Hide the Decline
The Distortion
Using emails stolen by unnamed 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 about “hiding the decline” out of context to try to distort what the scientists are really talking about. They focus on the words “trick” and “hiding the decline” and try to say that the “decline” is about global temperatures and the “trick” is something bad.
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.
A “trick” is a very common way to talk about a creative way to solve a problem. “Hey, neat trick!” is a common saying, and that’s the way this scientist is using that term. And the “decline” he is speaking about is a highly technical, specific issue: the decline of sensitivity in tree ring data to fluctuations in temperature. So he’s just talking about an effective way to present data that hides the “noise” of tree ring data to make the presentation more clear. That’s it. It’s a completely innocuous, boring conversation between two scientists.
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.
