right? Or did you not know / ever consider that?
Just because you didn't realize something that should have been really bloody obvious to you doesn't mean it was a scientific prediction by your straw-man scientists.
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
You need people's emails when you're digging for something (anything really) you can use to discredit someone personally (apart from any scientific merit). Besides which, some of those emails are personal.
The Virginia court ruled that filing a lawsuit just to get those emails constitutes harassment, which in turn is a frivolous use of the court's time. A sensible conclusion in my opinion.
And yes, there do seem to be consequences for filing frivolous lawsuits.
The stairwell in Venice is submerged because Venice itself is sinking, not because sea levels rose several feet since it was built.
He said ice sheet. So we're supposed to ignore what he actually said and assume he meant something completely different? Um, no.
"I am not well read in this department" - wait a minute, you can give exact cites for research papers on sea ice, but don't even have a *general* conception of what percentage of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining versus what is losing? Something tells me you're just grabbing cites you've never even read from denier websites.
Let me help you out with ice sheet. Pretty much all of the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining, while pretty much the only area losing is the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding areas in West Antarctica. Now, they're losing *mass* a lot faster per unit area than the east is gaining mass, but in terms of area, the overwhelming majority of Antarctica is gaining ice. Because it almost never gets above freezing there, even in a warming world.
If you'd actually read the paper, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that they themselves did the CMIP5 runs, it's not CMIP5 runs that had been done earlier. Do you even have a clue what CMIP5 stands for? Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. As in, "there were four freaking phases that came before this one". CMIP5 is comprised of all of the latest models from all over the world. They didn't even start planning CMIP5 unitl September 2008. Your notion that this is some sort of review of old climate predictions just shows how terrible your understanding is of what you're talking about and how you don't actually read the papers that you cite, that you're just simply grabbing them from whatever denialist trash websites you read.
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
so...why have temperaturse not risen during last 15-17 years while C)2 went up?
Holy shit that canard has been busted more times than I can count.
Of course, moderated into oblivion by deniers. No surprise there. Do you guys really fail to understand the cherry-picking of the data point 15-17 years ago and the false "trend" from that point?
"Science is not supposed to be driven by consensus."
It isn't and nobody ever said it was. You're arguing against position that nobody believes.
Scientific consensus is only important as a signal to the general public. When a scientific consensus forms around a new theory it signals that the evidence for a theory is so strong that it has convinced a large majority of scientists in a field of study that the theory is accurate. It tells us "you can take the theory seriously now".
You say:
"You are supposed to design a theory that makes worthwhile predictions about some aspect of the real world and then test it in the real world to ensure it actually predicts stuff."
I'm not a Climatologist but I'm pretty sure that is exactly what they've been doing: Making predictions and testing them.
I suspect that the recently launched Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite is going to collect data that will be used to test some predictions climate science has made about the sources and sinks of carbon.
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