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From Gautam Naik and Keith Johnson in The Wall Street Journal:

The spate of recent controversies about climate research has given fresh voice to a group of scientists who question the mainstream view that human activity is warming the planet to dangerous levels.

Very few scientists disagree that the earth’s climate has warmed since 1850. But some have long argued that there are too many uncertainties about man’s role in the warming, and that other factors, such as solar activity and the greenhouse effect of clouds, could account for a large part of the observed warming trend. Among this group are researchers who have criticized the limitations of past temperature records and mathematical models used to forecast future effects.

Such views are getting a fresh airing on the heels of two recent controversies dogging climate researchers. A United Nations group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has been heavily criticized for publishing an unsubstantiated claim that Himalayan glaciers would entirely melt away by 2035. A recent report also included several other claims later found to lack a scientific basis, including predictions of the impact of climate change on agriculture in Africa and the retreat of Amazonian rain forests, among others.

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The political fallout from the IPCC’s mistakes was evident Tuesday when Texas authorities announced the state was taking legal action against the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. In its filing, the state argued that the information the EPA used to make its decision is based on data from the IPCC. Alfredo “Al” Armendariz, EPA regional administrator for Texas and other nearby states, said he expected the agency’s efforts to withstand a court challenge.

For the article…

From firedoglake

It should be bizarre, but is in fact grimly typical, how the whole phony “climate-gate-scandal” has played out so far. Hundreds of emails between climate scientists were hacked — stolen — from servers at East Anglia University. The stolen materials were then misrepresented, distorted, and lied about, and the scientists involved abused, insulted, and accused of everything from deliberate fraud to acting as the willing dupes of the shadowy liberal-fascist “global warming industry.”

The bizarre part is that the only people being asked to Seriously Question Their Motives and Practices, or who are facing scrutiny for what they did, are the climate scientists who just got robbed, even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they have actually done anything clearly unethical. (The worst bit is the suggestion as to deleting emails, something that everyone concedes is pretty bad and nobody is defending, though there’s no proof anything was ever deleted.) More important, nothing in all this nonsense even approaches a challenge to the science that shows the reality of global climate change, at least to a reasonable person.

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From Zachary Roth, TPM.

So, what to make of those emails, stolen from a top climate research center in Britain, that conservatives are excitedly touting to argue that the science of climate change is fatally flawed?

The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger calls the episode “an epochal event” that shows “science is dying.” But underneath the bombast, the key question is whether the emails — hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), and indexed here — actually undermine the case, now settled, that man-made warming is happening. And despite the claims of the New York Post, among others, they don’t come close to doing so.

Exhibit A for conservatives has been the revelation in the emails that, back in the 1980s, CRU discarded a set of data on raw surface temperature. The Post argues that that means “it’s now impossible to check the CRU research,” and adds “So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science.”

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