"Climategate": Overblown and irrelevant
The controversy over e-mails stolen from global-warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.
Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as "Climategate," with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it "Swifthack," a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Senator John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change.
The truth is that the e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change. But they do hand a powerful political card to skeptics at the start of perhaps the most important environmental summit in history. Still don’t know what to make of it? If you’re struggling to untangle the details of the e-mail controversy, here are five key things you need to know: …
Continue reading. Note in particular this passage:
4. Do the e-mails weaken the scientific case for global warming? Put it this way: when it comes to climate-science analysis from the representative of the world’s biggest oil-producing state, it’s wise to be suspicious. In the weeks since the e-mails first became public, many climate scientists and policy experts have looked through them, and they report that the correspondence does not contradict the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, which has been decades in the making. "The content of the stolen e-mails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming," wrote 25 leading U.S. scientists in a letter to Congress on Dec. 4. "The body of evidence that underlies our understanding of human-caused global warming remains robust." …
