Is Global Warming Dead?

The controversy over the hacked emails is turning out to be a classic case of Swift-Boating.  While there is manufactured outrage over some emails being taken out of context, there is little or no discussion of the hacking or related break-ins that have been happening to climate scientists around the world.  For example, a leading a scientist at the University of Victoria in our backyard had his office broken into twice.  And meanwhile, the facts on the ground (and in the sea) continue to tell a very different and dramatic story.

For anyone who is interested in following this story,  wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/12/09/climate-gate-timeline/ ;

and for some humor: climateprogress.org/2009/12/10/climatega...-inconvenient-truth/

Too late, damage has been done, credibility lost....oppponents reinvigorated...skeptics even more skeptical... guy at the gas station got a rebuttal to give.....independents confused.
Can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Move along....

I don't think this is a permanent loss of credibility, it's just the diversion du jour. There have been other diversions before, but reality has a way of seeping back into the discussion after a while.

How anyone familiar with Mt. R's glaciers, the long history of glacial recession and outbursts on the Tahoma, Kautz, and Nisqually glaciers (including the 1947 Kautz mudflow), the loss of the ice caves on the Paradise Glacier, etc. (and what is happening in the N. Cascade, and Glacier NP) can doubt we are dealing with global climate change is as amazing to me as Bush's denial of evolution

Actually the long history of glaciers receding over the past few hundred years is muddying rather than clarifying, because much of the glacial recession happened before you could reasonably attribute it to industrialization. Of two basic possibilities, one or both apply:

1) The Little Ice Age made the glaciers anomalously big, and much of the recession is just a return to "normal"
2) Early industrialization and deforestation did have a significant effect, despite CO2 increases that seem "low" compared to today's changes.

I think climate scientists might be better off focusing more on the core science - the basics don't really seem all that complicated.  We know that:

(a) We (people) are digging up ancient carbon and releasing it along with other greenhouse gases;

(b) these gases are accumulating in the atmosphere in ever greater concentrations;

(c) and from their properties that these gases trap heat in the atmosphere (without any greenhouse gases we'd have a very different climate and might be skiing powder year-round!)

It seems like there is still uncertainty about the extent of historical natural vs. human-caused climate variation, but if someone really wanted to come up with a rationale for why we shouldn't expect the planet to be warming, then they'd need to dispute at least one of those observations.

Actually the long history of glaciers receding over the past few hundred years is muddying rather than clarifying, because much of the glacial recession happened before you could reasonably attribute it to industrialization.  Of two basic possibilities, one or both apply:

1) The Little Ice Age made the glaciers anomalously big, and much of the recession is just a return to "normal"
2) Early industrialization and deforestation did have a significant effect, despite CO2 increases that seem "low" compared to today's changes.

The onset of intensive agriculture in Asia and Europe itself lead to massive CO2 release and climate change exacerbated by the later burning of wood to make charcoal (which along with logging for ship timbers) which lead to massive deforestation not only in England (which totally denuded Ireland and went all the way to Poland for wood) but much of Europe and, of course, legendarily, the Mediterranean. The production of charcoal was an immense effort with immense CO2 emissions. Ruddiman hypothesized that these activities led to global warming which was reversed when bubonic plague decimate Eurasian populations, which led to reforestation, diminished ag, and less human related activity and after which, of course, human population explosion began, aided by intensive agriculture, advance in medicine, and industrialization. The Little Ice Age lasted couple of hundred years or so, but the recession of the glaciers on Mt. Rainier began in earnest around 1900-1910 accelerating (according to glacial outburst history) in the 1960s. I really don't see how the recession of glaciers on Mt. R, in the N. Cascades, in Glacier NP, and elsewhere makes global climate change less apparent. As far as the history of climate goes since the recession of continental glaciers 16,000 or so years ago, E.C. Pielou, the renowned ecological statistician, analyzed the data in her book about the subject and said there were no lasting trends or cycles in NA climate since the major Ice Age (her book preceded the recent an ongoing analyses of global climate change of the past couple of decades).

For anyone who would like a great short video on the so called Climate Gate, check this out. climateprogress.org/2009/12/24/the-truth...8Climate+Progress%29