11-23-2009, 10:49 PM
Quote:Not that this is definitive proof or anything like that, but it's more than comes out of the mainstream media.... he says, quoting from the Washington Post.
Quote:There's lots of evidence to the contrary of the current "global warming" craze. You just have to look for it and not close your eyes. Don't see what you believe, but believe what you see.No, there really isn't. What exists are bits and pieces (the latest series having been quite illegally hacked out of people's private, University e-mail accounts) that, when you cut them out of context and pin them up on a board labelled "The Great Global Warming Conspiracy," sort of make sense if you hold your head a bit to the side and squint really hard. The "Competitive Enterprise Institute" and its ilk are more than happy to support this kind of specious analysis wherever it pops up, for obvious reasons.
Or, alternately, you can look at the preponderance of scientific opinion, and come to a more reasonable conclusion - that anthropogenic warming due primarily to CO2 emissions is a well-established scientific fact. You can quibble about the levels and minutiae, but the basic story is very clear up to this point.
Some of these e-mails are "blatant displays of personal pettiness" because they are *private* e-mails, in which people joke around, speak their minds, and let their guard down in ways that would not pass muster in public. Nobody was ever punched. As for the "twisting of science", the same basic standards of evidence apply - if the denialists have a real case, let them fight it out in the journals, and let their critics fight back. What they have now is a bunch of unsubstantiated accusations based on out-of-context stolen e-mails; what they need is a solid scientific case.
-Jester