Saturday, October 9, 2010

Climategate aftermath

Almost a year has passed since the Climategate broke lose. For many of us of following climate blogs on a daily basis we know what Climategate is about and know that the science behind climate change is severely corrupted.

Today I read a tragic, but still interesting, mail from Harold Lewis (Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara). I quote the most interesting part:

"It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist."

I can only agree. It is so obvious for anyone with an open mind reading the details from the Climategate emails that AGW is nothing more than a global warming scam.

To the main question: is CO2 causing global warming? I would answer: We don't know. We can be pretty sure that CO2 is a first order human climate forcing (as Pielke Sr and others has pointed out). But it does not mean that it is the only one and not even the most important one!

Let us hope that the IPCC meeting in Mexico later this year will result in a more open research about the climate, and that all first order human climate forcings are considered.

To another main question: should we decrease CO2 emissions anyway? My answer is: Yes, that is probably a very good idea. Let us do so. The main issue is to be able to produce electricity at a low cost without CO2 emissions. We won't be able to change this by laws and regulations, that is counter productive. We need to solve this problem by inventing new technologies and/or improving current ones, such as nuclear power.

Let us now move forward, not backwards!