Global Warming, Climate change, Climategate, Climate deniers

This has been a difficult winter for the environmental movement. A hacker found embarrassing remarks in stolen emails of a UN scientist that works on the IPCC the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That was followed by highly publicized mistakes in the IPCC report. The Copenhagen talks were a disappointment, and even Red State Guy came out with a couple of posts critical of climate change, that actually made some sense.

Being an open minded liberal, and a former engineer and teacher I am dependant on the scientific method and rational thought to make sense of the world. Given new data that contradicted my understanding of the environment, I was forced to re-evaluate the entire concept of Global Warming.

Last night at 8:30 local time, we joined many million people in a hundred different countries in turning our lights off, for an hour to highlight awareness of the environment.

Thousands of landmarks all over the world were darkened and millions of people and thousands of businesses shut off the lights. This is a global effort to educate people about the environment. I will do my part by trying to explain my re-evaluation of Climate Change.

To understand the criticisms of the current scientific understanding I first had to understand the basic principles involved.

The following video is a pretty complete recap of what scientists have learned over the past 150 years. http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610...

There is no vast plot and just because one scientist is overzealous in his volunteer job you can't condemn every scientist in all of the countries in the world. Some of the findings are based on ice core samples. That research is corroborated with coral growth, tree rings, and by many other methods, like fossil records that indicate that the last time CO2 levels were this high was 15 million years ago . One study used 29,500 different indicators and 90% of them confirmed that climate change is happening and it is human caused.

But what about Climategate and the hacked emails? Doesn't that prove that Phil Jones was manipulating data and that the IPCC report is made up ? Climate deniers point to a number of emails that on the face of it seem to indicate manipulation, however these are cherry picked sentences taken out of context. To understand what the scientists were actually talking about see the second video, and read the following: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

No, although it was embarrassing and shows that sometimes scientists don't think much of climate deniers, the emails do nothing to indicate that the data was manipulated or that the science was wrong. Phil Jones was a lousy record keeper but all of his data has been duplicated from other sources. Even if one scientist had intentionally manipulated data it would not have changed the vast amount of evidence that has accumulated from myriad sources. The IPCC report which is three volumes, each about a thousand pages long, was written by over 1250 authors, most of which were not previous IPCC authors. Each one of these authors would have had to be in on the conspiracy. The documents were reviewed by 2,500 experts who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts.

After sifting through that huge 3,000 page report with a fine tooth comb, climate deniers can only point to two errors. In the first error the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers are projected for 2035. This was because the authors of the WG2 report used an unreliable source and did not consult with the authors of the WG1 report which had a 45 page report on glaciers with the correct information. The error was found by one of the authors of the WG1 report and was fixed by deleting two sentences.

The other error was in a report on rising sea level; "The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55% of its territory is below sea level". This sentence was provided by a Dutch government agency the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which has now published a correction stating that the sentence should have read "55 per cent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding; 26 per cent of the country is below sea level, and 29 per cent is susceptible to river flooding".

Climate deniers will trot out all kinds of supposed "Facts" that question Global Warming; They deny that humans can cause the increases in temperature, that it can all be explained by natural cycles, sun spots, or that global warming couldn't be happening because it was cold this winter and we had record snow storms. They continue to confuse local weather with global climate which indicates that the global temperatures are at record highs while local storms are generated because of record high ocean temperatures.

Environmentalists are constantly attacked by the fossil fuel industry which is bankrolling the same PR firms that were used to spread doubt about tobacco causing cancer. To read how this huge propaganda machine can cause an artificial crisis of confidence by spending millions of dollars to spread doubt read: http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/1...

In my opinion they should have had the climate conference in the middle of drought stricken Africa, while the temperature was 120 degrees, in view of the disappearing snows of Kilimanjaro instead of the North in the middle of winter. If you want to know the truth about Climate change and the deniers, follow the money. The fossil fuel industry has billions of dollars to spend and it is in their interest to spend that money to spread doubt.

I realize that my opinion will never change anyone else's mind. Each individual needs to do their own research, and make their own conclusions.

Here is a list of videos of climate deniers and their arguments that question Climate Change: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.h...

To check out rebuttals to all of these claims investigate the following site: http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs...