I wasn't being sarcastic; I was being both subtle and insouciant. I deliberately noted an article in which parallels were drawn between the tobacco companies campaign to cast doubt on the growing body of evidence linking smoking to cancer, and the campaign by many vested interests to cast doubt on the (hmm... monumental? overwhelming? ... perhaps a bit too strong. How about...) comprehensive accumulation of data and research from multiple lines of investigation and observation indicating the increasing warming influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases on global climate. And then I posted a current SST anomaly map. Did you look at it? Is it fraudulent? Contrived? Is there an urban heat island in it? (Hold this point; I'll be returning to it.)
I've been reading a lot on this event. "Outright scientific fraud?" Hardly. There are some indications of improper and potentially illegal acts -- if they were actually carried out. But those acts would not constitute scientific fraud. Scientific fraud is the actual promulgation or publication of data or research results known to be erroneous by the researcher. That means faked data; experiments or procedures described that were never performed; fossils described as coming from one place when they actually came from somewhere else; reported immune responses in a vaccine trial when their really weren't any -- things like that. Scientific fraud is a pretty high bar. Bad data, poor analyses, using statistical procedures that you aren't good at -- not good science, but not scientific fraud, either.
There is, of course, lots to chew on in these emails. What I have concluded from extensive reading is that a lot of highly intelligent scientists don't at all understand the value of good public relations. As one poster noted, McIntyre could have been a real asset, rather than a massive thorn. I've also concluded, by reading a lot, that a lot of what skeptics have thought exciting in these emails constitutes absolutely nothing at all. (Example: "Ammann/Wahl – try and change the Received date! Don’t give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with." Explanation: "Context is all. The published Amman and Wahl paper had (has?) a typo in the "Received By" date, saying that it was received on 22 August 2000, when that was actually received in 2006.")
Which is not to say there isn't anything there. But I'm satisfied that there is a whole lot less there than the triumphant skeptical misreading community thinks there is. Rather than rehashing and rehashing and rehashing, read all the posts on RealClimate.
And right now, the hard facts are that the earth has ceased to warm, and the models didn't predict it.
Number 1, show me any reasonable model that predicted an exact linear, simple warming trend. Interannual variability is a characteristic of the system and is expected.
Abstract of Easterling and Wehner 2009:
"Numerous websites, blogs and articles in the media have claimed that the climate is no longer warming, and is now cooling. Here we show that periods of no trend or even cooling of the globally averaged surface air temperature are found in the last 34 years of the observed record, and in climate model simulations of the 20th and 21st century forced with increasing greenhouse gases. We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer‐term warming."
But wait; also remember, as I pointed out to StarTraveler, that the June-August 2009 sea surface temperatures set an all-time record. Yes, there's an El Nino; there was a massive one in 1998, of course, so why this record now? And also note that if 2009 ranks fourth or fifth in the all-time global temperature record list, as is likely, then there will be only one or two years (1997 and 1998) in the top 10 that haven't been after the year 2000. And finally, according to what I'm reading, the UK Met Office is predicting a 50% chance that 2010 will knock 1998 out of the top spot for all-time warmest year ever. Whoop-de-doo. This (in my world, at least) makes sense, because of the presence of that El Nino, and whether or not it happens is going to be primarily dependent on what that El Nino does after January 1st.
And finally: I'm probably going to start a blog. It's going to be a boring sole-subject blog, and the subject will be Pleistocene (not Holocene) climate. Basically, glacial-interglacial transitions, their causes and effects. I just made this decision and I've got a lot of advance work to do, and I expect that I will learn a lot as I tackle this (and probably make some mistakes). But I have a definite goal in mind. We'll see if I can get there.
a. the human contribution to atmospheric CO2 is only about 5% percent, at most, of current atmospheric CO2,
b. the residence time of a molecule of atmospheric CO2 is only about 5 years,
c. it would require that human production of CO2 be increased 20 to 80-fold.
In chemistry, this kind of thing would get one drummed out of the profession (as I suspect is true of pretty much any science EXCEPT global warming).
There are simply too many unknowns in the "warming model", both as to magnitudes of various effects, and even to whether the effects are positive or negative. Read Freeman Dyson's critique as to why.