Climate Science and the Culture of Climate Change

This website focuses on the Culture of Climate Change, and NOT on climate science.  Spencer Weart is the expert-of-reference on the history of climate science.  However, the Culture of Climate Change is underwritten by climate science.  It is the scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change threatens the ecological systems across the globe.  This scientific consensus is the motor that is driving huge investments in various climate change mitigation and adaptation programs.  What would happen to the UN international climate change regime if that consensus buckled?

Climate change skeptics are wandering in the wilderness — out of step with funding priorities, at odds with their powerful fellow scientists.    Apparently someone from that camp of beleaguered outsiders hacked into the email accounts of notable pro-climate change scientists, exposing office gossip that tarnishes the veneer of truth to climate change science.  It was a computer system at the University of East Anglia that was hacked.  A similar hack of the pro-climate change website www.realclimate.org was thwarted.

The anti-climate change hackers posted their heisted emails at The Air Vent, a site devoted to anti-climate change advocates.

Dr. Patrick J.  Michaels, a noted climate change skeptic, claims that some of these emails reveal an effort to block the release of data for independent review.

Dr. Mann, University of Pennsylvania, wrote one of the revealing emails in which he described using a  ‘trick’ to accomodate data inconsistent with climate warming.

For more of the skeptical point of view see Stephen McIntyre’s climateaudit.org

Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA, is one whose emails have been published publically. In his view, the emails reveal little other than the fact that scientists are human and prone to indisposition.   Schmidt is quoted as saying, “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”