“The science is settled” has been a popular phrase when it comes to global warming, but that statement has come under fire, and even more so recently. The question of whether or not global warming is anthropogenic (caused by humans) is an important one, as it has huge ramifications for our environment, economy and ultimately our quality of life.
Before Nov. 17, 2009, it was unknown that data (including more than one thousand e-mails and thousands of other documents) had been stolen from a server at the Climate Research Unit, but on Nov. 17 that data was uploaded onto a hacked server of the RealClimate website with the message “A miracle just happened.” An administrator at RealClimate promptly noticed the server intrusion and deleted the uploaded information. In time, this information would surface again.
A report on this information by the Science & Public Policy Institute details what the information reveals.
“The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the United Nation’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
“The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the United Nation’s climate panel to report.
“They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
“They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was ‘a travesty.’ This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that ‘global warming’ science is settled.”
The incident was later dubbed “Climategate,” but despite the information brought to light by it, many argue against its impact on the theory of anthropogenic climate change. This is understandable as there have been many years of global warming talk and some ideas have become embedded in people’s minds.
The belief in anthropogenic global warming has opened the door to some dangerous political policies, which only increase the need to understand things properly when it comes to Earth’s climate. The first that comes to mind is Cap and Trade, which is a huge energy tax that is supposed to curb our carbon emissions. If don’t believe me that Cap and Trade is a huge tax, believe the President (who is a proponent of Cap and Trade) when he says “under my plan of a Cap and Trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”.
Furthermore, there have been proposed climate treaties that pose a threat to our sovereignty. To my knowledge none of them have been signed, but there was a lot of momentum for the United States to sign a treaty in Copenhagen, which would have made us accountable to foreign entities, and we would be eligible for penalties if we did not meet the goals enumerated in the treaty. This is ridiculous; we should not be signing up to be subservient to any foreign countries or groups. We must be a leader in our own right and conduct ourselves according to our own wishes.
The whole global warming discussion seems to have turned into an issue of peer pressure, on an almost elementary-school level. It’s far too common for people who express any sign of doubt of anthropogenic climate change to be met with charges of being a conspiracy theorist, crazy, or being bought and paid for by the oil companies. When there should be debates, there is name-calling and black-listing. In response to the saying that “the science is settled,” I reply, with all due respect, that the science is not yet settled. In fact, the more people claim that it is, the more they do harm to their own cause by not actually convincing anyone of the science. The less people explain things, the more skeptical of them I become.