After the Climate-gate email leak last November, new leaks are
springing in the "settled science" in the once arid, airtight debate
over global warming, aka "climate change" (as it's been known ever
since temperatures stopped rising).
Yet the Times has been AWOL
for four days on the latest major development - a revealing BBC
interview Saturday with climate researcher Phil Jones, head of the
Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia and source of the notorious
Climate-gate emails suggesting collusion and unacknowledged problems
with the data purported to show rising temperatures.
Jones was interviewed by the BBC on Saturday [1]and
made some pretty major concessions, admitting problems with the
movement's infamous "hockey stick" graph showing historically high
temperatures in recent times. Jones confessed that world temperatures
could well have been warmer during the "Medieval Warm Period" of
800-1300 AD than they are today. Jones also admitted he'd detected no
statistically significant global warming since 1995.
The Times,
whose coverage of the Climate-gate email scandal was sporadic at best,
has so far completely missed this latest development. Former
environmental reporter Andrew Revkin still contributes to his "Dot
Earth" blog at nytimes.com, but has yet to weigh in.
A Wednesday editorial on global warming, "With Stakes This High [2],"
did briefly address other climate controversies, like the Climate-gate
emails and controversial consulting fees paid to Rajendra Pachauri,
chair of the UN's panel on climate change.
The Times gave Pachauri the benefit of the doubt in a February 9 story [3],
but today's editorial was slightly tougher, and mildly reproached the
behavior of climate change scientists, while still sticking to its
belief that "human activity is largely responsible" for global warming
over the past century. The editorial concluded: "Scientists engaged in
the issue must avoid personal agendas and be intellectually vigilant
and above reproach."
But the real treat was Thomas Friedman's latest column, "Global Weirding Is Here [4]."
Friedman
has taken on himself the burden to re-brand "global warming" as "global weirding," perhaps
realizing the original phrase no longer resonates in a world of stable
temperatures and massive snowstorms. It's quite a convenient phrase -
one can now claim any sufficiently "weird" weather event is a sign of
climate change.
Blogger Ann Althouse pointed out [5]
Friedman's contradictions. First he argued it's "nonsense" to conclude
that climate change is a hoax on the basis of D.C. having a lot of snow
this winter:
Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes.
Yet several paragraphs later Friedman argued that isolated weather events are in fact signs of climate change:
Avoid the term "global warming." I prefer the term "global weirding," because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.
The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington - while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought - is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.
Which way is it?