For the past couple of days I have not posted for two reasons.  First, I was in London and tried to sleep as late as I could before my meetings (still effectively getting up before 4 am).  Second, I was reading up on “Climategate."  In case you have been completely offline and have not even watched my favorite fake news source, The Daily Show, here is a one sentence summary: Several climate scientists committed the cardinal sin of tweaking data in an attempt to make a case stronger, thereby actually making it weaker, when – inevitably – the tweaking came to light.

It turns out that trying to understand whether there something meaningful here, as opposed to simply having a knee-jerk reaction based on one’s existing believes takes some time.  I encourage everyone who cares about this topic to really dig in.  At a minimum, I recommend reading the coverage on the RealClimate and ClimateAudit blogs (for two opposing view points), including the super extensive comment threads, such as this one with 699 comments!

If you don’t want to do this work but are interested in my conclusion, here it is: what the scientists did is annoying because it was entirely unnecessary.  The basic theory about how greenhouse gases affect the climate is summarized neatly here and it is still the most likely theory after you allow for the omitted and adjusted data.

I am not aware of a theory in which adding CO2 to the atmosphere would result in cooling.  Instead, the competing theories tend to be about either (a) human-made greenhouse gases causing very little warming and/or (b) other factors (e.g. solar activity) playing a vastly stronger role over the same time frame.  To have a scientific basis against a reduction of greenhouse gases, you have to conclude that the evidence sufficiently supports one of these alternatives to the point that the cost of doing something (that cost itself being subject to reasonable debate) outweighs the cost of doing nothing (or very little).