Climategate is a very good illustration of the morality of our times. The reaction to it across the community illustrates how partisan the debate has become and how as we progress facts and science are being distorted. The debate about climate change is not a debate at all. The climate has always changed, always will change and there is nothing a clever human being can do to stop that. Nothing.
The debate is what is mankind's contribution to climate change, if any, and what is its impact, if any? Further, if there is an impact, does it really matter? If it does, what do we do to mitigate it and how do we as a world mitigate it fairly?
We have followed the debate about global warming for over five years. We receive dozens of updates a day. As time has elapsed we have come to two conclusions: whatever the science, we need to put less rubbish into our air, water and land; and, the thinking about how we remedy our polluting ways is at best, wayward and the solutions are just too political and monied.
Geologists study the Earth. They study its history over long periods of time, in fact billions of years. Rocks we know, can tell you about the history of the Earth and not conclusively, the Earth's climate. Geologists tend to believe that human activity is not responsible for climate change. This group are not climate change sceptics, they know climate always changes, they wonder about the human impact given that there are natural forces and occurrences that for climate are far more significant. Scientists that support theories on global warming tend to look at data over a much shorter term, say thousands of years, and that might be a stretch. They emphasise recent history and the growing amount of human made emissions in the atmosphere. They correlate any warming with man's activities, because carbon dioxide is known to be a warming agent in the atmosphere, they rarely consider the natural events that geologists might look to. As you can see the different approach means that you will get different results.
Climategate is very damaging and whatever your views, it should be not be washed over. There has always been fraud and manipulation of data in science. There always will be as there is just too much money in it. What these scientists have done is not defendable and the websites that set out to defend, do themselves a disservice. They are wrongly motivated and thoughtless.
As we have said before, the debate about human induced climate change needs to be cleaned up. It is a mess. We must play the ball, a polluted and over populated planet, not the man, the personal attacks on those that disagree with you. This applies to every side of the debate, there are many sides.
We all want a better environment. Whether the Earth is warming or not, we know its resources are finite and we are better off putting less rubbish into the air, better off not wasting what we have got. That needs to be the starting point. Just cut emissions. This is not about money, technology or failing emissions trading schemes, this is about commonsense and practical, local and durable measures. It is not about large conferences, over paid speakers (all ex-politicians!) and grand plans. It is about public procurement, reducing consumption, producing durable goods, decentralising human activity, collective ownership of key assets, better public infrastructure, thoughtful and probably vote less policy. It is about being honest with ourselves and our communities, realistic about our expectations and paying up handsomely for things we don't need. For politicians it is about measures that are vote less.
Climategate illustrates that we are a long way from that. It is about grand schemes, money, dishonesty and a crippling of debate. Emissions trading schemes, which should have been knocked out in the current recession, will be the next phase in this dishonesty. It is just too apparent but when will dishonesty ever end? Perhaps never in this politicised environment.
