Asked by an old and dear friend what I make of the recent \u201cClimategate scandal,\u201d I thought I’d do a quick check on sources summarizing the effect of the hacked East Anglia e-mails on climate change science.<\/p>\n
To my surprise, the Wikipedia article<\/a> on the topic is probably as good a place to start as any (as Wikipedia often is, despite its known flaws and potential unreliabilities; the fact that it’s both up-to-date and reasonably thorough on this topic allays my fears about Wikipedia’s slow decline<\/a>, as reported in the digital media a little while back).<\/p>\n This article<\/a>, published early last year in EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union<\/em>, summarizes the results of an extensive survey of climate scientists, which shows that while just over half of Americans believe there is a scientific consensus about human-caused global warming, 97.4% of actively publishing climatologists agree that human activities are bringing about a warming of the global climate. The study was carried out before the East Anglia e-mail flare-up, but the main thing that the latter would have done to this data is to bring down the level of trust in climate science among the public, especially the American public, not to change the scientific consensus. This editorial<\/a> in Nature<\/em>, one of the two most respected scientific journals on the planet, presents a fair assessment of what the hacked e-mails mean for the scientific community. (The other of the two, Science<\/em>, has not editorialized about it, but here’s the news piece<\/a> they published soon after the e-mail issue broke.)<\/p>\n This piece<\/a> by Weather Underground meteorologist Jeff Masters usefully summarizes an earlier study by Brown, Pielke, and Annan that shows more or less the same result, and mentions a few of the reasons for the mass media’s overemphasis on climate skepticism. Links to other studies of the scientific “consensus” and to statements by leading scientific organizations can be found at the Wikipedia page on scientific opinion on climate change<\/a> and on the climate change consensus<\/a>.<\/p>\n While there’s little scientific value in these, I find David McCandless’s visualizations at Information is Beautiful to be a neat summation of the main arguments pro and con<\/a> and of the scale of consensus<\/a> (though some of the commenters make a valid point about his approach, which is not very statistically rigorous). The first of these, however, follows the popular media frame of believers-versus-skeptics (“is climate change real or not?”), which is part of the problem of why so many in the public remain underinformed and unconvinced. Coby Beck’s How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic<\/a>, at Grist.org<\/a>, delves into the various arguments put forward by the (fossil fuel industry-fueled) denialist machine and by the (reasonably) befuddled public.<\/p>\n That ought to do for a start…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Asked by an old and dear friend what I make of the recent \u201cClimategate scandal,\u201d I thought I’d do a quick check on sources summarizing the effect of the hacked East Anglia e-mails on climate change science. To my surprise, the Wikipedia article on the topic is probably as good a place to start as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[520594,196,689701],"tags":[16845,4448],"class_list":["post-1176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-politics","category-ecoculture","category-media_ecology","tag-climategate","tag-ecopolitics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-iY","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1195,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/11\/swiftclimateboating-the-media\/","url_meta":{"origin":1176,"position":0},"title":"Swift\/climate\/boating the media","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 11, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Having published the results of its 12-part investigation into the leaked\/hacked climate scientist e-mails at the University of East Anglia, the Guardian is now inviting \"web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.\" It's a kind of public\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1177,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/01\/12\/climate-rage\/","url_meta":{"origin":1176,"position":1},"title":"climate rage","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Just a quick follow-up to the previous post... After the East Anglia flare-up, Paul Krugman was right to ask what fuels the rage behind climate denialism. Anyone who has perused any popular web site on environmental and climate issues will be struck both by the numbers and the utter vehemence\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"climategate.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/01\/climategate.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1335,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/09\/09\/fomenting-rebellion\/","url_meta":{"origin":1176,"position":2},"title":"fomenting “rebellion”","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just read Jane Mayer's New Yorker article on \"The billionaire Koch brothers\u2019 war against Obama\", which I'm happy to see is publicly available online. It's a good summary of what corporate watchers have been saying for years (see, e.g., here and here), but with a lot of interview material\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1359,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/10\/26\/the-house-of-cards-house-of-cards\/","url_meta":{"origin":1176,"position":3},"title":"the “house of cards” house of cards","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"For all my skepticism toward most \"climate skepticism,\" I find the case of Judith Curry very interesting. This recent post at her blog Climate Etc. repeatedly resorts to metaphors like \"'Alice down the rabbit hole' moments\" and \"bucket[s] of cold water being poured over my head\" to describe her experiences\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"house-of-cards.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/10\/house-of-cards.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1198,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/15\/climate-denialism-as-hysteria\/","url_meta":{"origin":1176,"position":4},"title":"climate denialism as hysteria?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Dipping once again into the public debate around climate change science -- today it's in the responses to MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel's op-ed in the Boston Globe, to which no less than 15 comments were added in the couple of minutes it took me to write these first couple of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"ft0p3003d3_00001.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/02\/ft0p3003d3_00001.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1165,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/12\/17\/copenhagen-changing-the-climate-of-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1176,"position":5},"title":"Copenhagen: changing the climate of democracy","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"What makes COP-15 a turning point is that a new set of connections are being forged in the heat of the confrontation of active citizens from around the world with the reality of global political-economic power structures. Paul Hawken\u2019s \u201clargest movement in the world,\u201d the movement of movements made up\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Climate change"","block_context":{"text":"Climate change","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/climate-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"cop-15-last-chance-2.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/12\/cop-15-last-chance-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}