So some scientists got into trouble for trying to delete emails in order to prevent deniers access to personal emails that might or might not have had anything to do with their climate change reserach. Their explanation was that they receive ridiculous numbers of requests under the Freedom of Information act from deniers using it as a tool to a) hold up their work while they have to deal with the request and b) use their complete lack of scientific knowledge to punch holes in perfectly acceptable research.
This latter point I can all too easily understand. People like to assume that science is always based on hard numbers that don't need altering, and then claim that science is a fraud when the raw data doesn't seem (to their simple eyes) to stack up. One of the things the deniers are complaining about is about how some researchers removed Japanese weather stations over 300m from their research progressively, leaving the (colder) 300m plus ones in place of older measurements, but ground level ones from later measurements, thus fiddling the figures. Welcome to science, where you have to try to control for variables that are fundamentally uncontrollable, ie the fact that Japan didn't have many ground level weather stations in those days - almost all of them were over 300m. In order to keep the record, you then have to calculate a formula that works out from the 300m + figure what the ground level figure might have been, and then use that figure in your data when you start the analysis - not the original, colder figure. More accurate later data can be drawn unaltered from the ground level stations, and so the data from the 300m+ weather stations can be safely ignored - it's not needed anymore.
Another argument trotted out by deniers is the fact that 75% of weather stations used for Californian figures are on the beach. Apparently this is based on the 'common-knowledge' assumption that it is always warmest at the beach because people go there to lay out in the sun in their swimsuits. As usual, a few seconds on Google provides the casual researcher (ie me) to find that there is a simple and non-cheaty reason why they used weather stations near the coast for this sample. California has a very variable temperature difference between highs and lows the further you get away from the coast due to the way that the air flows are blocked by the Sierra Nevada mountains and the sheer difference in elevation of different parts of the state once you get a few miles inland. The coast is the only place to get consistent and reliable results if you want a genuine average temperature result from California. If the scientists had wanted to cheat, they could have just taken daytime readings from the inland desert weather stations; they didn't, they just tried to get a realistic reading of California's average temperatures without having to do endless work controlling for the hot and cold spikes from the inland stations. They did this by taking readings from the cooler coastal areas.
What scientists and those who at least have a vague knowledge of statistical analysis and science understand, most people don't. This isn't saying that most people are stupid, far from it - the majority of people usually trust science. You don't see many people wondering if their TV set is going to work or not, or whether the Moon is suddenly going to get all uppity and decide to fall on us. Deniers, however, wield a special branch of ignorance. Not only do they not understand science, but they actively have an agenda to fight it.
Nick Davies, in his excellent book 'Flat Earth News' (which I advise everybody to read), covers a lot of very interesting ground about the climate change lobbying - not only the deniers, but also the truth mangling that goes on by groups like Greenpeace which then adds fuel to the deniers' fires when discovered. In the US, fake grass-roots organisations were set up by oil companies (Davies refers to these fake groups as Astroturf groups) in order to provide a platform for issuing climate change denial press releases to the wire news services. These press releases (which are usually either bullshit pseudo-science, manipulations of the truth or just lies) are then picked up by the press, who, being overworked and understaffed, don't fact-check the piece and just publish it as is, sometimes with little more than a bit of rewording to make it appear as though they had written the story themselves. One key feature about astroturf groups is that they appear from nowhere, issue press releases and encourage people to lobby their politicians on the issue, but they don't seem to need any funding, nor do they seem to be looking for new members. There are good examples of exposed astroturf groups here and here. The latter example unmasks how the tobacco industry in the US used astroturfing to try to deny the damage that was being done to smokers' health, to downplay medical evidence, or even discredit scientists or their research. And the motivations for the oil and coal industries today are exactly the same; profit. If global warming were accepted by the politicians, then energy producers (the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters) would have to adhere to strict legislation to reduce their CO2 emissions, and this would cost them a lot of money. They would have to make huge modifications to all of their processes, from mining through to the actual energy production. Naturally, being fat greedy cunts, they don't like to part with any money whatsoever, and the lives of the rest of the world in 100 years time don't matter to businessmen who only care about themselves right now. So they try to find ways of weaselling out of it, and the best tactic is to fight the evidence, and attack the climate change science publicly.
The biggest problem science has in this battle is that it is not used to this battlefield. Scientists like to think that arguments can be won by the best theories and the best fit with the evidence. In an ideal world, this would be the case, but they underestimate the power of public relations, which the big energy industries are all too comfortable with. A press release here, a 'leaked document' from a company paid scientist there, and suddenly the papers are all over the story, because any conflict like this is news. As mentioned earlier, journalists don't have the time to fact check what they print, and so these stories are published and the ordinary person thinks that scientists are all liars and that climate change isn't happening at all. Scientists simply can't hack this form of disinformation warfare, they lack the temperament and the experience (not to mention being unable to fund their own astroturf groups). Remember the much-touted list years ago of '400 scientists against climate change' that Senator James Inhofe shouted loudly about? Turns out that 'scientist' is a fairly loose term, and a large number of the 'scientists' on the list were actually economists, with a smattering of theoretical physicists, inventors and a tiny representation of actual geologists, at least one of whom (Agnes Genevey) has had their anti-climate change work viciously torn apart by scientific peers. And the petition by the a crackpot anti-socialist organisation that claimed 32,000 signatures of scientists? The petition was on the internet to sign - I'm not too sure about whether Perry Mason, Michael J Fox and Ginger Spice are particularly respected for their contributions to climate science. Let's face it, anybody can sign an internet petition and claim to be a top climatologist - a fact that, I suspect, was not lost on the people who set up the petition, but they were hoping that fact would get lost in the media. And it did. The list of 32,000 scientists made it into the news without question, and only when groups of scientists and environmental bloggers got hold of the list did these flaws start to come out.
What is starting to happen here is almost exactly like Creationism. Science is not about public relations, or about forcing research down a certain line; facts are facts, and when enough scientists check these facts and perform their own studies, there is either a consensus, or there is a need to create a new theory to fit the facts. At the moment, there is most definitely a scientific consensus that a) global warming is happening, and that b) it is being driven by our emissions of greenhouse gases. Data for research is manipulated, but not in the way the deniers claim - it gets manipulated in order to make it more realistic and to control for variables outside scientists' ability to control, for example the data from Japanese weather stations, or the data collected from the Californian coast. The deniers point and shout loudly at what they see as flaws, but which are not flaws to anyone who understands statistics or science; the trouble is that all of this bogus astroturfing and blind news reporting of these atstroturf groups press releases then begets a bunch of moron-level devotees who then swamp the 'have your say' columns of the newspaper websites with their eye-swivelling, name-calling rants, people who use terms like the 'loony left', who find it amusing to refer to 'Idiot Nick-Nucks Can't Do A Sum McBroon', and who love to close their self-congratulatory posts with mindless phrases like 'Sauce for the goose' as though they have clearly blown apart all of the oppositions arguments with their fetid pile of uninformed twaddle. Phrases like that are more like the smile on the face of a child showing off his latest shit. These fucktards are the same people who have the same reaction to immigration, or to suggestions that equality legislation is sound and valid (a transparent window into their mindset comes from a post about 'Harriet Harperson' on the Express' comments section where the poster suggests that 'there is an empty kitchen sink out there it's time she filled the vacancy' - so, not totally misogynistic at all, then). In short, these are exactly the same sort of people who prop up the idiocy of Creationism.
Creationism has been an evolution denier since day one, and it frankly astounds me that over 150 years since the Origin of Species, these ignorant fucktards are still given a platform from which to attack a perfectly valid science which has a veraitable mountain of evidence, both fossil and genetic, to support it's claims; indeed, evolution is one of the few scientific theories that has been pretty much universally accepted across the disciplines that it crosses over. They've had 150 years to accumulate this impressive store of illuminating evidence, and still the Creationists stand there with their hands on their hips and a snarky smile on their lips declaring that 'if evolution happened, surely there would be some evidence for it?' The trouble with climate change is that if people don't believe in evolution, it isn't going to mean a global catastrophe (unless you count the sudden sharp drop in IQs worldwide as a catastrophe) - climate change deniers are playing a dangerous game with everyone's lives and the lives of everyone's grandchildren, and one that has far more serious implications for our planet than a bunch of cretinous brainwashed religious nuts who refuse to open their eyes.
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