A Sad Time For Scientists

From WSJ:

It has been a bad–make that dreadful–few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

The IPCC e-mail scandal seems to have broken open a dam on how the research on climate change as been tainted or manipulated.

The scientist at the core of the climategate scandal now admits that the world hasn’t been warming since 1995.
And some scientists are saying that the world may not be warming at all.

As the WSJ notes, another IPCC report made claims that “extreme weather-related events” had led to “rapidly rising costs.” But that was based on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. “In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs.”

The IPCC research has been what all the global warming scares have been based upon. It was billed as the definitive word on climate science. Al Gore made his Nobel Peace Prize movie based on it.

If not for the scandal that is happening right now, we could have well passed cap and trade with it’s enormous expense to all Americans and a change in lifestyle that wasn’t necessary or helpful to the environment (they will still try to pass it). Now, according to the WSJ, “we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby’s regulatory agenda.”

What seems to have happened is that in their rush to prove global warming, scientists overstated the case, relied on shoddy research, and even hid research that didn’t agree with their political agenda.

The saddest thing about this? People may never trust scientists again. This is what happens when you let politics infect science.

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