I read the blogs (and talk to my brother, even) and there is a lot of excitement among people who want to continue believing that we do not affect the environment. There is talk of “Climategate”, where supposedly all this global warming crap will be shown to be a sham. Doubtless, many people think it’s all been a conspiracy to do something: raise taxes or make us all eat our vegetables.
But, that is, unfortunately, not true.
What the CRU does is climate modelling. They are not the guys who are:
- Splashing around in the arctic, watching the polar cap thinning and melting
- Launching satellites, watching the polar cap melting
- Climbing mountains, watching glaciers recede
- Dropping thermometers down boreholes to measure “fossilized temperatures”
- Measuring sea-surface and atmospheric temperatures from satellites
- Watching the global CO2 concentrations increase
- Measuring the CO2 concentration in the ocean
- Measuring CO2 uptake or release from forests
- Mouldering in his grave, having discovered the greenhouse effect a century ago
- …
The point is that there are three solid facts:
- Humans are causing the global CO2 levels to rise, substantially.
- The Earth depends on a greenhouse effect, and CO2 is an important part of the greenhouse.
- It is unusually warm, and over the last few decades, it has been getting warmer at a worrying pace.
All of these facts are supported by many different bits of evidence, and none of them depends on the CRU.
So, even if the CRU was rotten to the core (which does not seem too likely), even if all the climatic model-builders in the world were fakers, we’d still have to deal with these these disturbing facts. Don’t think there is magic that holds the Earth to a comfortable 1970s climate. There is only physics, and physics doesn’t care about your comfort or your survival.