It’s amusing to see the whole ‘climategate’ hacked email FUD is still roaring along strong 13 years later, at least among some segment of the population.
dwerme expressed alarm and concern about what some climate scientists wrote in private emails, leading him to believe that climate science was corrupt. He quoted:
"
I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
—Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit,
"
Spoiler alert … he, Trenberth and other scientists involved did actually include those papers in the IPCC report he referenced!!! Funny how when that quote gets rolled out, the actual reality of what happened is never mentioned. Jones was just griping to a friend about what he considered to be some sub-par scientific papers … that griping didn’t actually reflect corrupt science, just normal human behavior like exaggeration and sarcasm among friends who thought they were corresponding in private.
I got so interested in climate science in the wake of the email hacking and release, in no small part due to debating it here on the Fool, that I proceeded to take enough meteorology, climatology and stats courses, both graduate and undergraduate that I was very close to getting a second Bachelors in atmospheric science, and did get a MLA with a focus on climate science and writing.
The science is strong, built on physics going back well over 100 years.
As Jim said, the Earth will be warming in coming decades, with some caveats: a series of huge volcanos could throw enough particulates in the air to cause temporary global cooling, as could a significant meteor impact. We don’t have a great handle on what causes variations in solar output associated with the sunspot cycle, and it’s possible we could go into an extended minimum that could offset warming for a couple decades.
The apparent ‘pause’ in global warming in the early to mid 2000s is well explained: Start from a huge and extremely strong El Nino, which warms the surface of the seas, combined with being fairly high in the solar cycle, then finish with a couple years of strong La Nina’s, which cool the ocean surface, combined with the lowest solar minimum in ~100 years … Voila, you have ‘offset’ ~17 years of the human warming trend, though as those cooling conditions reversed, we saw the warming revert right back to trend.