Hay de todas las tendencias:
Richard S. Lindzen, profesor de meteorología del MIT, en el Wall Street Journal: The Climate Science Isn't Settled
At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern. (...)
Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.
Robert Murphy escribe un artículo interesante en MasterResource: Apologist Responses to Climategate Misconstrue the Real Debate (Quantitative, not Qualitative)
The scholarly skeptics do not doubt that the earth is warmer now than it was in 1850, and they don’t doubt that higher global temperatures would have noticeable effects on migratory patterns, ice sheets, and so forth. The real debate has been and continues to be: What fraction of this warming can be attributed to human activities? And then extrapolating, what will be the likely impacts on the climate if economic activity continues on its present trajectory?
When it comes to nuanced questions such as these–as opposed to loud mouths declaring, “Global warming is a hoax!”–the CRU emails and computer code are very revealing. Those of us who are not experts on climate models now have proof that the official line that “the science is settled” was a bluff. Of course it’s still possible that the IPCC projections may turn out to be accurate when all is said and done, but the confidence we should right now place in their modeling is much lower than what their biggest enthusiasts have been assuring us for years.
Resumen del Climategate de Lord Monckton, destacando las revelaciones más importantes de la filtración de correos. (Informe completo: Climategate: Caugt Green-Handed! -pdf-)
Tyler Cowen sobre los límites de pensar en términos de "el bien contra el mal":
Take Climategate. One response is: 1. "These people behaved dishonorably. I will lower my trust in their opinions."
Another response, not entirely out of the ballpark, is: 2. "These people behaved dishonorably. They must have thought this issue was really important, worth risking their scientific reputations for. I will revise upward my estimate of the seriousness of the problem."
I am not saying that #2 is correct, I am only saying that #2 deserves more than p = 0. Yet I have not seen anyone raise the possibility of #2. It very much goes against the grain of good vs. evil thinking: Who thinks in terms of: "They are evil, therefore they are more likely to be right."
(Which views or goals of yours would you behave dishonorably for? Are they all your least correct views or least important goals? With what probability? Might it include the survival of your children?)
I do understand that this line of reasoning can be abused: "The Nazis went to a lot of trouble, etc." The Bayesian point stands.
Tyler Cowen explica por qué cree que el calentamiento global es real y supone un problema, y el Climategate no le ha convencido de lo contrario.
Real Climate, que agrupa a varios de los científicos aceptados, está aportando "contexto" al contenido de los correos.
Editorial de la revista Nature sobre el Climategate, arguyendo que no revela ninguna conspiración ni desmiente en absoluto el calentamiento global:
La guinda la pone Paul McCartney, ex Beatle y activista ecologista, pidiendo ante el Parlamento europeo que la gente deje de comer carne una vez a la semana para combatir el cambio climático. Lo que me recuerda que hoy he comido un bocadillo de pollo y cenaré cordero.The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.
This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.
