A Travesty
The Distortion
Using emails stolen by Russian hackers, opponents of action on carbon pollution selectively quoted out-of-context emails to try to bolster their efforts to continue to deny the reality of climate change. For example, they take one email where a scientist mentions that it’s a “travesty” that we can’t monitor short-term fluctuations more accurately out of context to try to distort what the scientists are really talking about. They try to claim that the scientist is saying that the short-term fluctuations in temperature are the travesty, not the lack of monitoring.
The Truth
The scientific consensus about the reality of climate change is overwhelming, regardless of what’s in a few emails from a small handful of scientists. The results are already occurring – glaciers are melting, weather patterns are changing – and they are occurring even faster than our previous fears. However, these emails don’t even say what the climate change deniers claim they do.
Trenberth, the scientist who wrote that email, had just written a paper about the gaps in our monitoring of our planet’s “energy budget” and short-term, year-on-year “radiation fluxes,” and he was reacting to the frustration that a colder-than-usual snap brings out skeptics for climate change. He felt strongly that it was a “travesty” that we couldn’t account for short-term temperature changes within the CLEAR long-term warming trend. This is a highly technical point that doesn’t have anything to do with the larger question of climate change.
This is consistent across the stolen emails: technical, specific conversations are twisted to mean something they don’t in a desperate attempt to try to distract us from the reality of the extreme crisis of climate change.
Text of email: Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low….
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
