The Climategate e-mails are simply breathtaking. Let me show you one more below, but please do note that I could explain this away by saying that if one believes long term warming will doom us if we do not do anything today, and that temporary cooling will forestall efforts to do something, one might reasonably take the position below.
“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″
Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming?
And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”?
Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020.
…
I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where’s the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.Maybe he needs a backup plan:
MacCracken suggests that Phil Jones start working on a “backup” in case Jones’ prediction of warming is wrong
In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability–that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us–the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.
We all, and you all in particular, need to be prepared.
Best, Mike MacCracken [Note that Obama’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, is copied on this email]
I posted about ClimateGate 2.0 this morning as well. People should not only be fired, they should be jailed. This is a legendary level of fraud, and it’s amazing that so many people still will not wake-up and learn, change their minds.
The irony? They claim that their opponents are “anti-science.”
Had the Spanish Inquisitors and the Vatican had an IPad, this is the sort of stuff they would have emailed each other, flatearthwise.
“Alejandro Smythe Von Trippe, chairperson of the IPCC’s Board of Oversight, said today that their scientists have been mistaken. ‘Oops,’ he said.”
Well, Ok, I wish I had read something like that. What we get is silence from the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the overwhelming majority of concerned scientists, which include some on the payroll of the Weather Channel. I can understand Michael Mann laying low in Happy Valley, but where are the other zealots?
By the way, I sure do not know whether the world is warming or not. I can predict with near certainty that the weather will fluctuate, the same prediction I have given and will continue to give whenever anyone asks for my expert opinion about the stock market.
That is not to say that the modern ten-day forecast one gets on one’s smart phone is not better than what it was twenty years ago on the six o’clock news, which was better than the forecasts made without satellites. Today one can plant corn and cut hay with more confidence.
The question is not whether there is global warming, but whether there is significant change caused by combustion of hydrocarbons by humans, most particularly by humans driving cars, heating their homes, and fueling their industry in the United States. Given the extent of our knowledge, it is less likely that that is a big problem at all.
If somebody came around saying we could save a South Pacific atoll by having everyone stopping eating beans (H2S!), surely even the vegans would ask for some reasonable mechanism before we adopted a trillion-dollar project to cap and trade bean emissions.