Pretty much everyone’s heard about the evil/saintly hacker who stole/liberated thousands of
emails from a server at the University of East Anglia in England. Most publicized is the use of the word “trick” by one of the scientists when referring to climate data that did not indicate warming; essentially, the individual wished to hide the fact that there was no warming during a given period, via “creative statistics” (my term, not theirs).
Plenty of climate change skeptics have used this information as a dagger to try and stab the global warming argument and at least land it in the hospital. They claim that this is evidence global warming is a fraud, a hoax, and that a bunch of climatologists are lying to us and trying to spend a bunch of money we don’t have somewhere it’s not needed. At the very least, the effects are exaggerated, and it’s not nearly as dire a problem as we’ve been lead to believe. Look: they tried to defraud the world by manipulating data!
But the truth is there’s really no evidence they actually manipulated anything. And personally, I’ve got no problem with these scientists trying to figure out how to make a more convincing argument, and if they had to resort to biased presentations and interpretations of data, then so be it. Because
they had to.
Let’s think about this for a minute: the vast majority of scientists are in concerted agreement that global warming is a major problem and that it’s happening right now (I’m not going to link that, go Google it). And yet, there are a lot of people in the media, without the training to properly evaluate the data, who are nonetheless seriously questioning whether this is actually an issue (again, go Google it or watch any report on global warming ever). So what the hell do they do? When they present the facts clearly and without bias, the media stirs in all their private opinions and color the information, creating controversy where there is none.
And it’s not like this is an issue they can just say “Fine, you want to create controversy and act like we’re not sure, that’s okay, whatever.” Because if they’re right, we have a window of opportunity here where we can reverse the problem, and we will not have that window forever. We have to reestablish our balance with nature before our arrogance in thinking that we are all powerful crushes us. If we are not willing to listen to reason because sensation speaks so much louder, these scientists probably feel have a responsibility to overstate the case for global warming to make us listen; if they don’t, and global warming ends up fundamentally changing the nature of the environment, we as a species could die. I think that manipulating some data is worth saving the entire species. And even Glenn Beck probably agrees with that; I’m sure he’s manipulated data for far less noble causes than that.
Then, of course, the issue becomes the quintessential “Is global warming really happening? Is it dangerous?” to which we’ve heard a resounding “YES!” for the last several years. Well, let’s consider the second question first: global warming would result in the melting of a lot of the ice at both poles, flooding a lot of land near the coasts, which just happen to be some of the most populated areas on the planet; we’ve all seen Al Gore’s slideshow flood Florida and the Bay Area and plenty of other places. A dramatic increase in temperature would likely also throw off the equilibrium of any ecosystem we haven’t already destroyed, and considering our species evolved with a relatively consistent temperature, we’re pretty dependent on that staying the same for our continued survival; we’re good enough at building cooling systems to keep ourselves alive, but the things we eat might not be so lucky, and eventually, that could become a problem. There are plenty of other reasons why a serious shift in global temperature could be disastrous, from the heat wave that killed a ton of people in Europe in 2003 to a shutdown of the current running through the North Atlantic which would cover a lot of the northern hemisphere in ice. Global warming is pretty obviously pretty fucking dangerous.
So are we causing it? That’s really an irrelevant question; a better question is “Who the hell cares if we’re causing it?” Whether or not we are contributing to global warming is a serious question, but we need to go green anyway.
Not only because the potential outcomes favor such an action, but because we have been fundamentally out of balance with nature for quite some time now. We have been taking more than we’ve been giving back, and that can only go on for so long before we run out of resources; the only reason we haven’t already is because it’ll take us a little longer than a century to deplete the planet of a pile it’s spent eons building. The costs of environmentalism now are high, but the return is the continued existence and prosperity of the human race. Personally, I’m willing to recycle and let some scientists “manipulate” data to make sure the species doesn’t die out, but then again I’m a hippie tree-hugging environmentalist weirdo or something.