Paper details:
Short Essay #2: Choose one version of climate change denial discussed in our course reading. Explicate carefully how that form of denial works and then
explain why you think that form of denial is so prominent in the United States or elsewhere today. Each component should be approximately 250-350 words
in length.
I chose Conspiracy Theories and this is the article that I need to write based on
'Climategate proves conspiracy'
In November 2009, the email servers at the University of East Anglia in Britain
were illegally hacked and emails were stolen. When a selection of emails betweenclimate scientists was published on the internet, a few suggestive quotes
were
seized upon to claim that global warming was all just a conspiracy (Cook,
2010). The incident, dubbed 'Climategate', is symptomatic of a movement that
denies the scientific consensus (Delingpole, 2009). If one disagrees with a view
held by the great majority of the world's scientists, the most common response
is to assume all those scientists are involved in a vast conspiracy to deceive.
To determine if there had been any wrongdoing, a series of international
investigations independently investigated the Climategate emails and all cleared
climate scientists of any wrongdoing. The House of Commons Science and
Technology Committee found that the criticisms of the Climate Research Unit
(CRU) were misplaced and that 'Professor Jones's [of the CRU] actions were in
line with common practice in the climate science communiry' (Willis et al, 2010).
The University of East Anglia's Scientific Assessment Panel, in consultation with
the Royal Society, assessed the integrity of the research published by the CRU
and concluded there was 'no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in
any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit' (Oxburgh, 2010). The Independent Climate Change Email Review examined the emails to assess whether
manipulation or suppression of data occurred and concluded that 'the scientists'
rigor and honesty are not in doubt' (Russell et al, 2010).
Thus independent investigations conclude unanimously that nothing in the
Climategate emails actually affected the science. The issue was of isolated quotes
taken out of context. The most quoted email was from Phil Jones discussing
palaeo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures:
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each
series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1 961 for
Keith's to hide the decline.
The phrases often repeated from this email are 'Mike's Nature trick' and 'hide
the decline', interpreted to reveal nefarious intent. However, the issues discussed
in this email are openly published in the peer-reviewed literature. 'Mike's Nature
trick' refers to a technique (in other words a 'trick of the trade') used in a paper
published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann et al, 1998). The
'trick' is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the
reconstructed palaeo-data. This places recent global warming trends in the
context of temperature changes over longer timescales.
The most common misconception regarding this email is to assume that
'hide the decline' refers to declining temperatures. Republican Sarah Palin
argued, 'The emails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed
records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures'
(McCullagh, 2010). The 'decline' actually refers to a decline in tree-ring growth
in certain high-latitude regions since the 1960s. This is known as the 'divergence
problem', where some tree-ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental
temperature records after 1960. This was discussed in the peer-reviewed
literature as early as 1995, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Jacoby and D'Arrigo, 1995). When you iook
at Jones's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the scheming of
a climate conspiracy, but technical discussions of data-handling technique
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