Op-Ed - Snippets Of Stolen Climate Emails Not Going To Make The Earth Flat

[hatrack]

A file containing more than 5,000 e-mails from climate scientists was posted online in an apparent attempt to undermine public confidence in well-established science. This came days before the United Nations climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, where international leaders will gather again try to hammer out treaties to get the world off its high-carbon-emission path and to save humanity from the suffering that human-caused climate change brings with it.

Here is what we know: The Earth is round, smoking is linked to lung cancer, and humans are changing the climate by emitting massive amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other gases. Like extra blankets at night, those emissions are warming the planet. The physics of greenhouse gases has been understood for more than 100 years. It is not new science.

During the height of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year, about 5,000 metric tons of oil spilled into the water a day. At the same time, human activities were pumping 82 million metric tons of carbon dioxide daily into the atmosphere, a record. For perspective, our emissions from fossil fuels are equivalent to 15,000 Gulf oil spills every single day.

EDIT

Out-of-context snippets from stolen e-mails cannot change the well-understood science nor can they change the extreme weather we are all witnessing. These “new” e-mails are actually from the same set of two-year-old e-mails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in Britain in November 2009. The original release of these hacked e-mails was a hoax, a manufactured scandal designed to smear climate scientists. Of course, climate scientists were vindicated in multiple investigations. There is nothing new here. The Earth is still round.

EDIT/END

http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2011/11/mandia-emails-opinion