In fact, nothing in the stolen e-mails or computer code undermines in any way the scientific consensus—which exists among scientific publications as well as scientists—that climate change is happening and humans are the cause. “There is a robust consensus that humans are altering the atmosphere and warming the planet,” said meteorologist Michael Mann of The Pennsylvania State University, who also participated in the conference call and was among the scientists whose e-mails have been leaked. “Further increases in greenhouse gases will lead to increasingly greater disruption.”
Some of the kerfuffle rests on a misreading of the e-mails’ wording. For example, the word “trick” in one message, which has been cited as evidence that a conspiracy is afoot, is actually being used to describe a mathematical approach to reconciling observed temperatures with stand-in data inferred from tree ring measurements…
[U]ltimately, even those papers specifically challenged in the e-mails (one of which featured a vow to “keep [these papers] out [of the IPCC report] somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is”) made it into the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report.
As for charges that the CRU database is corrupt or compromised such that its results cannot be trusted, Schmidt noted that a number of other databases with climate records supporting global warming exist throughout the world—including NASA’s GISS, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and even the IPCC, all of which provide access to the raw data. Further, many of the same contrarians arguing that global warming has stopped in recent years are relying on the same CRU record that they are now disparaging as untrustworthy.
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