OK, climate gate was crap when it was in the news. It remains so and it always will. Just check the old threads that we had on our forums and you will see that I said it back then.

Basically, the hack hit the news and less than a day later, the few tidbits that were there had been found and spread far and wide. When that hit, I was saying to everyone else to sit the fuck back and wait. It the news for climate science was going to come up really bad, then there would be lots more that would be found as the data was sifted through.

Several months and 160MB of text later, we are still left with the same three or four exchanges that we had back on day 1. Nothing else has come out from that. And if it were there, it would have been found. Perhaps not by some geek running full text searches on the data but with a story that might have turned out to be revelatory, we can all be sure that big oil and the other energy industries all had people sifting through that data just trying to find something, anything really that could be used to add fear, uncertainty and doubt to the general perception.

Since that has yet to happen, I am of the mind that there really was not anything there to be found. Actually, I an somewhat surprised that so little was found. The archive was huge and scientist put their pants on in the morning just like the rest of us. Here I don't even need a smoking gun, just something that is worded in a way that someone with little understanding of science might find confusing.

I've made this analogy many times.

Lets say they are right and climate change is bunk.

Ok, say you have a toilet on the equator that gets clogged. Do you pretend that it isn't clogged and continue to use it, or do you do something to unclog it? Lets say you have a toilet in the Artic circle and it gets clogged, do you continue to use it, or do you do something to unclog it?

Temperature change is going to happen, even without our species. But at this current time it seems that whatever natural changes that would exist without us, are being magnified by us. And even if it were not, we are still producing more waste than our species can manage. Warm or cold, a toilet is still a toilet, and I don't think our species wants to live in it's own filth.

Well a-dog, the phrase “a lot of scientists” doesn't really go very far for this type of discussion. There is just so much that can be hidden behind that. I don't think that I have to go to far out on a limb to say that it can hide just as much as saying that there are a lot of scientists who are in the pro-global warming camp.

The one fact that we can be certain of is that there is a crap load of wrong information out there. Some of it comes from politicians (on both sides mind you), some from huge corporations who might be in no small amount of trouble if the idea has teeth and some even comes from the scientists themselves.

Scientists are just like the rest of us, in that they put their pants on in the morning and go to work. When they are not talking the science amongst themselves, they have opinions on political matters just like anyone else.

A better question to work on would be along the lines of just what we can say about global warming with any degree of confidence.

One thing that we can say is that global temperatures do change on the scale of decades even without human involvement. We have accurate thermometric data going back to about 1800 or so. Before that, we can look at tree rings, ice cores and so on to get an idea of what conditions may have been like in yet earlier times. The fossil record shows periods when tropical species lived farther north than they do today and other times when arctic species lived farther south.

Just for a point of discussion, I will refer to that stuff as the background noise. Now, can we distinguish the effects of human activity from the background noise? Honestly, that is one of the points where way too many people are grossly misinformed on the matter.

Can we say with 99.999% accuracy that human activity and the effects that it has clearly stands out from the background noise? Simply put, NO! And Hell NO!

Can we say with better than 50% accuracy that we can clearly see anthropogenic issues? Um, it is tempting to do so but when you try to do that, you just get lost in a mess of confusing and contradictory data.

So what level of confidence must we have before we act to change the way that we have been doing things? Should we start making huge economic upheavals when we are 90% confident of the data? 95%? 98%? Again, that is the wrong question.

We do have a few facts that we know with 100% confidence.

We are trashing our planet faster every decade. We are overpopulating the planet at an astounding rate. We need to get our action under control or we will be in trouble before we know it. The fact of the matter is that we cannot keep doing what we are doing for another couple of centuries before we cause some huge disaster.

Just for grins, let's say that the worst case scenario for global warming is what hits us. We are going to tank our ability to feed ourselves. World population will crash (not that that is a bad thing) and billions will die. However, even if global warming is not the cause of the coming crisis, something will be and billions will die. Pretty much, something is going to get us in the end and if we get our collective asses in gear, we may be able to slow down whatever the catastrophe will be so that it is less painful than it might be.