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“Climate-gate” Roars, But the
Temperature Still Rises

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

I have my own private climate contrarian, a neighbor in Omaha. To respect his privacy, I’ll call him ‘Mike’ (although given the recent news of “climate-gate,” the contrarians seem to think that privacy is a quaint, antiquated notion when it comes to stealing scientists’ personal emails).

‘Mike’ contacts me whenever he has something to brag about, and the other day he was really crowing over the purported evidence of a ‘scientific conspiracy’ about the human role in global warming those purloined emails are alleged to represent. Aside from his annoying habit of trying to convince me that I have no right to disagree with him because he’s a taxpayer and part of my salary is paid by the state, listening to Mike is educational. I like to know what the other side is thinking — all the better to refute it. (As for his sponsorship of my salary, it comes to about 30 cents a year, which I’ll gladly rebate it to him.)

As by now everyone knows, the climate skeptics are claiming that the email correspondence stolen from a British climate institute at the University of East Anglia proves that scientists have been cooking the statistical books. The problem with this entire argument, however, is that carbon dioxide has no politics. While the skeptics fog up the issue with allegations of conspiracy and cover-up, greenhouse-gas levels continue to rise and the Earth is getting warmer.

Mike was on a roll in his email to me: “The cat is out of the bag; the smoking guns are smoking. I will not mince my words. Settled science??? Honest debate? With faked-up data? Give me a break. More like settled fraud: faked and manipulated data, dishonest and self-fulling [sic] computer models, a completely corrupted peer review process, blacklisting and destruction of the careers of the ‘deniers.’ Now who is doing the denying?”

“You are all lucky that the American media, the Administration, the Democratic majority in Congress, and most UN members are in the bag,” Mike went on to tell me. “Or there would be hell to pay. And you,” he said to me, “have been an active publicist for this worldwide deception, hopefully an innocent participant who was led down the primrose path.” Mike’s words make me sound like a 1950s communist sympathizer or a useful idiot fingered by the John Birch Society, rather than someone who reads the science and comes to honest conclusions.

The Real Issues

Sadly though, the media brouhaha over the purloined emails is obscuring the basic geophysical facts of the matter: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — now above 385 parts per million—continues to grow. The effects of this increase (because of what scientists’ call ‘thermal inertia’) lag behind the actual emissions by about 50 years in the air and 150 years in the oceans, portending a very warm future no matter who says what about whom today.

The CO2 level is now as high as it has been in 2 to 3 million years — a time when the Earth had no permanent pack ice. While daily weather varies (as does public opinion) carbon dioxide doesn’t read stolen emails. The higher its level, the more heat we will eventually get. Just as the world’s leaders are meeting in Copenhagen to discuss a new climate agreement, the skeptics have adeptly diverted attention from the most important fact of this discussion: namely, that greenhouse gases are rising at an alarming rate.

The fact that the skeptics will reduce themselves to such tactics tells us something about this debate. Having no scientific case to stand on, they reduce it all to a personal smear campaign with stolen evidence.

In the Meantime…

In the meantime, scientific indications of warming that the contrarians deliberately ignore keep piling up. A study in Nature Geoscience (November 22, 2009) on East Antarctica (where 90 percent of the Earth’s ice resides) indicates that areas that have previously been considered stable are beginning to lose mass. This estimate of Antarctica's ice mass from 2002-2009 says that most of the ice loss is taking place in coastal regions, at an estimated 57 gigatons per year. (A gigaton is one billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds).

The same study also confirmed earlier estimates that West Antarctica is losing about 132 gigatons of ice per year. "While we are seeing a trend of accelerating ice loss in Antarctica, we had considered East Antarctica to be inviolate," said lead author Jianli Chen. "But if it is losing mass, as our data indicate, it may be an indication the state of East Antarctica has changed. Since it's the biggest ice sheet on Earth, ice loss there can have a large impact on global sea level rise in the future.”

At the same time this study was published, Australia during mid-November 2009 suffered a spring heat wave that set record highs characteristic of mid-summer and pushed the fire danger to ‘catastrophic’ in some regions of South Australia and New South Wales. Adelaide had its highest springtime temperatures on record (35 degrees C., 95 F.) for eight days in a row. The temperature reached 109 F. in Sydney. According to Australia’s weather and climate agency, “The heat wave resulted from a combination of factors: gradually rising temperatures across southern Australia, probably as a result of global warming; an El Niño event in the Pacific Ocean; and a high-pressure weather system that stalled out over the Tasman Sea to the southeast, causing hot, dry winds to blow south over the continent.”  

Bruce E. Johansen is a professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and author, in 2009, of Hot Air and Hard Science: Dissecting the Global Warming Debate and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Global Warming Science and Technology.