Fast Facts About Climategate
* The consensus is not scientific as much as it is political.
What we find out from the emails is that Jones and a number of others were using underhanded manipulations to suppress scientific publications that disagreed with the CO2-caused AGW theory. There is no scientific consensus if all the science isn’t being considered.
* There’s a difference between “global warming,” “anthropogenic (caused by humans) global warming,” and “anthropogenic global warming caused by CO2.”
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* The Climategate files don’t call global warming into question, but they make some of the science of anthropogenic global warming more suspect, and they make it clear that “forcings” other than CO2 have not been fairly considered.
* There has clearly been significant warming in the last 400 years -- since the “Little Ice Age”. That’s how we know it was the Little Ice Age.
* There is good reason to believe that humans may be accounting for some warming -- and some cooling, for that matter. But we don’t know how much.
* The case for all or most of the warming being due to CO2 was not as unquestionable as it was presented to be, and from the Climategate files we know that even that case was being slanted significantly.
* There is more than one “smoking gun” email (see here, here, here, here, here, and more)
* … but the program codes are much more significant than the emails
* … and the program codes will be yielding new surprises for a while to come.