That the planet is getting warmer on balance, and that human behavior is a — perhaps significant — driver of that warming, are both plausible. But plausible because at a basic level the claims can be expressed in a syllogism that fits on a cocktail napkin (CO2 is a warming gas. Human industrial activity produces massive quantities of CO2 . . .)
We have always relied on science (and, crucially, scientists) to fill in the many complex empirical interstices in that syllogism, to work out the precise mechanisms of man-climate interaction and give us an idea of what follows therefrom. For 20-plus years the mainstream science has tended inexorably toward catastrophism on this front – hockey sticks and water worlds, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
But the moral of controversies like “Climate-Gate” and “Glacier-Gate,” and indeed of the counter-narrative of blogs like Planet Gore, is that that science has been muddied by a warming bias — be it conscious or unconscious, ideologically motivated or not — that takes the form of slipshod methodology, suppression, and obfuscation, and that thoroughly complicates the disastrous picture painted by climate-change zealots. And when the policy issuing from this science calls for a global top-down reordering of economies on a scale that would make Marx blush, and potentially put a ten-zero dent in global GDP, this bias has to be uncovered and undone wherever it is found. Cocktail-napkin plausibility ain’t gonna cut it.
Over on the homepage today, I’ve got an article on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s chief climate scientist, who embodies many of the vices of the climate-change community, and who seems to be covering his ears and humming loudly in response to the mounting criticism of the mother-of-all climate catastrophism narratives, his panel’s 2007 assessment report.
UPDATE: A reader (with a Ph.D., but can we trust him?) e-mails with this:
Saying that man produces “Massive” amounts of CO2 is quite misleading.
Man only produces a small fraction (2-5%) of the total amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere every year. The rest is naturally occurring and we have no impact on it. Even if manking impoversihed itself an got rid of all CO2 emission, the CO2 level would still be going up.
CO2 increase in the atmosphere is a lag response to temperature changes with a lag time in the hundreds of years (even Al Gore’s graphs show this). The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is in response to temperature changes that occurred hundreds of ago from natural causes.
Sorry, CO2 is plant food. The most important response to increased levels of CO2 is that plants grow better. The temperature response is non-linear and is far outweighed by the response to cloud cover (water vapor), which NO MODEL incorporates into its predictions.