Climategate Strikes America
Recently, an unknown hacker posted hundreds of e-mails between climate scientists online, indicating that the researchers had been padding their research, and had also been working to prevent climate skeptics from getting their studies published.
While nothing in the letters repudiates the mass of evidence that climate is, in fact, warming of man-made causes, they do call into question certain research methods of high-up climatologists, and they do highlight the concerns of some that certain climate scientists aren’t able to get published because their information is contrary to the consensus.
The issue has also been jumped on by climate skeptics, who say that this is evidence of a conspiracy among scientists to inflate global warming’s importance and waste valuable resources converting our energy resources to more environmentally friendly energy sources.
The uproar has added to a declining interest over global warming in the United States, which has become more apathetic as a whole towards global warming. Al Gore and other prominent climate change activists have hit the news networks claiming that “Climategate,” as the release of the letters has been called, is just a distraction that has more to do with ethics than with factual evidence. Others claim that the scientists were trying to block the climate skeptics work from getting published simply because it was bad science, and that they shouldn’t be condemned for venting frustrations in private e-mails.
The release of the letters was obviously timed to come out shortly before the beginning of the much anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, which started on Monday. The conference is designed to set a road map for climate change reduction (particularly in the field of carbon emissions) over the next few years, and is supposed to set a framework for another major agreement along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol.
This will certainly be a hindrance in Copenhagen, but it most likely will not majorly effect any of the dealings. The usual suspects are exploiting the controversy as clear evidence of a hoax on a global scale, though, notably Senator Jim Inhofe, and the Saudi government, which is almost entirely dependent on oil for the maintenance of its wealth.
Climategate’s effect on the American public is a different story. America is a nation of skeptics, and there’s no doubt that climate change legislation is a hindrance to big business. Whether or not Al Gore and the climate change lobby can mobilize quickly and effectively enough to combat the perceived damage of these letters has yet to be seen, but it likely will have lasting consequences.
