The glaciers thing was a mistake. Mistakes and miscommunications happen in bureaucracies. If the government accidentally gave the wrong date for the completion of a project or something and apologised and corrected themselves, everybody would roll their eyes and move on. But because it's such a contentious subject everybody's all OMG WTF SCANDAL!!!!111one
The only email I've seen credibly sourced is the first quoted in that link. A "trick" in scientific parlance is just something clever, nothing more. In this case, they're discounting data from a small group of Siberian conifers because their data is known to be unreliable. Unfortunate choice of wording and the aforementioned contentiousness of the subject leads to outcry. I've not seen the other claimed emails anywhere, which makes me highly suspicious. For example, the second:
wrote:where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.
There's no
way a scientist would genuinely make the mistake of believing a single cold spell somehow discounts global warming. A single data point does *not* change a trend. If anybody seriously believed that, next time we have a heat wave all the sceptics should be suddenly agreeing that global warming is right. Of course it's not going to happen because that argument is bollocks and really, they know it.
I'm not saying there's no way the emails are genuine, though. Not all scientists are ethical, unfortunately, just like any other group of people. But discounting stuff that's clearly bollocks or that is misinterpreted, do we have evidence for some gigantic conspiracy spanning thousands of scientists and world governments? Do we hell.
Refusal to accept global warming is a simple and understandable reaction to not wanting to give up one's luxuries, nothing more. Climate science is mindbogglingly complicated, and without years of study there's simply no way we can understand the subject. The idea that some random journalist or conspiracy theorist can understand it well enough to be right and thousands of highly trained scientists be wrong is simply laughable.
Oh, and fun facts: 2009 was tied for the second-warmest year ever, and vastly more importantly, the 00s are the warmest decade on record.
Source. Don't listen to the male bovine excrement about it getting cooler this decade spouted on a regular basis by anti-climate change arguers.
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A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise, a morning filled with 400 billion suns - the rising of the Milky Way
