An American Lion

Being a skeptic of Global Climate Change, also known as Global Warming, takes a lot of patience. You have to sit around and wait for hackers to find out what the climate change academics and scientists are doing to fake their data. In and of itself, when scientists are fudging the numbers, it deals a death blow to vast swathes of credibility. It doesn’t necessarily mean there is no climate change. It does mean that desperation reigns:

Here is how the story now known as ClimateGate broke: On Nov. 17, an unknown person somehow gained access to a huge cache of emails and data files from the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit (CRU) and put them on the Internet. The hacker posted links to the data on prominent climate-skeptic blogs, just weeks before the Dec. 7 start of the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen. Then, the documents were distributed with the ominous preface: “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents.”

The approximately 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents purportedly showed that an elite cabal of climatologists had massaged decades of data to fool the world into believing in the myth of anthropogenic climate change. (The perpetrators offered no explanation why the scientists might want to do this. My best guess: All climatologists secretly despise GDP growth.) The scientists had apparently altered the world’s biggest record of global surface temperature readings, trashed discordant evidence, and publicly humiliated climatologists who reached differing conclusions.

Climate blogs went wild. The British press soon glommed onto the story with characteristic maniacal glee. One typical post by James Delingpole in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, read: “If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth … has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed.”

Within a day, the story caught on across the Atlantic — particularly in the right-wing press. Blogger Matt Drudge banged the drum with headlines declaring a “climate cult.” Glenn Beck and other Fox News anchors devoted hours to the story. And on Thursday, two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (one the head of right-wing outfit Pajamas Media, which sent Joe the Plumber to cover the Middle East peace process) demanded that Al Gore — whose Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth featured the work of some of the climatologists embroiled in the scandal — give his award back.

The truth, climate scientists insist, is that the data does nothing to disprove the overwhelming evidence that global warming exists and is caused by humans — evidenced in multiple data pools and corroborated by thousands of studies. Spencer Weart, a physicist who specializes in the atmosphere and wrote The Discovery of Global Warming, explains, citing glacier and polar cap readings: “Even if you threw out every study from every scientist at East Anglia, it wouldn’t change anything. There’s 15 different ways to prove without doubt that the world has gotten very warm.”

How can you fault the opportunism of people who oppose this sort of thing? The scientists handed them a loaded gun with their behavior, which they were betting wouldn’t be exposed. Except for the fact that E-mail is one of the easiest things in the world to compromise. You’d think that a bunch of academics would be savvy enough to know that their unethical behavior on E-mail would become public eventually, since that is ususally what happens when someone acts up on E-mail.

I’m very much a just give me the numbers type of person. I like to trust data. I hate it when someone fudges the numbers, be it science or finance. I especially hate it when it’s a finance scandal. But science is also pretty bad. If you can’t let the numbers inform your actions, you have no business in science, finance, or any other area where data matters. Go write a novel if control is what you crave.