A Climate Change Confession

Despite Bill’s timely warning I confess I was completely unprepared for the ferocity with which my climate-change-denying family members would clamp down on the CRU hack and refuse to let go. I am, perhaps, naive, but I had thought the simple distinction between scientific claims and moral evaluations would be enough to return the discussion to rational, fact-based grounds.

I was, alas, deeply mistaken.

Read Bill’s site for an effective debunking tutorial, and then turn to some more recent posts: the RealClimate follow-up and the Daily Kos interview with Michael Mann. The Daily Kos interview is particularly instructive as it walks through the five or so emails (out of the thousand stolen dating back to 1996) that are being selectively quoted (and, I can now confirm, significantly misquoted)—and explains the situational context in which each was written. (The Nate Silver post linked by Bill does a particularly good job with the favored “hide the decline” email.)

Devote yourself to these refutations. The paranoid mindset that fuels climate change denialism guarantees that the CRU hack will be with us at family gatherings for a long, long time; while your Occam’s Razor may suggest we reject any hypothesis that requires a secret world-spanning conspiracy of climate scientists, politicians, and journalists, for their Crabtree’s Bludgeon such a conspiracy is the only possible explanation.