Crazy Dana and the Wing-Nuts on Climate Change and e-mails

With the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit happening in the next few days, the lead up to the conference has been focused on right-wing hysteria. We have even had our own nutty Congressman Dana Rohrabacher foaming at the mouth on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) — who believes that if global warming exists, it has been caused by “dinosauer flatulence” — provided the most comical attack. Rohrbacher called upon Americans to get “angry” and “fight the globalist clique” of “globalists” and “radical environmentalists” who are trying to “shackle generations of Americans”:

ROHRABACHER: Copenhagen may well lay the foundations for the future that the globalists who are pushing this agenda envision for us. […] What the Copenhagen crowd would mandate and can be traced back to the same alliance between our own radical environmentalists and the global elite. […] This is about centralizing power into the hands of global government, that’s what Kyoto and Copenhagen are all about, that’s what the globalist alliance is all about. […]

We must fight the globalist clique that is trying to shackle generations of Americans. … Members of Congress need to hear from angry constituents, and I predict they will.

Here is a video compilation of the comments made by our favorite wing-nut h/t: ThinkProgress.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgTSnWuea7c&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

A thoughtful editorial was published in the journal Nature on December 2, 2009 regarding the hysteria on the part of the climate change deniers after the release of email among climate change researchers. While the actions of these individuals to try to smooth out the data to support their overall conclusions, the instance itself, does not represent a conspiracy on the part of the majority of climate scientists to manipulate data to support the evidence that climate change is happening and much of that change is the result of human impact on our planet.

From the Article:

Climatologists under pressure

Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ‘smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

First, Earth’s cryosphere is changing as one would expect in a warming climate. These changes include glacier retreat, thinning and areal reduction of Arctic sea ice, reductions in permafrost and accelerated loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Second, the global sea level is rising. The rise is caused in part by water pouring in from melting glaciers and ice sheets, but also by thermal expansion as the oceans warm. Third, decades of biological data on blooming dates and the like suggest that spring is arriving earlier each year.

Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world’s voracious appetite for carbon is essential (see pages 568 and 570).

Read the rest of the journal Nature Editorial here.