Did you hear? “Climategate” scientists vindicated
Last week, the first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) largely vindicated the scientists involved. According to an AP report, "the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said that it had seen no evidence to support charges that the University or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues."
This news comes at quite the interesting time as we've been sitting on a story from Yale University's Environment 360 blog - a publication of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies - about the need for environmentalists to break away from using catastrophic global warming scenarios and instead start focusing on shaping the future global energy economy.
Despite the fact that claiming a small victory over the "vindication" news would almost validate all those hours spent arguing on comments sections, we now believe there's a bigger picture to consider. Even though this report discredits some of The Goracle's work, we're declaring it a must read for anyone interested in climate science and the future of our planet. Actually - since it all concerns the future, it's a must read for everyone.
Below is an excerpt from the article titled Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. For more on this topic, check out Environment 360's special series, Climategate: Anatomy of a Public Relations Disaster.
Perhaps most problematic of all, with some environmentalists convinced that connecting global warming to natural disasters was the key to climate policy progress, researchers felt enormous pressure to demonstrate a link. But multiple studies using different methodologies and data sets show no statistically significant relationship between the rising cost of natural disasters and global warming. And according to a review sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Munich Re, researchers are unlikely to be able to unequivocally link storm or flood losses to anthropogenic warming for several decades, if even then. This is not because there is no evidence of increasing extreme weather, but rather because the rising costs of natural disasters have been driven so overwhelmingly by social and economic factors — more people with more wealth living in harm’s way....
Now is the time to free energy policy from climate science. In recent years, bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy supply through the expansion of renewables, nuclear power, and natural gas, as well as increased funding of research and development of new energy technologies. Carbon caps may remain as aspirational targets, but the primary role for carbon pricing, whether through auctioning pollution permits or a carbon tax, should be to fund low-carbon energy research, development, and deployment.
No longer conscripted to justify and rationalize binding carbon caps or the modernization and decarbonization of our energy systems, climate science can get back to being primarily a scientific enterprise. The truth is that once climate science becomes detached from the expectation that it will establish a standard for allowable global carbon emissions that every nation on earth will heed, no one will much care about the hockey stick or the disaster-loss record, save those whose business, as scientists, is to attend to such matters.
Climate science can still usefully inform us about the possible trajectories of the global climate and help us prepare for extreme weather and natural disasters, whether climate change ultimately results in their intensification or not. And understood in its proper role, as one of many reasons why we should decarbonize the global economy, climate science can even help contribute to the case for taking such action. But so long as environmentalists continue to demand that climate science drive the transformation of the global energy economy, neither the science, nor efforts to address climate change, will be well served.
