Friday 4 December 2009

Hot Air time for climate change deniers

Last week George Monbiot warned of the consequences of the email hack at UEA and called on the Professor Phil Jones of the department to resign. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response The emails include things like this : (Phil Jones :)"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

This was all the excuse the Saudi Arabian delegates to Copenhagen needed to say they intended to slow down action on climate change until the science was more certain, and it was all the excuse BBC's 'Today' programme needed to put the tedious Philip Stott on again. Jonathan Porritt made a pretty poor show of challenging Stott's assertion that the whole Man-made climate change thesis is a small and vulnerable point of convergence on which a vast pyramid of assembled data rests. It's rubbish, of course - a completely false and misleading analogy, but the leaked emails certainly make it look as if this is what's going on.

It seems to me that if, in the space of 150 years, the human race releases into the thin skin of gas that envelopes our planet (look up some images and see how thin it really is) solar energy locked up in the form of carbon that took 100 million years or so to lay down, the onus is on those scientists who say that this should have no effect to prove it.

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