What happens now that scandal clouds the scientific basis for worry about climate change?
Naturally, claims have arisen that incriminating e-mails to and from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in the UK were taken out of context. Already, sympathizers say the messages should be ignored because they came to light through the wicked intrusions of a computer hacker.
Contexts, however, are clear enough. And, the messages can't be ignored, whatever routes they followed into the public domain. They came from scientists central to the international campaign for sacrificial remedies against global warming of human origin. And they show those scientists discussing the manipulation, even destruction, of data and the stifling of dissent.
Science and politics
While mitigating explanations may yet emerge, it is difficult to read the e-mails and not see corruption of science by politics. The e-mail writers showed unscientific concern for policy outcomes and an eagerness to shut views in conflict with their own out of debate. These are not obscure lab drones on some quirky crusade. They're celebrities of global-warming politics, whose reports drive findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the citadel of climate alarmism. And they've been caught acting with apparent political motivation.
So what now?
Doubters of IPCC orthodoxy, having been dismissed without a hearing as cranks by the popular media and some—as it turns out—of the academic press, feel vindicated. It would be unreasonable, however, for them to expect their view suddenly to prevail. Scheming e-mails from the other side of a politicized academic argument won't persuade the masses that human contributions to observed warming are minor and that, therefore, behavior modification mandated by governments can't much affect global average temperature.
On climate change, in fact, minds are made up, political positions are fixed, and capital is invested. So a swift reversal on climate change surely is unlikely. It's valuable, however, to ponder. If the East Anglia affair did somehow persuade a majority of free people that their climate anxiety was unwarranted, and if politicians changed agendas accordingly, a large section of the developed world's cultural fabric would have to be rewoven. For example:
• Subsidies for "green energy" would cease in the US, leaving behind real environmental calamities such as 30,000 or so wind turbines converted into prairie junk.
• Congress and the Obama administration would disentangle energy and greenhouse gas emissions in policy-making.
• The United Nations would refocus itself on international peace.
• The Nobel Foundation would rename the award it gave former US Vice-President Al Gore and IPCC the Propaganda Prize.
• The mass media would abandon pet inanities such as "scientific consensus" and "settled science" and learn to put research funding into fair perspective.
• Public school teachers, with fewer you-can-save-the-planet simplicities at hand, would find new ways to bolster their students' self-esteem.
• Greenhouse-gas emission allowances would vanish from the menu of risky ways by which traders get rich.
• The phrase "cap and trade" as it applies to greenhouse gases would recede into political oblivion.
This easily extendible list is fanciful, of course. These things won't soon happen. A sense of climatic doom has embedded itself in the institutional thinking, investment planning, and—therefore—political ambitions of the developed world. And a single news event won't disengage it. The event does, however, provide a reason to think about how different the world would be without global-warming hysteria—and to wonder if change in that direction would make the world lower important safeguards.
The debate
Human activity does change the climate. It alters landscapes and increases concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In terms of warming, the ramifications of those changes aren't known—at least not to the certain extent the scandalized e-mail writers seem to have wanted everyone to believe. Without continued research and honest debate among scientists—debate unencumbered by politics—the ramifications of those changes can't be known.
Among revelations from the e-mails purloined from the University of East Anglia, the most important is that such a debate has not yet occurred.
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