Oh my: Belief in man-made global warming now under 50%

So, it seems a UCI Scientist was among the people who had emails hacked. The OC Register caught up with him and he says all us people who believe this means the science is wrong are a bunch of radicals. That the WSJ has a set of bogus Scientists who lie that Global Warming doesn’t exist. He agrees with Gibbs that the science is basically locked up and confirmed and some of these guys are MERELY worried about their public image and impressing people and that’s ALL the emails show. Here’s part of the OC Registers interview with this guy:

Michael Prather, a researcher at UC Irvine who specializes in climate modeling and has served for years as an author with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, joins many scientists and climate specialists in a firm ‘No.’
Prather, who found one of his own e-mails among those that were hacked, says the scientific consensus on global warming, as well as the data supporting it, remain strong.
He and others say the e-mails instead reveal that scientists are all too human, and can become as excessively concerned with public relations as anyone else in an institutional setting.
The controversy provided a strange backdrop to the beginning of a climate summit in Copenhagen, where 192 countries will try to hammer out agreement on reduction of greenhouse gases.
We asked Prather three questions as the controversy raged. Prather also allowed us to publish his 1998 e-mail — a kind of workaday scientific note filled with technical language, but one that did not inspire the kind controversy other e-mails did.
Q. What is the significance of the release of these hacked e-mails?
A. Primarily they show that climate change science is healthy, interactive, and mostly open.
There are some minor examples of potentially bad behavior, but no conspiracy. The few examples of this are notable in 1000+ emails!
Q. Could the release of the emails change the scientific consensus on climate
change?
A. No, there is far too much science on climate change, far beyond UEA and Penn State, to alter the scientific consensus. If the public lets this affect them, then we have a serious communication problem.
These emails will be used by those who have already made up their minds on climate change to support their irrational belief system. We have already seen some of this, as the highly polarized press (WSJ) digs up their pet scientists to write op-ed pieces masquerading as scientific articles. What is worse, but expected, is that when scientists who were directly attacked, or whose primary work was directly attacked, by these one-sided half-page opinion pieces ask to write a rebuttal, the WSJ editorial policy does not allow equal access but limits their response to a couple of brief paragraphs. Thus, for those whose believe that climate change just cannot be human intervention, these emails will bolster their faith, but for those who continue to examine the scientific evidence, including the uncertainties in current knowledge, they will prove trivial.
Q. What is the consensus?
A. 99% of the last IPCC assessment still stands, and the new data since 2007 make an even stronger case for an acceleration of the human-caused global warming.

Sultry Beauty on December 8, 2009 at 7:16 AM