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Climate change heats up again

0 Comments | Buffalo News, Jul 13, 2010 | by Clarence Page

Here’s a note to the global warming deniers who sarcastically called me a dope during last winter’s back-to-back blizzards on the East Coast: hot enough for you now?

As temperatures topped 100 degrees, breaking records in the nation’s capital, and the pavement turned into a skillet beneath my feet, my thoughts raced back to the frigid days of last winter’s blizzards.

Those were the days, you may recall, when Sen. James Inhofe, a proud Oklahoma Republican friend of the oil industry, and his family built an igloo on Capitol Hill and labeled it “Al Gore’s New Home.” I might now suggest a “new home” for Inhofe: an air- conditioned doghouse powered by solar panels.

But I would be scientifically wrong to make that suggestion, just as Inhofe and other deniers of climate change were wrong last winter when they suggested that any single weather event, whether it is a blizzard or a heat wave, offers evidence of climate change.

As I wrote last winter, Inhofe and other snarky climate change deniers were confusing the meaning of “weather” and “climate.” Weather is day-to-day. Climate is long-term. As climatologists say, climate change only shifts the odds in favor of certain extreme weather events like blizzards, floods, hurricanes and heat waves.

Yet when I brought this up during last winter’s “snow- pocalypse,” I experienced something that has become remarkably predictable in the Internet’s ugly political brutopia. I was inundated with e-mails that called climate change a “hoax,” a “scam” and a plot by whale-loving commie terrorists who are out to snatch everybody’s guns, bibles and SUVs.

Most of my e-mailers were demanding answers from me about “climate-gate,” a controversy that some impolite scientists had imprudently turned into ripe fruit for conspiracy theorists. Glenn Beck blasted the media for “ignoring” climate-gate. His fellow Fox News showman Sean Hannity called it a “scandal” that “exposed global warming as a myth cooked up by alarmists.”

But last week, as Washington boiled in tropical heat and humidity, the British scientists at the center of that “scandal” were cleared by a six-month British government inquiry into the affair. The inquiry led by Sir Muir Russell followed two other government inquiries and an exhaustive series of reports by the Guardian newspaper that also cleared the scientists.

The controversy began when more than 1,000 e-mails from 13 years correspondence between scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and released online last year. Critics accused East Anglia scientists of fudging results, covering up flaws, silencing critics and distorting the peer review process that determines which studies are published in scientific journals. That would be serious stuff, if it were true. The East Anglia unit is one of the world’s leading research bodies on climate change, whether natural or human-induced. Major debates hung in the balance
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