When discussing man-made climate change (or anthropogenic global warming), I often drift into unfamiliar (and sometimes disturbing) territory. That territory is what I call The Land of the Afraid, Ignorant and Lost.
In this weird alternative dimension there are doomsayers who are convinced the world is going to end in 3 years time, there are conspiracy theorists who totally believe the moon landings were faked and everyone seems to be taking a potshot at Al Gore.
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When I first blogged about the subject, I went in with a very pure idea that science holds the answer to our problem, and that was enough. The logic seemed simple (after all, I was a scientist before I became a writer), so I stuck with it. Unfortunately, this wasn't only a naive standpoint, I was hopelessly wrong.
When presenting the scientific facts behind climate change, global warming and the human influence on our biosphere, I was always hijacked by a vocal minority that cried foul about my "bias" to one side of the debate.
Debate? There's a debate?
For my whole academic life, I've known that humans impact our atmosphere severely and our relentless production of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) amplify the effects of the naturally occurring "greenhouse effect" that keeps our planet habitable. The more CO2 we pump into our atmosphere, the warmer the atmosphere gets.
This is a scientific fact based on decades of scientific study. The main cause of the increase in global average temperatures in recent history is not down to any natural cycle -- although natural cycles do exist -- it is down to us.
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Personally, the most interesting thing I find about this affair is the overstatement of the importance of the whole thing. Some columnists have even given it a name: "Climategate."
I love it! I wish lab work was this exciting when I was in research. I can see it now: climatologists in balaclavas breaking into buildings, stealing sensitive data that proves climate change is a lie, covering up the "truth."
Cutting to the chase, in Climategate, the hackers pulled some "sensitive emails" between climatologists and discovered a few emails sounded a little fishy. However, from the "thousands" of emails, the deniers were only able to pull a tiny selection of text to "prove" their case. One UK source lists some of this compelling non-evidence in an anti-science diatribe.
However, this is not evidence, it's not proof, all it proves is that the climatologists involved assumed their emails would have remained private. The deniers have cherry-picked small selections of text and taken the discussion out of context.
